In this mailing:
- Soeren Kern: Coronavirus: Europe on Lockdown
- Raymond Ibrahim: "Please, Please Help Us!": The Persecution of Christians: December 2019
- Amir Taheri: Dealing with Coronavirus Reveals Cultural Differences
by Soeren Kern • March 15, 2020 at 5:00 am
The unprecedented restrictions on the movement of people, unimaginable only two weeks ago, is bringing life in Europe to a virtual standstill. "We have to be prepared for the fact that Europe will be hit hard, that Europe will be hit even harder than China and that we will be dealing with this challenge for months." — Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. "The numbers are growing alarmingly fast." — Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz.
In Spain, the government has announced a nationwide state of emergency that effectively quarantines 46 million people. All non-essential travel will be prohibited as of 8AM on March 16. The public will be confined to their homes except in cases of emergency or to purchase food or medicine. Pictured: A taxi drives on a deserted highway, under a road sign that reads, "Stop the coronavirus, stay home" on March 14, 2020 in Barcelona, Spain. (Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images)
Europe is now the epicenter of the global coronavirus pandemic that has reached more than 45 countries on the continent. As of March 14, upwards of 42,000 people have tested positive for the disease, according to data from European health ministries. The so-called Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is spreading extremely fast: roughly 40,000 of the cases (95% of all cases) in Europe were confirmed during just the first 14 days of March. Italy is Europe's worst-affected country, followed by Spain, Germany, France, Switzerland and Norway. In Europe as a whole, more than 1,600 people — 4.0% of those confirmed as having been infected — have died from COVID-19. In Italy, the lethality rate currently is 5.8%, according to the Ministry of Health.
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by Raymond Ibrahim • March 15, 2020 at 4:30 am
A report cited by Fox News found that more than 6,000 Christians have been slaughtered by Islamic terrorists since 2015 — a thousand of them in just 2019. "It is... genocide.... the longer we tolerate these massacres, the more we embolden the perpetrators. We give them a 'green light' to carry on killing." — Baroness Caroline Cox, Fox News, December 24, 2019, Nigeria. "Christian Syrian refugees ... have been blocked from getting help from the United Nations Refugee Agency... by Muslim UN officials in Jordan." "You have this absurd situation where the scheme is set up to help Syrian refugees and the people most in need, Christians who have been 'genocided,' they can't even get into the U.N. camps to get the food. If you enter and say I am a Christian or convert, the Muslim U.N. guards will block you...." — Paul Diamond, a British human rights lawyer, CBN News, December 4, 2019, United Nations in Jordan.
On December 20, Mohammad Moghiseh, the head of Tehran Revolutionary Court, sentenced nine Muslim apostates to a total of 45 years in prison. "These Christian converts have objected to the verdict issued by the Tehran Revolutionary Court and are awaiting final appeal," the report states. Pictured: The entrance to Tehran Revolutionary Court. (Photo by Behrouz Mehri/AFP via Getty Images)
The following are some of the abuses Muslims inflicted on Christians throughout the month of December 2019, and categorized by theme: The Slaughter of Christians Nigeria: The Islamic State in West Africa Province released a video of the execution of 11 Christian aid workers on the day after Christmas. The brief video shows one Christian being shot, followed by 10 others, tied up and being beheaded by masked jihadis standing behind the hostages. "This message is to the Christians in the world," a man's voice narrates over the footage. "Those who you see in front of us are Christians, and we will shed their blood as revenge for the two dignified sheikhs, the caliph of the Muslims, and the spokesman for the Islamic State [who were killed by the U.S.]"
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by Amir Taheri • March 15, 2020 at 4:00 am
South Korea, a non-Western capitalist democracy, did not try to hush things up but was hampered by another factor: The "bleeding-heart" liberal insistence on respect for religious diversity. Because the epidemic started in a Christian fundamentalist community, the authorities in Seoul were hesitant to magnify the threat and take drastic measures such as imposing a quarantine on the congregation. What seems suspicious is that the drastic measures that Rome imposed on regions where its opponents are strong were not adopted, even in a light version, for the country as a whole. As a result, more than a million people fled the forbidden zone to relocate in central and southern regions of the peninsula. Carl Schmidt argued that the task of the state is to deal with exceptions because the countless quotidian ordinary acts that sustain human existence are normally and routinely carried out by citizens.
In Iran, President Hassan Rouhani claimed that the virus had been introduced by the American "Great Satan" in order to disrupt elections for the Islamic Consultative Assembly then underway. The fable was propagated that the record low turnout of voters had been part of an American plot. Pictured: Voters and officials at a polling station on the southern outskirts of Tehran on February 21, 2020. (Photo by Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images)
Having started as a local public health issue in China, the corona epidemic has now morphed into a global economic and even political threat. It has also put the limelight on the manner with which affected nations have tried to face the challenge, revealing the true nature of various regimes. At the time of this writing, four nations are singled out as those most affected by the pandemic: China, where it started, Iran which is second to China in numbers of cases, South Korea where the coronavirus broke out in a religious community and Italy, the Western nation most affected. The different ways in which those nations dealt with the challenge sheds light on their respective political systems and cultural environments.
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