Germany’s Right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is calling for the government to provide aid to the country’s local breweries and inns, many of which are threatened with disaster because of the ongoing lockdown in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown.

Germany, which has a long brewing tradition, is home to many breweries, some of which have been in existence for centuries. And although there had been a boom in small breweries in recent years due to the explosive popularity of craft beers around the world, the sudden shock of a long-term lockdown is now threatening their very existence, as previously reported by Voice of Europe. Pubs and restaurants have all been closed, public events where beer is served have been cancelled, and exports have decreased as a result of border closings.

In response, the AfD is saying that the government must provide financial aid to breweries and inns that does not need to be repaid. “Loans and deferrals do not help them,” Stephan Protschka, an AfD MP from Bavaria, said in a report by Junge Freiheit.

Alice Weidel, the Chairman of the AfD’s parliamentary group in the Bundestag, urged for small- and medium-sized restaurants to be allowed to reopen as soon as possible. She pointed out that there are social distancing measures that can be taken in such places, such as if only every other table is occupied by patrons, and that the eating areas can be regularly disinfected.

Beatrix von Storch, Weidel’s deputy, seconded Weidel’s recommendation, and said, “What applies to shops must also apply to beer gardens, restaurants, and cafes.” She expressed disapproval that on April 23, which is Germany’s national Beer Day, beer gardens and restaurants were all closed, despite the fact that countries like South Korea have already demonstrated that it is possible to reconcile safety with reopenings.

voiceofeurope.com/2020/04/germany-populist-afd-calls-for-aid-for-local-breweries-and-inns/

No matter how many worthless face masks and test kits, the People’s Republic of Coronavirus sends to European countries, they will continue to kowtow to Beijing. If only the European governments were as comfortable confronting China as they are America.

Bowing to heavy pressure from Beijing, European Union officials softened their criticism of China this week in a report documenting how governments push disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, according to documents, emails and interviews.

The initial European Union report, obtained by The New York Times, was not particularly strident: a routine roundup of publicly available information and news reports.

It cited Beijing’s efforts to curtail mentions of the virus’s origins in China, in part by blaming the United States for spreading the disease internationally. It noted that Beijing had criticized France as slow to respond to the pandemic and had pushed false accusations that French politicians used racist slurs against the head of the World Health Organization. The report also highlighted Russian efforts to promote false health information and sow distrust in Western institutions.

“China has continued to run a global disinformation campaign to deflect blame for the outbreak of the pandemic and improve its international image,” the initial report said. “Both overt and covert tactics have been observed.”

And then China cracked the whip, and the EU joined the disinformation campaign.

But China moved quickly to block the document’s release, and the European Union pulled back. The report had been on the verge of publication, until senior officials ordered revisions to soften the language.

“The Chinese are already threatening with reactions if the report comes out,” Lutz Güllner, a European Union diplomat, wrote to colleagues on Tuesday in an email seen by The Times.

The sentence about China’s “global disinformation” campaign was removed, as was any mention of the dispute between China and France. Other language was toned down.

In the US, Chinese disinformation campaigns included inciting panic about the virus and claiming through text messages that President Trump intends to declare martial law. But Europe continues to put Made in China ahead of any pride, dignity, and truth.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/04/european-union-bows-china-daniel-greenfield/

by Giulio Meotti

Nine months after the blackouts in the 60’s, New York enjoyed a baby boom with a surge in the birth rate. But at the time, the West was still “the West”.

Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, now asks his citizens to take advantage of the enforced home lockdown by “making babies”. It is a poor delusion. Coronavirus will empty the Western cradles. 

The coronavirus pandemic will lead to a collapse of births, due to the traumatic economic uncertainty, the lack of a vaccine, the psycological effects of most dramatic images of this crisis: overcrowded morgues, mass graves, hospitals out of control, bloodbath in the nursing homes. In Italy, in vitro fertilization has been already stopped due to the emergency. It will mean the loss of 4.500 new births.

But Europe’s fertility was already falling before this pandemic. The virus is simply going to accellerate some of the Western existential weaknesses. It will be a poorer Europe, one more divided than ever, even less open to new life.On the other hand, we see, from the mainstream media, appreciation for some effects of the lockdown in nature: less smog, less CO2, less greenhouse effect, less cars, less factories, less tourism, less oil, less coal, it seems a film written by Greta Thunberg.

These are the people whi for years asked the West to have less children.Environmentalists and anthropocentrism’s critics have transformed this pandemic into their misanthropic utopia. Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, says that “nature is sending us a message”.Nature is not a sentient being, however much the ecological religion may fantasize that it is. “Gaia”,planet earth, is not God coming to punish for our sins.In fact, however, the pandemic brought something good: it showed us what the world would be like if ideological green extremists won. The nature that takes over man’s creation, the suspension of industrial activity, the collapse of consumption, different forms of socialism to redistribute what little wealth is left because it will be hard to produce it again.

Writing in Le Monde, the French anthropologist Bruno Latour explains “the pathogen whose terrible virulence has changed the conditions of existence of all the inhabitants of the planet, is not the virus at all, it is human beings!”.Every crisis of death is a crisis of life. 

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/25595

The giant German drug store chain Rossmann sponsored an advertisement with a rapper who has advocated an antisemitic conspiracy theory against Israelis during the jihadi plane attacks on 9/11 in New York City.Rossmann is the second largest retail drugstore in Germany, with a total of 4,088 stores and 56,200 employees.

The German rapper Wasiem Taha, who is of Palestinian origin, circulated on social media a statement that “On September 11, 2001, 4,000 Israelis did not show up for work at the World Trade Center.” A caption under the statement and a picture of a passenger plane about to strike a WTC tower reads “Islam facts.”Taha wrote above the social media post: “Weird, isn’t it.”Taha fantasized in a song a number of years about a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv with a bomb belt.The popular Rossmann video advertisement targets a young audience and addresses the post-coronavirus climate: “Clubfeeling 2020. So that we all celebrate after corona.”Customers are showed wearing face masks so they can later party.

In 2018, the left-wing daily taz wrote that the Berlin rapper Massiv promoted a “9/11 conspiracy theory and hate speech against Israel.” The paper said that Massiv is “without a doubt pro-Palestinian” in regards to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.Taha was born in Germany in 1982.A Rossmann spokeswoman sent a company statement to The Jerusalem Post on Friday. The statement said “We are against any form of antisemitism…Massiv distances himself today from his earlier antisemitic statement.”Rossmann wrote that Massiv assured the drug chain in a statement that “I distance myself from hate, violence, war and antisemitism. Since 2015, I have completely defused my texts from negative expressions and profanity. I am working wih youths in different projects. My music is motivating.”Rossmann said the advertisement was a one time deal with the rapper and the company does not plan to work with him again.The German Jewish and pro-Israel activist Malca Goldstein-Wolf told the Post on Friday that “The impression arises that Rossmann does not take antisemitism seriously. Anyone who spreads conspiracy theories about Jews stokes hatred of Jews.”She said that “a well-known company like Rossmann does not immediately end its cooperation with the rapper Massiv in times of increasing antisemitism and does not apologize for the wrong decision is a slap in the face of Jewish customers. I will no longer shop at Rossmann stores.”Arye Sharuz Shalicar, who was born in Germany to Jewish-Persian parents and made aliyah in 2001, and author of the book The New-German Antisemite – Do Jews today belong to Germany? – tweeted: “always have shopped at Rossmann. I will refrain from that from now on. Why? Because Rossmann paid an antisemitic conspiracy theory rapper named Massiv to promote the company. Or how do you understand this agitation from him after 9/11?”

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/german-drugstore-chain-shows-ad-with-antisemitic-conspiracy-rapper-625795

People across the UK have noticed that the British supermarket chain Morrisons has been running ads which promote the Muslim holiday Ramadan but not  St George’s day – England’s national day – which is on April 23rd.

Interestingly enough, a quick search for Ramadan on the grocery chain’s homepage brings up this page. However, a search of St. George’s day on the website gives no results.

Late Thursday afternoon, Morrisons actually tweeted about St George’s day, most likely because they noticed people were complaining about it.

This is hardly the first time that a European company downplayed its own cultural holidays while promoting foreign ones. However, it’s a positive sign that these companies, at least, are sometimes willing to make adjustments after they’re heavily criticized for their ‘woke’ marketing tactics. After all, companies that get woke often go broke, as the expression goes.

voiceofeurope.com/2020/04/uk-supermarket-runs-ads-promoting-ramadan-but-not-st-georges-day/

On Friday at noon on the dot the bells ring in the St. Severi church in Erfurt and in the city church St. Michael in Jena. The ringing is to commemorate the victims of the genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Andranik Vardanyan, chairman of the Armenian community in Thuringia, informed about this. “Every year on April 24, Armenians gather worldwide to commemorate the genocide and demand justice as Turkey, as the legal successor of the Ottoman Empire, continues to deny the genocide to this day,” Andranik Vardanyan said.

https://www.otz.de/regionen/jena/glockenleuten-in-erfurt-und-jena-erinnert-an-voelkermord-an-armeniern

The police and firefighters called in to intervene in immigrant neighborhoods now plagued by violence are said to have received new instructions.

The executive seems more than ever to fear the problems arising in the “lost territories of the Republic”. While Interior Minister Christophe Castaner or spokesperson Sibeth Ndiaye are trying to minimize the extent of the violence that has occurred in recent days, the police and firefighters who have to intervene to stop fires in these neighborhoods have been instructed to “let burn” to avoid the ambushes, reported William Molinié, journalist at the police-justice service of LCI and TF1.

“In the social housing suburbs and in Paris, the police who are escorting the firefighters responding to fires are now asked to let it burn as long as there is no danger of spreading, so as not to be exposed to the risk of ambush,” he wrote.

The information echoes what regional daily Le Parisien had already reported : on the night of Wednesday, April 22 to Thursday, April 23, Île-de-France police received a similar instruction from the Paris police headquarters .

“Following recent phenomena of urban violence throughout the Paris region, some caution should be taken into account on the part of the workforce of public roads,” they were asked. And the police hierarchy added: “It is necessary to avoid any contact with the disturbers on interventions which do not represent a danger or the spread of fire in order to avoid having injured officials. Reasonable and reasoned use should be made of collective armaments.”

Two nights of urban riots in the Hauts-de-Seine commune, spread over part of the Paris immigrant suburbs. According to Yves Lefebvre, general secretary of the union SGP Police unit FO, there are fears of a generalization of violence.

“Without wanting to stigmatize the Muslim community, we are going to jump into Ramadan with both feet and it will be even more complicated. Besides that, the weather is helping either. The weather is nice in the Paris region,” he said.

freewestmedia.com/2020/04/24/french-firemen-told-to-let-it-burn/