French prosecutors have opened up an investigation into a man who stalked, harassed and spit on famed French conservative journalist and essayist Éric Zemmour while he was walking alone on the streets of Paris in a video allegedly posted by the perpetrator on Snapchat on April 30.

The man, who looks to have Middle Eastern or North African appearance, follows Zemmour and threatens him several times in the video. The suspect currently remains unidentified. Later, the man films himself facing the camera and claims that he spit on Zemmour despite coronavirus restrictions being in place against the spread of disease. 

In the video, Zemmour does not react and continues to walk away from the assailant.

A video of the incident has been viewed over 300,000 times. The Twitter user who posted it said, “Eric Zemmour assaulted in the street by a gangster Arab-Maghrebian. Lamentable episode that fully validates [Zemmour’s] opinions: We must expel criminal aliens as well as those who have dual nationality.”

The assailant is seen in the video in a hooded jacket and wearing a mask. He apparently posted the video to social media shortly after the incident.

Zemmour is a prominent journalist for the conservative newspaper Le Figaro who has written critically of Islam, the European Union, and mass immigration in the past. He is also the author of “The French Suicide” and is known for his strong opposition against continued immigration to France.

In a previous interview, he compared immigration in his country to a “demographic tsunami” and said he believes current immigration and integration policies have failed. He worked for the French channel RTL from 2010 to 2019.

Reactions from journalists and politicians began to roll in following the attack, with some complaining the issue was not getting enough attention.

Deputy Mayor of Versailles François-Xavier Bellamy said, “There is a disturbing silence after the aggression (…) Defending the rights only of those whose ideas we share will prepare us for totalitarianism.”
MEPs Valérie Boyer and Eric Ciotti, who are members of The Republicans, also supported Zemmour. 

French philosopher Raphaël Enthoven said, “This scene is filthy. No man deserves to be insulted like that.Full support for Eric Zemmour.”

rmx.news/article/article/video-renowned-french-journalist-eric-zemmour-targeted-by-arab-attacker-in-paris

“I fought the good fight, I finished the race, I kept the faith”. It is the last page, a quote from the New Testament, of the diary of the writer Wang Fang, popularly known as Fang Fang. Since the start of the pandemic quarantine in Wuhan, Fang, this outspoken writer who was president of the Hubei Writers Association, has kept her “Diary from Wuhan”. Sixty entries that will flow into a book where not only the sacrifice of doctors and volunteers is told, but also the errors of the regime.In China, Fang has now become a “liar”, “traitor”, one who “discredits her country”, as well as receiving death threats.

In mid-April, the German publishing house Hoffmann und Campe and the Anglo-Saxon HarperCollins announced their intention to publish the diary later this summer. The Deutsche Welle international broadcaster now says that the original cover of the German edition of the “Diary” has been withdrawn.

Hoffmann has a glorious history and had Heinrich Heine and Karl Ludwig Börne among its early authors.

The cover that circulated on the publisher’s website and on Amazon was originally a red background with black and yellow characters and the bold design of a black mask. The subtitle read: “Das verbotene Tagebuch aus der Stadt, inder die Corona-Krise begann” – “The forbidden diary from the city where the coronavirus’ crisis originated.”

Criticism from Chinese social media had rained down on the publishing house, according to which the cover echoed Western prejudice against China. To date, the cover has disappeared from the website of the publishing house and from Amazon, and we are waiting for the new one to appear.

The publisher told Deutsche Welle that it had not consulted with the author during the design of the cover. And the publishing house admitted that it was necessary for it to be more cautious.

There are about twenty journalists, bloggers, activists, university professors and doctors who have disappeared in the past three months, all have told of what was going on in Wuhan.

What a sinister joke it will be if Western self-censorship follows Chinese censorship.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/279700

I still remember it vividly. In 2006 – two years after Theo van Gogh, her collaborator on a film about Islam’s mistreatment of women, was butchered in Amsterdam by a jihadist who left a note saying she was next – Ayaan Hirsi Ali became the subject of a scandal. A 60 Minutes-type series on Dutch TV alleged that Hirsi Ali – who’d come to the Netherlands in 1992 as a political refugee, quit Islam after 9/11, and been a member of parliament since 2003 – had entered false data on her asylum application.

This was old news. Four years earlier, in her own first book and in magazine interviews, she’d admitted that, fleeing her family to avoid a forced marriage, she’d altered certain inconsequential details (such as her birthdate) to protect herself. None of this had mattered to anyone. But once Dutch TV had spent a full hour using this information as a cudgel, Hirsi Ali – who, while widely admired for her staunch support of abused Muslim women, ruffled feathers with her outspoken criticism of Islam – was in danger of losing her career, her Dutch citizenship, and her very life. By the end of 2006, having pretty much been pushed out of parliament, she relocated to Washington, D.C.

As I say, I remember it vividly. But until the other day I’d forgotten the name of that fateful TV series. It’s called Zembla, and it turns out that Hirsi Ali hasn’t been its only high-profile political target. In 2017, Zembla broadcast a three–part “report” on Donald Trump’s supposed relationship with the Russian Mafia. It was a pathetic effort, attempting to besmirch Trump through guilt by even the most tenuous association with people who may or may not once have done something untoward. Going through several years of Zembla’s online archives, I didn’t see a single critical look at a Dutch establishment politician or, for that matter, of a Democratic politician in the U.S. or any left-wing, globalist European politician.

Which brings us to a charismatic young Dutch politician – of the decidedly non-establishment sort – named Thierry Baudet. First some background. Two decades ago, Dutch sociologist Pim Fortuyn explained his opposition to Islamic immigration as follows: “I have no desire to go through the emancipation of women and homosexuals all over again.” Slandered by political and media elites as a “far-right extremist,” Fortuyn was in fact an openly gay classical liberal, witty and sophisticated, who didn’t want to see Dutch freedom and tolerance destroyed by Islam. Many voters shared his concern. After he launched his own political party, Lijst Pim Fortuyn, it quickly won widespread support, and when he was assassinated on May 6, 2002, nine days out from a parliamentary election, he was probably on the verge of becoming prime minister – and, perhaps, of transforming the history of Western Europe in the twenty-first century.

In 2004, as noted, came the murder of another prominent – and reviled – Islam critic, writer and filmmaker Theo van Gogh. That same year, Geert Wilders founded the Freedom Party (PVV); in the sixteen years since then, he’s lived at secret addresses with armed bodyguards; been put on trial for violating hate-speech laws; spoken around the globe, becoming an international symbol of resistance to Islamization; and managed to accomplish at least some modest immigration reforms. Yet the repeated failure of the Dutch electorate to hand Wilders the power to do for the Netherlands what Fortuyn seemed to be on the verge of doing all those years ago has been, at least to this observer, supremely maddening.

Enter Thierry Baudet. Born in 1983, he’s said that his politics were shaped by two events that occurred during his first year of college: 9/11 and Fortuyn’s murder. In 2016 he formed a new party, Forum for Democracy (FvD), whose positions overlap extensively with those of the PVV. In addition to assailing mass Muslim immigration, Baudet opposes the EU, the euro, open borders, and “climate-change hysteria.” And he’s a Trump fan. But his style diverges markedly from Trump’s – and Wilders’s. While the buoyant, bigger-than-life Wilders is something of a Dutch version of Trump, Baudet, with his penchant for arcane historical references and Latin apothegms, comes off as a sort of millennial Fortuyn. Like Fortuyn, he’s been called “flamboyant” (although, unlike Fortuyn, he’s apparently quite the ladies’ man).

Baudet’s party won big in the provincial elections of March 20, 2019, two days after three people were killed on an Utrecht tram in an apparent act of Islamic terrorism. When the votes were counted, it turned out that FvD had won more votes than any other party. At his victory celebration, Baudet pronounced that “[w]e are standing in the rubble of what was once the most beautiful civilization in the world,” and that the Netherlands was “being destroyed by the people who are supposed to be protecting us,” with several governments in a row under prime minister Mark Rutte having left “our borders wide open, letting in hundreds of thousands of people with cultures completely different from ours.” When the newly selected provincial representatives voted on May 27 to choose the members of the Dutch upper house, the Senate (Eerste Kamer), FvD secured twelve seats out of 75, tying it with Rutte’s VVD. Meanwhile, in the far more powerful House of Representatives (Tweede Kamer), Wilders’s PVV still held twenty out of 150 seats to FvD’s two.

In the year since, Wilders and Baudet have worked together. The next election for the Tweede Kamer will take place on March 17, 2021, if not earlier. Will it be another big win for critics of Islam?

Not if the Dutch media can help it. Baudet was long since overdue for a good old-fashioned Dutch media mudslinging, and it came on this past April 16 in the form of an “investigative report” on Dutch TV entitled “Baudet and the Kremlin.” The premise of this hour-long mugging was that Baudet is a puppet of Vladimir Putin. Guess which series this program was a part of? Yes – Zembla, the same series that bought down Hirsi Ali and that broadcast that three-part Trump calumny. It was this episode on Baudet that brought Zembla back onto my radar screen, and it was only after I started reading up on the series that I was reminded that these were, in fact, the same creeps who’d brought down Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Like its episodes on her and on Trump, the Zembla installment about Baudet was a model of sheer unfounded vilification. It tacitly equated opposition to Dutch membership in the EU with support for Putin. and it maintained that one after another of the so-called “far-right” parties of western Europe are covertly allied with, or even working for, Putin (as, of course, is Trump). One of the main “sources” for Zembla’s claim that Baudet is a Putin tool was Henk Otten, a former official in the FvD, who was treated by Zembla as an oracle rather than a disgruntled rival. l

Another Zembla “source” on Baudet was Baudet himself. Having been given access by Otten to Baudet’s messages on the WhatsApp platform, Zembla tried to use them against him. After combing through years of his messages, the show’s producers focused on those that indicated his connections to a British writer named John Laughland and a Ukrainian writer named Vladimir Kornilov. Laughland has written for the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, and many other major newspapers, but Zembla zeroed in on his association with the Paris-based Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, which, it claimed, “appears to have strong ties to the Kremlin.” Which means, naturally, according to the program’s logic, that Baudet may also have “strong ties to the Kremlin.” As for Kornilov, Zembla pretended to take seriously a few WhatsApp messages in which Baudet made jokes (complete, in at least one case, with a “wink” emoji) to the effect that he, Baudet, was on Putin’s payroll and that Kornilov was the bagman.

A third “source” for Zembla’s “report” on Baudet was one Michael Carpenter, who told Zembla that FvD had been on his “radar” for years because of its “virulent” pro-Kremlin “propaganda.” Who’s Carpenter? Zembla identified him as a former Pentagon and White House operative who’s “one of the highest-ranking American officials tasked with cases related to Russia.” The implication was that Carpenter is an objective expert on international relations. What went unmentioned in the broadcast were the specifics of Carpenter’s White House post as well as his present job. First, in the White House, he was a foreign-policy flunky for Joe Biden – back when Biden’s foreign-policy activities consisted largely of peddling influence to shady characters in China and Ukraine in exchange for multimillion-dollar paydays for his son, Hunter. Second, Carpenter is today Managing Director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which is based in Washington, connected to the University of Pennsylvania, staffed by former members of the Obama Administration, and motivated at every turn, according to its website, by Joe Biden’s “lifelong commitment to public service.”  

What, exactly, is the Penn Biden Center? You may recall that during the current presidential campaign, Biden said that after leaving the vice presidency he’d been a professor at Penn. The truth is that he was paid $900,000 by Penn to be the face of his eponymous Center. When the Philadelphia Inquirer looked into what he’d actually done to earn the money, it discovered that he’d held “a vaguely defined role that involved no regular classes and around a dozen public appearances on campus, mostly in big, ticketed events.” A Penn spokesperson toldPhiladelphia Magazine that Biden’s role involved expanding Penn’s “global outreach” and “sharing his wisdom and insights with thousands of Penn students through seminars, talks and classroom visits.” Yes, he’d been accorded the title of “professor” – his full title was University of Pennsylvania Benjamin Franklin Presidential Professor of Practice – but as the Washington Times observed, he didn’t actually do any teaching. When he quit the Penn sinecure to run for president, his Center – and Carpenter – remained behind.

Not that Carpenter has done any teaching, either. While at Penn, he’s spent much of his time tweeting (his Twitter feed has two constant themes: Trump evil, Biden godlike) and had his byline on the Washington Post op-ed page a number of times, most recently on April 29. He’s a good soldier and then some: in one op-ed, he not only supported Trump’s impeachment but said that Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, and Bill Barr should be impeached, too. On October 7, 2019, the Post ran a Carpenter op-ed headlined “Only in Trump’s world could what Joe Biden did in Ukraine be considered ‘corrupt.’” Here’s Carpenter’s take on Hunter Biden’s involvement with Barisma, the spectacularly corrupt Ukrainian firm: “Trump has made much of the fact that Biden’s son Hunter later joined the Burisma board, but the fact remains: Despite repeated calls by the U.S. government — whose Ukraine policy Biden led — pressing Kiev to cooperate with a British-led investigation of Burisma, neither [then Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor] Shokin nor his successor showed any inclination to help the British or to launch a serious probe of their own.” In other words, Carpenter wants us to believe that Joe Biden supported a serious probe of Burisma’s corruption – but that, for reasons Carpenter doesn’t care to go into, it was apparently just dandy with Joe for his son to accept bundles of cash to sit on Burisma’s board.

This, then, is Michael Carpenter: a quintessential Deep State swamp dweller and shameless water-carrier for Joe Biden. We know now that members of the Obama Administration tried to frame Trump as a Putin stooge. Does Carpenter’s participation in the April 16 installment of Zembla mean that the same shabby crew have also been trying to bring down the pro-Trump Baudet?

Whatever the deal may be with Carpenter, the bottom line about Zembla’s Baudet show was that it was yet another transparent attempt by the Dutch left to take down a political antagonist. It was a very unscrupulous attempt – and also very lame, especially given the nature of the target. For the fact is that any serious person who’s even glancingly familiar with Baudet’s life and work will know that, whatever his faults may be, he’s nobody’s marionette. This is a guy who’s written exceedingly learned books in which he lays out the arguments for his worldview in such detail as to make it clear that he’s the real deal – that is, he’s an intelligent and principled person who’s thought extensively about all the issues, steeped himself in all the relevant history, and reached conclusions based on sound reasoning and his own deeply held convictions. Unlike, say, Joe Biden or Michael Carpenter, he’s not a political hack who’s prepared to do or say almost anything for the right price.

By and large, however, the mainstream Dutch news media were eager to parrot Zembla’s unfounded accusations against Baudet. One exception was Frits Bosch in De Dagelijkse Standaard, who noted that this was nothing new: the Dutch media had maligned Fortuyn and van Gogh and Wilders too, and in much the same way. They’d done so endlessly, mercilessly, with no regard whatsoever for truth or decency, and without giving any thought, apparently, to the possible consequences of their acts of demonization. In the Netherlands, quite simply, this is what happens to you if you’re a prominent figure who criticizes Islamic immigration. Sometimes you end up dead; sometimes you just end up fleeing the country or spending the remainder of your life at a secret address with armed guards.

Now it was Thierry Baudet’s turn. The only important difference this time was that a Joe Biden lackey took part in the smear.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/deep-states-long-arm-bruce-bawer/

On March 16, the European Commission recommended a temporary restriction of non-essential travel from third countries into the “EU+ area” for 30 days. On April 8, the European Commission recommended that the temporary restriction be prolonged until May 15. According to the European Commission’s press release:

“The Commission’s assessment of the current situation points to a continued rise in the number of new cases and deaths across the EU, as well as to the progression of the pandemic outside of the EU, including in countries from where millions of people usually travel to the EU every year. In this context, prolonging the travel restriction is necessary to reduce the risk of the disease spreading further.”

According to Margaritis Schinas, the Commission’s Vice-President for Promoting our European Way of Life:

“While we can see encouraging first results, prolonging the travel restriction is necessary to continue reducing the risks of the disease spreading further. We should not yet let the door open whilst we are securing our house.”

However, persons “in need of international protection or for other humanitarian reasons” are exempted from these restrictions on non-essential travel from third countries, according to a European Commission document dates March 30, 2020, entitled: “Guidance on the implementation of the temporary restriction on non-essential travel to the EU, on the facilitation of transit arrangements for the repatriation of EU citizens, and on the effects on visa policy”. This means that people who apply for international protection cannot be turned away and that the rights of migrants and refugees to apply for asylum cannot be suspended, even in the time of coronavirus.

This policy was on display during the recent crisis on the border between Turkey and Greece, when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan used migrants — whom Turkey transported to the border with Greece — as political blackmail, threatening to unleash a new migration crisis on Europe. At least 14,000 migrants were brought to the border, according to media reports. Greece, at the time, said that it was suspending all asylum applications, based on article 78 (3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which states:

“In the event of one or more Member States being confronted by an emergency situation characterised by a sudden inflow of nationals of third countries, the Council, on a proposal from the Commission, may adopt provisional measures for the benefit of the Member State(s) concerned”.

The European Commission, however, did not approve. The Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, ordered Greece to allow the migrants that Erdogan transported to the border to apply for asylum.

“Individuals in the European Union have the right to apply for asylum. This is in the treaty, this is in international law. This we can’t suspend,” said Johansson. Greece has since ended its suspension, which was welcomed by Johansson: “At this time it is important to defend our values and fundamental rights,” she said.

Many other things, however, have been suspended because of Covid-19: Europeans have been told to stay at home, schools and kindergartens have shut, people have not been able to go to work and many have lost their jobs. Everything has been done to minimize the spread of Covid-19. Immigration, however, seems one thing that, no matter how dire the situation, the EU is unwilling to suspend.

In addition, on April 16 the European Commission, issued a recommendation that warned EU member states that the registration and processing of asylum applications must continue and member states comply with asylum law.

“Even in a health emergency,” Johansson said, “we need to guarantee individual fundamental rights. Any measure taken in the area of asylum, resettlement and return should also take full account of the health protection measures introduced by the member states to prevent the spread of coronavirus.”

The guidance says, among other things, that personal interviews with asylum seekers can be carried out by video-conference during the crisis or omitted if necessary, and stresses that quarantine and isolation measures should be adequate and non-discriminatory, and that asylum seekers should have access to good healthcare.

Schinas joined in, saying:

“Today we are acting to support Member States in providing guidance on how to use the flexibility in EU rules to ensure the continuity of procedures as much as possible while fully ensuring the protection of people’s health and rights. While our way of life may have changed drastically in the past weeks – our values and principles must not.”

The guidance was published in mid-April, at the same time, that the EU began the first relocations of unaccompanied minors from migrant camps on the Greek islands. The relocation included 1,600 unaccompanied minors from Greece to ten EU member states — Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Croatia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Luxembourg and Lithuania, as well as non-EU member Switzerland.

Schinas said about the recent relocations:

“This scheme is Europe at its best. In times where coronavirus is taking its toll on everyday life, it is commendable to see Member States honouring their commitments and working together to help vulnerable migrants on the Greek islands. I am grateful to Member States participating in the scheme and hopeful that more will continue to join us.”

As much as the EU remains committed to international law, it would seem that under the circumstances of a worldwide pandemic, which has forced countries to go to extremes in terms of limiting the liberties of their own citizens to fight Covid-19, it should be possible to find ways temporarily to suspend the right of third-country nationals to migrate to the EU.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15976/eu-covid-19-immigration

Also predictable.

Mask mandates have triggered violent reactions in some parts of the country. And it’s not surprising. Driving 10 miles to a store only to be told that you can’t buy what you need because you don’t have a mask, is going to be infuriating. Confrontations have already occurred in Oklahoma and, in this case in Michigan, a confrontation turned not only violent, but deadly.

The Genessee County Prosecutor’s office said Monday afternoon that a Flint Family Dollar security guard who was killed on Friday was shot following a dispute with a customer who would not put on a mask in the store.

The 43-year-old security guard was shot Friday afternoon at the Family Dollar on Fifth Ave in Flint. He was pronounced dead at the hospital. 

Obviously the shooter was almost certainly a career criminal and should get the death penalty/spend the rest of his life in jail.

But this hazardous situation didn’t have to occur.

The basis for suggesting that people wearing bandanas or cloth masks on their faces is going to save lives is dubious. For much of the duration of the pandemic, WHO and the CDC were saying the exact opposite. And so people are right to roll their eyes.

Wearing masks is almost as useless as wearing porous gloves to the store. They seem to have more to do with pandemic culture than anything practical.

And in 90 plus degree weather, masks become downright hazardous. That’s not counting shootings like these.

It’s unclear that masks have saved any lives, but at least one life was lost because of them.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/05/unclear-if-face-masks-have-saved-any-lives-they-daniel-greenfield/

Turkish fighter jets harassed a helicopter that was carrying Nikolaos Panagiotopoulos, Greece’s Minister of National Defence, and General Konstantinos Floros, Greece’s Chief of General Staff yesterday — the top two military commanders in the country.

The two were on their way to visit Greek military outposts on islands in the eastern Aegean Sea — near to Turkey, but still within Greek territory — when two Turkish F-16s unexpectedly intercepted the helicopter and flew alongside it, occasionally making dangerous maneuvers near it, as reported by Greek City Times.

The incident took place at approximately 11:30 AM Sunday morning, shortly after the helicopter had taken off from Oinousses. The Turkish planes again flew into Greek airspace a short time later over Agathonisi. They ultimately left the area when Greek fighters intervened.

While violations of Greek’s territorial boundaries by the Turkish armed forces is nothing new, this incident was notable for its especially provocative nature, being carried out in full view of Greece’s military chiefs.

Turkish President Recep Erdoğan has long spoken of his desire for a “Blue Homeland” for Turkey which includes territorial expansion, with seizing control of islands in the eastern Aegean that are currently part of Greece on his agenda.

Greece’s Ministry of Defence condemned the incident. “This is another unacceptable action that reaffirms once again Turkey’s negative role in the region, insisting on anachronistic perceptions of international relations,” the Ministry said in a statement, according to another report by Greek City Times. “We call on her to enter the 21st century.”

Panagiotopoulos likewise criticized the Turks’ provocation, but said that Greece is unafraid. He also congratulated soldiers who are engaged in protecting Greece’s border with Turkey.

Turkey has increased its efforts to intimidate Greece in recent months. Last week, Turkish forces fired their weapons across the border into Greece on several occasions, as previously reported by Voice of Europe. And the steady flow of illegal migrants across the Greek-Turkish border — which is often assisted by the Turkish armed forces — remains a problem not only for Greece, but for all of Europe.

greekcitytimes.com/2020/05/03/turkish-jets-harass-stalks-helicopter-transporting-greek-defence-minister-and-top-general/

Almost eight out of ten Muslims living in Denmark want to make criticism of Islam illegal, according to a report from Denmark’s Ministry of Justice released called “Freedom of Speech in Denmark“.

According to Samhällsnytt, the study focused mainly on the opinions of Danes on the freedom of speech, the report also showed that 76 percent of migrants who came to Denmark from Muslim countries want to ban criticism of the religion. At the same time, only 59 percent of people in the same group would welcome a law that would prohibit the introduction of sharia law in the country.

However, putting the results of the study into a broader perspective, only 18 percent of Denmark’s population, including migrants from Muslim countries, would support banning criticism of Islam.

As Voice of Europe reported, Dutch researcher Ruud Koopmans, who has been analyzing Muslim migrants living in Europe for more than 20 years, came to similar conclusions. His report from last year showed that two-thirds of Muslim migrants in Europe consider sharia law to be more important than the laws of the European country they reside in.

Other studies in the past have shown other worrying results from Denmark, with four out of 10 Muslims in the country saying that Danish laws should be at least party based on sharia law, and over 10 percent even said Denmark’s laws should be solely based on sharia law.

Other countries like France have shown similar results. There, a survey showed that nearly half of Muslimssupport sharia law in the country.

Danes are increasingly migrating to anti-immigration parties over concerns about Denmark’s changing culture. The government also instituted a ban on burqas in 2018 and a petition to ban circumcision in the country received the 50,000 signatures required for a vote in parliament.

rmx.news/article/article/76-of-muslims-in-denmark-want-to-ban-crititicism-of-islam