The European Union (EU) announced an assistance package of around €71 million on Thursday to help the Palestinians combat the coronavirus pandemic.The announcement was made during a video meeting between Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh and foreign diplomats, including the head of the Office of the European Union Representative to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Sven Kuhn von Burgsdorff.

“The European Union welcomes the preventive measures so far taken by the Palestinian Authority, as well as the COVID-19 response Plan,” the EU said in a statement.“The EU notes the challenges linked to implementing the response plan, including the fact that the occupied Palestinian territory is economically dependent on Israel, restrictions on movement and access for Palestinians, and the complex challenges in the Gaza Strip under closure. The EU’s assistance package, which also includes humanitarian aid, is a direct response to the Palestinian Authority’s COVID-19 response Plan.”“The coronavirus pandemic is an unprecedented, global public health emergency with repercussions for our citizens, societies and economies,” Burgsdorff said during the meeting with Shtayyeh. “This is a time for solidarity between peoples and the time for us to stand together. The EU recognizes that Palestinians, like Europeans and many others, are severely affected. Today’s announcement is crucial to make sure that Palestinians are better equipped to fight the economic and social impact of this global pandemic.”The EU also announced that it will contribute another €9.5 million to six hospitals in east Jerusalem and advance payment of  €40 million to PA civil servants to ensure that the PA has sufficient funds to cover the extra expenses foreseen in its response plan to the virus.In addition, the EU pledged  €6.9 million in humanitarian aid to non-governmental organizations and UN agenci

Shtayyeh said during the meetings that the Palestinian plan to combat the coronavirus pandemic is estimated at $137 million. He expected that the Palestinian economy could lose up to $3.8 million as a result of the virus, causing damage to various sectors. He called on donors to support the Palestinian budget.The funds are needed for medicine and medical equipment, as well as for preparing the health sector in its effort to fight against the disease, Shtayyeh said.He predicted that the PA budget deficit will increase to $1.4 billion due to the decrease of its revenues by more than 50%.PA President Mahmoud Abbas has approved an emergency budge for the government that will see the reduction of its expenditures to the maxim level, while preserving the aid to needy families, supporting the health sector and paying salaries to Palestinian public servants, Shtayyeh said. “This epidemic and its economic and social repercussions pose a challenge to all countries,” he added. “But we in Palestine face it under circumstances due to the occupation, limited sovereignty over our land and borders, and additional challenges imposed by the reality of the occupation.”The PA premier called for a “firm stance” against Israel’s intention to “annex parts of the West Bank” and warned that such a move poses a challenge to the Palestinians and the entire world.He also briefed the diplomats on the PA government’s efforts to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Shtayyeh pointed out that a “national emergency committee” was established to deal with the crisis.That committee, he explained, has produced health, economic, social and security committees, each of which has been studying the repercussions of the crisis and setting creative solutions to deal with the crisis.In addition, each Palestinian community has its own emergency team that is working in cooperation with popular committees, Shtayyeh said. “Our people have experience in dealing with crises and enduring the worst conditions as a result of our experiences with the occupation, as we have learned to work in a team spirit and not to let anyone go hungry,” he said.

https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Coronavirus-EU-supports-Palestinians-with-71-million-euros-624165?fbclid=IwAR1J0DEpx97FbFVoMA9uAUsP_S7oeUixgr55IHXq7QZRgLg7n6ix1JHVPQg

Qatari state-owned Al-Jazeera has released a new film titled ‘Western Thrace, Contested Space: The Turks of northeast Greece’. It is little surprise that Qatar, a Salafi dictatorship that provided logistical and financial support for ISIS, has supported Turkish propaganda to claim that the Muslim minority in Greece’s Western Thrace region are discriminated against by the Greek state.

Qatar is Turkey’s only ally in the Middle East as they both champion the radical Muslim Brotherhood cause, and as Turkey failed to discredit Greece with its fake news through the Turkish state-owned TRT network during last month’s migration crisis, as reported by Greek City Times, it has now resorted to the much more successful Qatari network to disseminate anti-Greek rhetoric.

The Al-Jazeera film claims that there are 150,000 Turks in the Western Thrace, which could not be further from the truth and is Turkish propaganda that is continually repeated.

There are 150,000 Muslims in Western Thrace, but this does not make them automatically ethnically Turkish. What the Qatari propaganda outlet failed to mention is that within that 150,000 number are not only ethnic Turks, but also Muslim Roma, Slavic Muslims known as Pomaks, and yes, as many as you might not even know, ethnic Greek Muslims who converted during the Ottoman era but maintained their Greek identity.

The Greek government in 1999 reported that in Western Thrace, 50% of the Muslims are Turkish, 35% are Pomaks and 15% are Roma. Of course Al-Jazeera ignored this fact and continued to repeat the mantra that all 150,000 Muslims in Western Thrace were Turkish, denying the identity of Greek Muslims, Romas and Pomaks to serve Ankara’s agenda against Greece.

Early in the film, one ethnic Turk interviewed by Al-Jazeera says “You feel forced to hide, not to reveal, or not to be able to freely express your name, your identity. This is how it is to be a Turk here.” He makes this claim while posing in front of a Turkish flag and a photo of the perpetrator of the Greek genocide, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Claiming they are forced to hide their identity while many of the speakers pose in front of images of someone responsible for the slaughter of over a million Greeks cannot be anymore contradictory.

Somehow, not seeing the irony, the very next scene after the ridiculous claim made that in Greece Turks cannot “freely express” their identity, it cuts to a cultural association where children are dressed in their traditional Turkish costumes, doing their traditional Turkish dances, to traditional Turkish music. Didn’t the video editors of Al-Jazeera notice this contradiction?

Then Çiğdem Asafoğlu, the leader of the Party of Friendship, Peace and Equality, says “The main problem here is denial of our identity. We define ourselves as Turkish, which we undoubtedly are. However, the Greek state doesn’t accept this fact. They talk about Greek Muslims, a definition we will never accept.”

However, what Asafoğlu and Al-Jazeera propagandist Glenn Ellis fail to mention is that the recognition of a Muslim minority in Western Thrace, and not ethnic identities, is a result of the 1923 Peace Treaty of Lausanne. Part VI Article 2 of the Treaty of Lausanne, as published in English by the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, states: “Moslems established in the region to the east of the frontier line laid down in 1918 by the Treaty of Bucharest shall be considered as Moslem inhabitants of Western Thrace.”

Effectively Asafoğlu and Al-Jazeera are defaming Greece for following an international peace treaty with Turkey. Who would have thought that those who defend Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, someone who has supported jihadists in Syria and Libya, converts formerly Christian Orthodox churches into mosques as reported by Greek City Times, and butchers his own citizens in eastern Turkey, is trying to defame Greece.

Greece has followed the Treaty of Lausanne as it respects international law, which is why the Muslim population of Western Thrace is growing. Turkey on the other hand disgraced the Treaty that was supposed to protect the Greek minority in Constantinople. In 1955, Turkish intelligence spread the false rumour that the birth house of Atatürk in Greece’s second city of Thessaloniki was destroyed. This rumour led to Turkish mobs conducting a pogrom against the Greek minority in Constantinople, leading to the decimation through violent means of the city’s 120,000 Greeks. Today there are only 3,000-4,000 Greeks in Constantinople.

In addition to the propaganda piece, Ellis highlights that a frustration of the Muslim community in Western Thrace is that they cannot appoint their own religious leaders. As he is a propagandist for Al-Jazeera, he of course did not highly the fact that the Turkish state also appoints religious leaders to their mosques.

Ellis also propagates that schools are being shut down because of discrimination, but does not mention that between 2009 and 2014, 1,705 schools all across Greece shut down because of austerity measures during the economic crisis. Many schools after 2014 also shut down because of a lack of funding, but highlighting the reality of austerity Greece does not fit the propaganda narrative, so it was omitted to be mentioned by Al-Jazeera, just as the conditions of the Treaty of Lausanne were, or the fact that only about 50% of Muslims in Western Thrace are Turkish.

As Al-Jazeera is the mouthpiece of a regime that imprisons homosexuals, funds ISIS and other terrorist organisations, has the punishment for blasphemy set as death, and ranked 127 out of 149 countries for gender equality, we cannot be surprised that it has viciously defamed Greece to serve Erdoğan’s agenda after Turkish state-owned TRT utterly failed to defame Greece only last month.

However, just as TRT were caught out with their lies, so has filmmaker Glenn Ellis and Al-Jazeera.

greekcitytimes.com/2020/04/09/al-jazeera-mouthpiece-for-turkish-propaganda-against-greece-in-new-film/

An Islamist group has been given permission by Christian Democratic Union (CDU) mayor Schaile to use powerful loudspeakers to maltreat the inhabitants of Germersheim with a call of the muezzin. In the future, only double-glazed windows or AfD voting will be helpful! Who could be pleased about the special permit? Who could be pleased about the special permit? The Islamist Ditib and the anti-constitutional organization “Milli Görus”, which clearly belongs to the radical Islamist scene and wants to establish a theocracy. The AfD member of parliament Matthias Joa took these footage (video above) . He has been fighting against Islamist structures on the ground for a long time, while the Christian Democratic Union of Rhineland-Palatinate (CDU) is paving the way for Islamization.

politikstube.com/germersheim-unertraeglicher-muezzin-ruf-durchdringt-strassen-in-kleinstadt/

By Beau Rothschild

The Liberty Movement is fighting back against liberal elites in corporations like Facebook, Google, and Twitter using corporate power to marginalize their message.  The Daily Beast reports that Twitter had no problem with Chinese disinformation about origins of the coronavirus.  “Coronavirus disinformation spread by senior Chinese government officials does not violate Twitter’s terms of service, a spokesperson for the company told The Daily Beast on Monday.”  This would be fine if Twitter had not already targeted conservatives for temporary and permanent bans.

The double standard is outrageous.

It is time for right-leaning users of social media to punish these companies using the free market.  One way is for users to choose new cutting-edge social media platforms, like Parler, to use the power of the consumer to drive demand away from the big social media platforms to ones more friendly to open discussion and diverse political opinions.

Government policies have enabled these companies to use politically correct rules to moderate political speech.  The giants of tech today benefit from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that provides a de facto massive subsidy for our nation’s largest social media platforms.  Many of the ideas politicians are promoting to carve out exceptions to that law miss the boat.  Section 230 has served to protect these companies when they moderate political speech in a way that violates the idea behind the First Amendment to the Constitution.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation makes the case that this law is “the most important law protecting Internet speech.”  The benefits of this law are great, yet there is a strong case to be made that Twitter, and other social media giants, have used this protection to go after conservatives.

Twitter is a classic case of how one company can abuse conservative users in a way that limits speech.  Twitter has engaged in the banning of many conservatives for a subjective violation of the platform’s rules.  Look at the case of James O’Keefe of Project Veritas.  Twitter blocked O’Keefe’s access to his Twitter account after he released a video showing a New York Democratic election commissioner admitting to voter fraud.  The company also “shadowbanned” Dilbert cartoon creator Scott Adams because he asked his followers to tweet examples of supporters of Hillary Clinton violently confronting Donald J. Trump–supporters back in 2016.  Shadowbanning is when a Twitter user’s comments are invisible to that person’s followers.  That type of politically biased activity was not considered when Section 230 was made law.

Signing up for alternative platforms as a supplement to Twitter will put pressure on the media tech giants to change behavior without a change in law.  The act of diversifying social media use will provide an outlet to conservatives who want to reach out to a targeted audience of conservatives and open-minded people who are OK reading messages they disagree with.  Twitter has a monopolistic hammerlock on short-form social media communication, but that can be broken by right-leaning social media users diversifying and signing up for other means of communication.

The new social media company Parler has taken on Twitter with a business model that is friendly to the voices that have been stifled by social media giants.  The company put out a statement after Katie Hopkins, a British conservative, was banned from Twitter for violating the subjective rules of the platform.  Parler made the case: “Big tech has once again failed to take a moral stance and protect debate, discussion, and free speech when bullied by the censorship mob.”  Parler correctly pointed out that the “cancel culture” that allows a liberal mob to stop speech it doesn’t like had won again, and Twitter showed “cowardice” in dealing with it.

At CPAC this year, Jeffrey Wernick, an investor in Parler, made a strong economic case about the “contestability of markets” with regard to social media giants.  He cited the return on investment of Google (44%) and Facebook (51%) as examples of companies ripe for competition, yet they have grown market share.  These companies are acting like monopolies with a market that is not being contested because of some obstacles to entering these markets.

It is time for conservatives to use the market power to fight back and move consuming to friendly sites like Parler.

 https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/time_for_conservatives_to_fight_back_against_leftist_social_media_giants.html#ixzz6JCYd7n2c

Claes Ruth of Karolinska University Laboratory said: “all hospitals” in the country are “strained” at the moment as virus cases and deaths surge with 106 new deaths in Covid-19. A total of 793 deaths has been registered in Sweden.

The total cases in the country now exceeds 9 100, and the hospital system in Stockholm is being overwhelmed with patients and dead bodies. Swedish authorities are storing bodies in Gothenburg and Stockholm in “refrigerated shipping containers, ice rinks, and canteen fridges,” according to RT News.

Crematoriums cannot keep up with the massive influx of virus-related deaths which has overflowed morgues.

According to the latest figures released by the Public Health Agency during today’s press conference, the total number of deaths increased by another 106 to a total of 793, which with the backlog in the reporting to the Public Health Authority means that Sweden has counter over 800 Covid-19 deaths.

By comparison, Sweden has between 500 and 700 deaths linked to influenza per year according to the Public Health Authority.

Approximately 470 patients are currently being treated for Covid-19 according to the Swedish Intensive Care Register, which means that they make up the majority of all intensive care patients currently. The number of intensive care patients with Covid-19 increases on average daily with between 10 and 30 patients.

Sweden currently allegedly has around 950 intensive care places, but the exact number of available places remains confidential.

Men are still the group worst affected by Covid-19. Of the total 719 people who have been, or still are, admitted to intensive care units in Sweden for Covid-19, 545 are men.

Anders Tegnell, state epidemiologist at the Public Health Authority, said that a study was carried out in the Stockholm area to test the spread of infection in the community. Of the 773 people aged between 2 and 86 in Stockholm, 2,5 percent were infected.

He further stated that with the spread rate of the Coronavirus, between five and ten percent of the population in Stockholm would be infected with the virus. “We know that there are significantly more people, it is obvious but how many more we do not know.”

At the same time, he made clear that the figures concern Stockholm which is much worse affected than the rest of the country and that there is no clear data on what it looks like in the rest of Sweden.

freewestmedia.com/2020/04/10/covid-19-death-toll-overwhelms-stockholm/

Nasr El Dbin B. was sentenced to eight years in prison this week after being convicted of manslaughter for the killing of 36-year-old Joselin H. after having sex with her in the ladies toilet at the “Katys Hütte” bar.

The victim is said to have been the last guest at the bar that evening, with the killing taking place on June 11th of last year.

After the two had sex, the 36-year-old mother allegedly bit the lip of the 37-year-old migrant who became enraged and smashed her face repeatedly into the tiled floor of the toilet and then proceeded to strangle her to death with a scarf, Bild reports.

At the trial, it was revealed that immediately after killing Joselin H., the Algerian used his phone to look up pornography before he dumped her body in a bush near the bar. Police found the body the following day.

According to Die Welt, the migrant had been working as a waiter and cleaner at the bar and is said to have received part of his salary in cocaine which made him sexually aggressive.

The case is just the latest killing to involve a failed asylum seeker in Germany since the height of the 2015 migrant crisis.

In March 2019, a 22-year-old Tunisian man was accused of fatally stabbing to death his ex-girlfriend in the city of Worms after they had engaged in an argument. The migrant was already well-known to local police for being involved and drugs and other illegal activities.

In 2018, Afghan asylum seeker Ahmad G. was arrested for murdering 17-year-old Mireille B. in Flensburg with the victim’s friends claiming he had been angered by her refusal to convert to Islam.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/04/10/failed-asylum-seeker-watched-pornography-after-killing-german-woman/

https://qmap.pub/read/3915

The Wuhan coronavirus has made the already evident insanity of reusable shopping bags so obvious that now we read this:

In 2007 San Francisco proudly became the first city to ban plastic bags. But last Tuesday the city’s Department of Health issued new guidelines, which now ban people from going to stores and coffee shops with “their own bags, mugs, or other reusable items from home.”

Virtue-signaling moonbats can’t save the planet without their filthy reusable shopping bags and coffee mugs. But even the leftists running San Francisco understand that we have real problems to deal with.

The Chancre by the Bay isn’t alone:

Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Illinois and Oregon have temporarily suspended their own bans on plastic bags, imposed new bans on reusable bags, or both.

Hawaii and Washington state have reversed their bans too.

Coronavirus epicenter New York has held off enforcement on its plastic bag ban until May 15. Since no one denies that plastic bags are not only more convenient, efficient, and economical but a clear benefit to public health, why not kill the moronic not to mention tyrannical plastic bag ban altogether? Because where liberalism has triumphed, the statist ratchet as a rule only moves in one direction: toward ever greater government control. The best you can hope for is to slow it down a little.

San Francisco’s new ban on reusable bags says nothing about plastic bags. But banning the bags that were supposed to be the smart alternative to plastic is probably as close a progressive city ever gets to admitting it was wrong.

How San Franciscans can legally carry their groceries is unclear.

moonbattery.com/san-francisco-bans-reusable-shopping-bags/

The Free Democratic Party (FDP) politician in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Lorenz Deutsch, urged the director of the music and cultural festival Ruhrtriennale to pull the plug on an appearance from an academic supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS)movement targeting Israel who has also trivialized the Holocaust.Writing in late March, Deutsch told the director of the festival, “The BDS movement is not characterized by factual criticism of Israeli government acts, but aims at demolishing its existence through demonization, delegitimization, and disinformation. Achille Mbembe, who you invited, is unfortunately an example of this way of dealing with Israel.”

Deutsch termed the BDS an “antisemitic movement” and noted that, in 2018, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia banned public funds for institutions that provide BDS activists a platform. The Ruhrtriennale festival, which runs from  August 14 to September 20, is a recipient of tax-payer money.Deutsch, who is the cultural spokesman for the FDP, noted that Achille Mbembe signed a petition calling for an academic boycott of the Jewish state.The FDP politician said he finds this education boycott “attitude fundamentally questionable among academics. In addition, he [Achille Mbembe] also stands out in a recent publication with theses on Israel and the occupied territories, which have no factual basis and fall under the categories mentioned above.”Deutsch cited Achille Mbembe’s essay titled, “The Society of enmity” in the publication Radical Philosophy from 2016 to show that he equates Israel with South Africa’s former apartheid system, which is well-known from BDS circles.Deutsch wrote that Mbembe even surpasses attacks of comparing Israel with the former apartheid system. He cited additional passages from Achille Mbembe’s essay: “However, the metaphor of apartheid does not fully account for the specific character of the Israeli separation project. In the first place, this is because this project rests on quite a unique metaphysical and existential basis. The apocalyptic and catastrophist elements that underwrite it are far more complex, and derive from a longer historical horizon than those elements that used to support South African Calvinism. Moreover, given its ‘hi-tech’ character, the effects of the Israeli project on the Palestinian body are much more formidable than the relatively primitive operations undertaken by the apartheid regime in South Africa between 1948 and the early 1980s.”

The 62-year-old Cameroonian philosopher Mbembe continued that “This is evidenced by its miniaturization of violence – its cellularization and molecularization – and its various techniques of material and symbolic erasure. It is also evidenced in its procedures and techniques of demolition – of almost everything, whether of infrastructures, homes, roads or landscapes – and its fanatical policy of destruction aimed at transforming the life of Palestinians into a heap of ruins or a pile of garbage destined for cleansing. In South Africa, the mounds of ruins never did reach such a scale.”Deutsch responded to the academic paper, stating that “Here completely different situations become the same in an impermissible way,” adding that Mbembe uses terms such wall, border separation, destruction, etc. in an attempt to create supposed connections.Deutsch wrote that “a second apartheid comparison [in Mbembe’s essay] has left me speechless. Here the South African apartheid system is compared with the Holocaust, the two ‘manifestations’ of a ‘separation fantasy.'”Achille Mbembe wrote: “The apartheid system in South Africa and the destruction of Jews in Europe – the latter, though, in an extreme fashion and within a quite different setting – constituted two emblematic manifestations of this phantasy of separation.”Deutsch accused Mbembe of “relativizing  the Holocaust” and “placing the Jews of Israel today in the logic of the overall argument of national socialist white criminals – a well-known pattern. It seems to confirm that many people can deal better with dead Jews than with living Jews.”Mbembe did not immediately respond to a Jerusalem Post press query sent to his South African email address at The University of the Witwatersrand.In his public letter, Deutsch cited a quote from the American author and expert on antisemitism, Bari Weiss: “Anti-Semitism that originates on the left is a far more subtle and sophisticated enterprise [than on the right]. It’s typically camouflaged in language familiar to Jewish tongues and ears: the language of social justice and anti-racism, of equality and liberation.”Mbembe was a guest professor at the University of Cologne in 2019 and is slated to talk at the festival about “planetary life.” Carp, who oversees the festival in the city of Bochum located in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, has faced criticism over the years for her sympathy with the BDS campaign.

https://www.jpost.com/BDS-THREAT/German-politician-urges-festival-to-disinvite-BDS-academic-624161

On Wednesday, the Berlin Fire Department reported a blaze in a new building connected to Berlin’s city castle. The building stands on the Palace Square in central Berlin, just off Alexanderplatz. It is a reconstructed copy of the old royal and imperial palace of both the Kingdom of Prussia and the German Empire.

The fire department stated that one person was reported injured and that at least 80 firefighters were working to put out the fire. A spokesperson for the city fire department told the newspaper, Bild, that the fire must have started after an explosion that took place outside the castle.

royalcentral.co.uk/europe/fire-at-rebuilt-imperial-palace-in-berlin-140461/