In Germany, police recently completed their fifth nationwide “Action Day against Hate Postings“.

German authorities initiated the action day more than three years ago; since then, it has been held once a year. According to the Federal Police, the number of recorded cases of hate crime linked to the internet has actually fallen — from 2,458 cases in 2017 to 1,962 in 2018.

Despite the decrease in cases, German authorities nevertheless decided to have not just one, but two action days this year. The first took place on June 6, when German authorities launched coordinated police raids in 13 federal states against suspects who had allegedly posted hate speech online. In a total of 38 cases, homes were searched and suspects interrogated, the Federal Criminal Police Office reported.

The second action day in 2019 took place on November 6, when the Federal Criminal Police Office in Wiesbaden, which coordinated the action, launched police operations in nine federal states — Hesse, Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Berlin, Brandenburg, Bremen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saarland and Saxony — against suspects believed to have posted hate speech online. In 21 cases, there were apartment searches or interrogations.

The decrease in online hate speech, however, is no cause for celebration, according to the Federal Police:

“Many criminally relevant posts are not displayed or are not made known to the security authorities as they are expressed in closed forums and discussion groups.”

Instead, the Federal Police asked the German public to become informants and notify them about online hate speech:

“Support us and contribute to the fight against hate crime: … Anyone who encounters hate postings on the net or becomes a victim should report this to the police. Some federal states have internet portals available for this purpose, through which anyone can also report such crimes anonymously. An overview of these online stations can be found at: www.bka.de/DE/KontaktAufnehmen/Strafanzeigen/strafanzeigen_node.htmlor on the Internet portal of the German police: http://www.polizei.de”.

Regarding hate postings, according to Federal Police, 80% of online hate crimes are “incitement to hate”, as well as “insult, coercion and threats”.

In view of what Germany faces on the terrorism front, it seems an odd priority for the Federal Police to be hunting down online thought crimes in two nationwide “Action Days against Hate Postings” in one year alone.

In an operation in November, involving more than 170 police officers, German authorities arrested two Turks and one German of Macedonian origin in Offenbach, a city bordering Frankfurt, and charged them with plotting a terrorist attack using explosives.

According to police, the men’s intention was to “kill as many people as possible” in the region. The men were well known to the police.

Also in November, German police detained a Syrian man in Berlin. Federal prosecutors said the suspect had begun to procure the “requisite components and chemicals for the construction of an explosive device,” also with the intention of killing as many people as possible.

“This was intended for detonation at an unknown point in time and at an unknown location in Germany,” they said.

Earlier this year, in March, 11 people were arrested on suspicion of planning a terrorist attack. German police told the media that the goal of the attack was “to kill as many infidels as possible” using firearms and vehicles. In July, police in the cities of Cologne and Düren, carried out raids on six apartments and a building site to prevent a terrorist attack by six Islamic extremists, one of them with connections to a jihadist group in Berlin.

In addition, the Turkish Interior Ministry announced that it would start deportations of 10 captured men, women and children with suspected ties to “Islamic State” back to Germany.

There are 95 German suspected ISIS supporters believed to be in custody in Turkey, Syria, or Iraq. German police have active investigations against 33 of them and in 26 cases, arrest warrants have been issued.

A family of seven German Islamists already arrived in Berlin from Turkey. There are no German arrest warrants for the family and German authorities said they do not believe the family ever joined Islamic State. Armin Schuster, the interior policy spokesman for Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, insisted that the German returnees were not “serious cases,” and warned against “media-fueled hysteria” according to a report in Deutsche Welle. “They did not take part in the fighting,” he said. “They won’t be sent to prison but they have to be kept under surveillance.”

If they have to be kept under surveillance, one might argue, then perhaps there is reason for suspicion? It therefore appears odd for a German official to be arguing that a family that might voluntarily have traveled to join ISIS, a racist, supremacist, violent and lethal terrorist organization — even if they did not succeed in joining it — is not a serious case. Being concerned would hardly seem “hysterical”.

German police, nevertheless, seem keenly aware that Germany is under threat. The Federal Criminal Police Office recently announced that it was setting up a department, “Islamist-motivated terrorism/extremism,” in order to “further strengthen the fight against Islamist terrorism together with the other security authorities in the federal and state governments…”

“For despite the military defeat of the self-proclaimed ‘Islamic State’, the risk of Islamist-motivated attacks in Germany remains high. In addition to the seven attempts and plans that the security authorities have been able to thwart in Germany since 2016, the five-fold increase in the number of dangerous persons and the significant increase in the number of investigations conducted in this area also illustrate the challenges facing the German security authorities” [Emphasis added.].

The new unit will also have to deal with the dangerous issue of ISIS returnees:

“Another important issue is the treatment of returnees from the war zones in Syria and Iraq. These individuals are already the subject of intensive consideration… the dangers they pose should be addressed at an early stage by launching investigations and obtaining arrest warrants”.

In between online thought crimes and terrorists, the German police would seem to have their work cut out.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15292/germany-hate-postings-day

BY MATT MARGOLIS

There’s a bipartisan, civilian effort currently underway to hold the Chinese government financially accountable for their mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic. A class-action lawsuit against the Chinese government was filed on March 13 by the Miami-based Berman Law Group. Joe Biden’s younger brother Francis is an adviser for the firm.

“We believe that this is not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue. This is an American issue,” said Jeremy Alters, Berman’s chief strategist and non-attorney spokesman. Alters is also a prominent Democratic fundraiser. “The best way to do this is with a bipartisan effort to hold China accountable.” Berman Law Group has partnered with Lucas | Compton, a lobbying and public affairs firm with ties to President Trump and the Trump organization. “Anyone who is willing to participate and help, we plan to work with to help move this lawsuit forward to collect for the citizens of the United States for this terrible tragedy that’s happened,” Alters continued. “But there’s no one better to help us show a strong unified bipartisan effort in this lawsuit than Lucas | Compton.”

Damages sought from the Chinese government could easily reach trillions of dollars, according to Alters.

On Wednesday, multiple senior White House officials and top Trump advisors confirmed to Daily Caller that they were briefed on this effort are and are monitoring it.

“I’m totally in favor,” one Trump adviser told the Daily Caller. “F**k them.”

The lawsuit can “unite our country against a common enemy,” said another advisor.

The White House declined to comment when asked about potential executive actions that may be taken on the issue.

China’s mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak has come under intense scrutiny. They didn’t report the virus to the World Health Organization until December 31, 2019, even though the first case was likely discovered in November, or even earlier. Reports suggest they attempted to cover it up.

Berman Law Group and Lucas | Compton are urging Americans affected by the pandemic to join the lawsuit by going to DemandChinaPay.org.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/a-multi-trillion-dollar-civilian-lawsuit-against-china-for-the-coronavirus-fallout-is-being-monitored-by-white-house/

“Can the Chinese government be held responsible for ‘criminal negligence’ in relation to Covid-19?”, asks the economist Branko Milanovic. This is the question that many columnists and observers ask themselves.

I talked with Steven W. Mosher, an American expert on China and head of the Population Research Institute about this, the single most important political and cultural issue in the present global crisis. 

Meotti: What doesn’t the West get about the Chinese regime?

Mosher: Even after the end of the current pandemic–which will, sooner than we think, end–China will not be looked upon the same way again.  Its relationship with the West in general, and the U.S. in particular, will be fundamentally different.  It will no longer be seen as merely an economic competitor, or even a strategic rival. 

It will be seen as a hostile force to be confronted at every turn.  

China will not give up its hegemonic aspirations and return to its previous status as a non-expansionist regional power.  But it will no longer be aided in its quest for global domination by any country other than its handful of dictatorial allies whose dictators have, in one way or another, been paid off.  China’s Belt and Road Initiative will come to be seen not as the high road to riches, but as deceitful debt-trap diplomacy, not to mention a one-way ticket to Coronavirus hell.

Meotti: Why is this epidemic, as you said, “made in China”? 

Mosher: With every day that goes by we learn more about the evil and incompetent regime that unleashed this horror upon the world.  Whether or not the Wuhan virus leaked from one of its biolabs or not, Beijing deliberately concealed the outbreak for as long as two months.  Although it was finally forced by the rising death toll to admit it had a problem, it has continued to dissemble about virtually everything else in the two months since. 

Why wasn’t the world warned in time? Estimates are that 95% of the infections in China, and almost 100% around the world, could have been stopped with timely medical intervention.

I am a frequent visitor to Italy, and have over the years traveled to all parts of the country, from Turin and Venice in the north, to Bari in the south.  It pains me to learn that in northern Italy hundreds of elderly Italians are being denied ICU beds and ventilators, and are dying.  They are dying because of the incompetence and evil of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  

Italy signed on to the same Belt and Road project, the only G-7 country to do so, on the promise that it would lead to prosperity.  At the present time, however, China’s New Silk Road seems to be a fast track to death. 

The problem is not that there are hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens living in Italy, not counting illegal immigrants.  The problem is that their government allowed the Chinese Coronavirus to reach epidemic proportions in China, and then allowed it to be spread around the world.  The CCP could probably have not done a better job of “seeding” a global pandemic if it had been trying to.

Let’s be crystal clear about one thing: Everyone who falls ill from the Chinese coronavirus, everyone who dies from the Chinese coronavirus, everyone who is denied medical care because the hospitals are treating Chinese coronavirus patients,  everyone who loses a job, or loses weeks out of their lives because of a quarantine—each and every one of those individuals is a victim of the Chinese Communist Party.

That because it is the CCP—and only the CCP—that is responsible for this deadly outbreak.  

Meotti: A regime that aborted females, that imprisons millions, that take organs from prisoners, persecute religions… Where is the scandal in the West? 

Mosher: The Chinese coronavirus has also put the spotlight on the Peoples Republic of China’s (PRC) outsized influence in the United States. 

Every Fortune 500 company that has invested in China has become a hostage to the Beijing regime, and its lobbyists argue against taking action against China’s multifarous human rights abuses.  Wall Street has become the financial services arm of the Beijing regime, providing the financing and the hard currency it needs for its military buildup and relentless expansionism in the South China Sea and elsewhere.  

Its penetration of U.S. colleges and universities to implant or suborn professors also gives it influence in academe.  These professors work for China’s interests, not America’s. Such academics not only advocate pro-China policy positions, they sometimes steal research and technology. 

The FBI has recently arrested “students” who were actually intelligence agents and other “researchers” who were actually officers in the People’s Liberation Army.

Why is today’a China a threat to our civilization, freedom of expression,WHO etc..?

The Chinese Coronavirus pandemic has focused the world’s attention on the dangers of a rising China is a way that nothing else has.  It has also exposed the way that the Chinese Communists have corrupted the international order, starting with the World Health Organization. 

Incredibly, the WHO helped China to hide the epidemic for a couple of weeks.  WHO researchers were kept out of China until February 15, more than two months after the first cases were discovered. Even today, the WHO is not given access to the kind of data that would allow a complete understanding of the spread of the virus in China.  Without this information, we are fighting in the dark against a largely unknown enemy.

We should have known certain basic facts about the coronavirus weeks ago. 

• We should have known that it was contagious during the incubation period.  
• We should have known that the incubation period was two or three weeks, or even longer.  
• We should have known that it could be transmitted by aerosols.  
• We should have known how long it was able to survive on surfaces. 
• We should have known what antiviral drugs were effective in treating the disease. 

Instead, we were told virtually nothing.  And what we were told often turned out to be false.  The numbers of infected and dead, for example, in China are certainly much higher than the official numbers.

China’s model of governance would mean an end to all the things that we hold dear, from human rights and popular sovereignty, to freedom of expression, association, and assembly.  None of these things are permitted in China.  Nor would they be long tolerated in a world dominated by China.

The post-coronavirus world is unlikely to be a world dominated by China, however.  The Chinese Communist Party’s evil and incompetence has now been exposed on the world stage in an unforgetable way.  

Americans will never forget that, in the middle of a viral epidemic unleashed by China, the Beijing regime threatened to withhold vital prescription drugs and medical devices in order to let “America drown in a coronavirus sea.”

America and the world will now move beyond the “China Dream,” even if the Communist Party leaders there continue to cling to it. 

• The world will reassess its dependence on China for, among other things, prescription drugs and medical devices. 
• The Belt and Road Initiative will grind to a halt as China desperately tries to avoid a financial collapse. 
• The U.S. tariffs on Chinese-made goods will go back up when China defaults–as now it must–on Phase I of the trade deal it signed with President Trump.  
• Chinese investment in places like northern Italy, where PRC controls much of the textile industry will be reassessed. 

The world will pull back from China.

As the world order reconstitutes itself after the current pandemic subsides, it will take a different shape.  China will no longer be regarded as a responsible member of that order, because it has proven that it is not.  Instead it will be on the outside, looking in. 

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/25437

People are short on toilet paper because a herd of greedy, hysterical fools stampeded into stores like Costco and hoarded the supply. Some have now figured out that Wuhan virus has nothing to do with toilet paper, and that it will take them years to use the hundreds of rolls they have stacked up in the garage. But Costco isn’t taking it back. The same goes for other goods gathered by hoarders at everyone else’s expense:

As if thinking the hoarding craze would go on indefinitely, Costco appears to have overbought:

By the time this is over, TP may be going for a penny a roll. For now, you can still pay too much for it on eBay.

Thanks hoarders, for reminding us that we have something worse to fear than a virus: other people.

moonbattery.com/no-costco-returns-for-hoarders/

Instead of a curfew, Germany has a contact ban, but several asylum seekers have not yet understood this new regulation to curb the spread of the coronavirus or do not want to understand it, do not adhere to the distance rule and ignore curfews. The cities of Schneeberg and Zschorlau in Saxony also have these same problems with ” asylum seekers” , who are almost exclusively in large groups in public.

The tabloid BILD reports:

The mayors of Schneeberg and Zschorlau ask Saxony’s Ministry of the Interior for help. Because many of the asylum seekers living here would not comply with restrictions on leaving the home.

Again and again, large groups of residents of the Schneeberg asylum shelter have been observed on the streets of Schneeberg without good reason, the mayors report. This would give the population the impression that the restrictions would not apply to asylum seekers.

When asked about this matter, some asylum seekers reacted in part aggressively. For this reason, the State should, for example, set up a stationary supply as quickly as possible to provide the refugee home with everyday goods.

politikstube.com/schneeberg-zschorlau-asylbewerber-ignorieren-kontaktverbot/

Scenes resembling the First World War are unfolding are unfolding on Europe’s frontier, with Greek border forces bathed in noxious fumes as Turkish police and, allegedly, Turkish-armed migrants bombard them with tear gas.

The Islamist president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was believed to have bought the border crisis to an end by deciding that he would not keep his side of the Graeco-Turkish frontier open for illegal migrants wishing to break into Europe anymore last Wednesday, due to the risk spreading coronavirus. However, it seems that thousands of migrants remain at the border regardless, and that Turkish personnel are continuing to support their efforts to punch through Greece’s protective fences — not least by bombarding their Greek counterparts with tear gas in social media footage which has been circulated by the Greek press.

Footage shot from the Greek side of the border and shared by Greek media outlet Proto Thema appears to show Greek personnel and army amublances bathed in noxious fumes in scenes reminiscent of the infamous gas attacks on the trenches of the First World War following one such bombardment.

The Greeks have themselves used tear gas to try and repel illegal aliens hurling rocks and petrol bombs at them, or attempting to tear down or otherwise dismantle border fencing — but recent videos show a number of migrants at the fences now appear to have been supplied with gas masks so they can sustain their attacks on the border regardless.

Turkish officials have previously claimed that at least 100,000 migrants have been released into Greece, but the Greek government disputes this, saying they have successfully held back tens of thousands and estimating the number who have made it through the land border in the hundreds.

Their task has not been made easier by the European Union’s past refusal to provide funding for robust border fences, which the bloc denounced as “pointless”.

“We are against building walls,” declared then-European Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs, and Citizenship, Dimitris Avramopoulos, as recently as 2018.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/03/25/watch-scenes-resembling-first-world-war-as-battle-of-evros-between-greeks-migrants-turks-continues/

BY VICTORIA TAFT 

For a guy who just biffed his first, live anti-Trump “shadow briefing” about the coronavirus, Joe Biden, the Double-Secret-Coronavirus-Shadow-Briefer, probably shouldn’t have made this move during a live interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

The last we saw Tapper he was “enraged” at rollerblading San Franciscans who were supposed to be socially distancing but not doing so to the liking of the anchorman. At the time, Tapper tut-tutted with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, “This is kind of enraging. Many people in San Francisco have clearly not gotten the message!”

On Tuesday, Tapper was back on the job as America’s Anchor-Doctor.

Tapper welcomed Biden, but almost as soon as the interview started, he looked horrified as the Double-Secret-Coronavirus-Shadow-Briefer … used his hand – no, not to wave at the teleprompter guy as happened during his disastrous “shadow briefing” —  but to cough into!

https://pjmedia.com/trending/mr-double-secret-coronavirus-shadow-briefer-is-cough-ready-for-cough-duty/

By Richard Jack Rail

Italy is getting creepily close to the death panels Sarah Palin warned us about in 2008.  The idea is that old people be allowed to die so younger people can use the medical resources (ICUs, ventilators, hospital beds) that the oldsters would have taken up.

This strikes me as contradictory.  The Left’s Malthusian scarcity thinking should favor the elderly over the youthful.  The younger you are, the longer you will be using scarce government services, eating scarce food, drinking scarce water, burning scarce gasoline, using scarce electricity, and extending your already overlarge carbon footprint.

Society saves resources by letting you die young.

Or should that be “by seeing to it that you die young”?  You know, the thinking that undergirds abortion.  Kill ’em young, and they don’t get to use bennies or otherwise suck up life force, leaving more for the rest of us to gorge on.  Older patients will probably die soon anyway, so they won’t suck up as much life force in the long term as younger patients.

The apparent European mania for euthanasia complements this approach to social management.  It will eventually be decided, for the greater good, that only perfect babies (carefully defined by statute) will be allowed to reach age 10, at which time they will undergo I.Q. testing (weighted for diversity, sex, eye color, etc).  Those testing below 100 will be allowed to die (made comfortable until they starve to death).  Among those who survive, euthanasia clears the boards off at 60.

Simple.  Clean.  Scientific.  And no “death panels.”  It will be written into law so that no one person has to bear the awful guilt of killing several hundred thousand humans deciding who dies every year.  That just wouldn’t be fair.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/death_panels_alive_and_well_in_europe.html

In the beginning there was only the Wuhan outbreak but within a few weeks, it spread to the entire province of Hubei, a territory where 60 million inhabitants live – six times the population of Lombardy. How did the invisible enemy invade every continent, from Europe to America via Africa?

In Italy it all started from Codogno, a town in the province of Lodi that has just under 16 000 inhabitants. Almost right away Vo ‘Euganeo followed. Soon the Italian outbreak got bigger to include the whole of Lombardy, with Bergamo and Brescia as cities most affected by the viral scourge.

Virologists believe that the virus spread to the rest of Europe from Germany, including to Italy with the main outbreak located in the North Rhine-Westphalia region with almost 5 000 infected. And in Bavaria there is over 2 200 infected patients.

In France, the main focus is on the Paris region and Alsace, where the army is building a field hospital. In Austria the greatest danger is concentrated in the Paznaun valley, precisely in the renowned ski resort of Ischgl. According to reports from Der Spiegel, the resort closed too late, and hundreds of people from Denmark, Germany, Sweden and many other countries were infected there.

In the UK, London is the main source of the outbreak. Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow, a suburb of the City, has raised the white flag declaring a crisis due to the high number of patients hospitalized for suspected contagion by Covid-19. The situation in Spain is also dramatic, where the numbers in Madrid are not so different from those in Lombardy.

Despite being about a week late compared to Italy, the infection has brought the Iberian capital to its knees. El País reported that on Monday March 16, hospitals in the Madrid region counted one death every 16 minutes while another Spanish daily El Mundo added that the two crematoriums in the city work 24/7 without interruption.

In South Korea the ground zero of the infection was located in Daegu. Until a few weeks ago, 60 percent of cases (initially even 80 percent) were located right here, in the fourth urban center of the country by number of inhabitants, about 250 kilometers south-east of Seoul.

Iran had its deadly outbreak in the religious city of Qom, about seventy kilometers from the capital Tehran.

Finally, in the United States, the epicenter of the infection is located in New York, where a spike in cases occurred on Friday March 20. The New York Postreported that on that day the new Coronavirus killed citizens “at a rate of more than one an hour” bringing the death toll to double figures.

According to the New York Times, in La Rochelle, a city in New York State (about half an hour north of Manhattan) the first containment efforts were made. On Monday, researchers noted an “attack rate” in New York that was “five times higher” than the rest of the country. Dr Deborah Birx warned that anybody leaving NY should self-quarantine for 14 days.

freewestmedia.com/2020/03/25/the-epicenters-of-the-covid-19-pandemic/