Anti-vaxxer news - First new polio case in decades diagnosed in Israel

 https://www.timesofisrael.com/first-new-polio-case-in-decades-diagnosed-in-israel/

A case of polio was discovered in Israel for the first time in several decades, the Health Ministry said Sunday, raising fears of an outbreak of the nearly eradicated disease.

A mutated form of the virus, which can cause illness in the unvaccinated, was discovered in a 4-year-old boy in Jerusalem, the ministry said. He had not been vaccinated against the disease.

The case was believed to be the first polio diagnosis in Israel since 1989, after Israel largely wiped out the disease through an aggressive inoculation campaign.

In 2013, traces of the virus were detected in sewer systems across Israel, but no human diagnoses were made. The discovery, however, pushed Israel to launch a mass vaccination drive among young children.

Like much of the world, Israel administers polio vaccines to children as part of its standard vaccine regimen, with four doses given between the ages of 2 months and around 7 years.

Putin's clumsy military campaign in southern Ukraine makes little sense

 https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/07/europe/russia-southern-ukraine-military-analysis-intl/index.html

It is a marvel that Moscow was either so convinced civil disobedience would not be a problem or decided that they simply did not need a plan to deal with it. The Kremlin's attempt to film Russian aid trucks handing out the solution to the problem its invasion created was greeted with local scorn and profanity. The protests go on.

Donald Trump has a bonkers theory on how to win the war in Ukraine

 https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/07/politics/donald-trump-ukraine-china-russia/index.html

Over the weekend, the former President provided a glimpse into how he may have handled on the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine -- and it is a doozy.

According to audio obtained by The Washington Post, Trump told a group of Republican donors in New Orleans that the United States should paint Chinese flags on its F-22 planes and then use those planes to bomb Russia.

"And then we say, 'China did it, we didn't do it, China did it,' and then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch," Trump concluded.

The Post reports that the Republican donor audience laughed when Trump proposed his "pretend-we're-the-Chinese" strategy. What's far less clear is whether Trump was actually joking.

Why Attacking ‘Cancel Culture’ And ‘Woke’ People Is Becoming The GOP’s New Political Strategy

 https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-attacking-cancel-culture-and-woke-people-is-becoming-the-gops-new-political-strategy/

But there is no agreed-upon definition of “woke” or a formal political organization or movement associated with it. Nor is there an exact definition of what constitutes being “canceled” or a victim of “cancel culture.” However, despite their vagueness, you now see conservative activists and Republican politicians constantly using these terms. That’s because that vagueness is a feature, not a bug. Casting a really wide range of ideas and policies as too woke and anyone who is critical of them as being canceled by out-of-control liberals is becoming an important strategy and tool on the right — in fact, this cancel culture/woke discourse could become the organizing idea of the post-Trump-presidency Republican Party.

“Wokeness is a problem and we all know it”

 https://www.vox.com/22338417/james-carville-democratic-party-biden-100-days

Take someone like Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s obviously very bright. She knows how to draw a headline. In my opinion, some of her political aspirations are impractical and probably not going to happen. But that’s probably the worst thing that you can say about her.

Now take someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the new Republican congresswoman from Georgia. She’s absolutely loonier than a tune. We all know it. And yet, for some reason, the Democrats pay a bigger political price for AOC than Republicans pay for Greene. That’s the problem in a nutshell. And it’s ridiculous because AOC and Greene are not comparable in any way.

Republicans are crusading against 'woke'

 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/republicans-are-crusading-against-woke-n1264811

Republicans, looking to dent President Joe Biden and win back Congress next year in part by rousing a voting base animated by culture war issues, have increasingly settled on a single word to describe what it is they stand against: "woke."

Conservatives en masse have blasted "woke" companies that spoke out against Republican-led voting restrictions — a move that publicly aligned much of corporate America with Democrats on the issue, even if many of the businesses stressed their beliefs that access to the ballot shouldn't be a partisan issue.

How US 'wokeness' became a right-wing cudgel around the world

 https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220301-how-us-wokeness-became-a-right-wing-cudgel-around-the-world

Once a rallying cry for Americans to be alert to racism, "wokeness" has become the political term of the hour, co-opted by culture warriors to denigrate "political correctness" and leftist orthodoxy."The radical left is trying to replace American democracy with woke tyranny," former US president Donald Trump told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida during his keynote speech Saturday.

Speaker after speaker at CPAC invoked rightwing betes noires from "cancel culture" to the policing of pronouns. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential hopeful, joined in the barrage of accusations, telling the crowd that "the woke is the new religion of the left."

The concept has metastasized from its US origins to penetrate the global body politic, from the English-speaking world to newsrooms, university boards and parliaments in Europe, Asia and South America.

Liz Cheney Blasts 'Putin Wing of the GOP' After Ret. Col. Macgregor's Zelensky Remarks

 https://www.newsweek.com/liz-cheney-blasts-putin-wing-gop-macgregor-zelensky-remarks-1685269

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) slammed Douglas Macgregor, describing him as part of the "Putin wing of the GOP" after he said Russian forces had initially been "too gentle" in Ukraine and he described Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a "puppet."

In an interview on Fox Business on Friday, Macgregor—a retired U.S. Army colonel who served under former President Donald Trump as senior adviser to then-Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller—also said he didn't "see anything heroic" about Zelensky.

The Netherlands: A country which refuses to admit its guilt toward the Jews

 https://www.jpost.com/opinion/op-ed-contributors/the-netherlands-a-country-which-refuses-to-admit-its-guilt-toward-the-jews-351234

However much the Dutch try to avoid it, this behavior is not forgotten. In February this year, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, wrote a letter to Dutch Deputy Prime Minister Lodewijk Asscher. The text focused on his request that the Dutch government investigate what caused almost 39 percent of the current Dutch adult population to accept the huge lie that Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.

Rabbi Cooper also wrote that it had been brought to his attention “that the Netherlands has neither admitted the negligence of its World War II government and the collaboration of the bureaucracy with German occupiers, nor offered any apologies. I believe the Netherlands is the only occupied country during the war where this is the case.” In his reply to the rabbi, Minister Asscher ignored this issue entirely.

Justice Delayed: How Britain Became A Refuge For Nazi War Criminals

 https://www.rcwlitagency.com/books/justice-delayed-how-britain-became-a-refuge-for-nazi-war-criminals/

Cesarani describes how the immigration policy of Clement Attlee's post-war government actually favoured Eastern Europeans over non-whites and Jewish Holocaust survivors. Despite protests from MPs Dick Crossman and Tom Driberg, former members of the Waffen-SS and Nazi police units made new lives in Britain. British intelligence recruited agents among them and sent many into the Eastern Bloc, where they were betrayed by Kim Philby. Only in 1986 did the Simon Wiesenthal Centre provide evidence that could not be ignored. The House of Lords defied the Commons in a last ditch effort to stop legislation which would permit war crime trials in Britain but on May 10, 1991, the war crimes bill was signed by The Queen. This authoritative book written by a former researcher for the All-Party Parliamentary War Crimes Group, brings together the whole extraordinary story, exposing the use made of Nazi collaborators by British intelligence, the post-war 'cover up' and provides in-depth background to the first war crimes trials in Britain for fifty years.

How British High Society Fell in Love With the Nazis

 https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-british-high-society-fell-in-love-with-the-nazis

“The British 'Establishment', including key figures in the aristocracy, the press were keen supporters of Hitler up until the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Few were supporters of Nazism, but they admired Hitler and felt he offered the best means of preventing the spread of communism. They tended to turn a blind eye to anti-Semitism and the attacks Hitler made on communists, socialists, and other internal opponents.”

It's time to confront the dark postscript to America's role in defeating the Nazis

 https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/24/opinions/dark-postscript-america-nazis-golinkin/index.html

America's been a haven for thousands of Nazis and Nazi collaborators who served in concentration camps and death squads and SS units. Several were even leaders of Nazi-allied governments. And we didn't merely take them in -- in some cases, we welcomed and protected them; we kept them safe from justice. It's far past time we acknowledged it.

Besides the obvious ethical reasons for historical honesty, there are also social ones. We're in the middle of a heated national conversation fueled by a hunger for racial justice. But how can we hope to acknowledge the impact of centuries-old institutions like slavery and Jim Crow when we can't be honest about coddling perpetrators of the Holocaust, which still has living eyewitnesses, victims and veterans? We can't get to 1619 if we can't get past 1945.

COLLABORATION

 https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/collaboration

German authorities required the assistance of the Axis nations and of local collaborators in the regions they occupied to implement the "Final Solution." Collaborators committed some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust era.

Franco, Nazi Collaborator

 https://albavolunteer.org/2013/06/franco-nazi-collaborator/

After World War II, the Franco regime succeeded in whitewashing its close ties to Nazi Germany—which had helped Franco win the Civil War, and which continued to be Spain’s closest ally in the years immediately following. After 1945, Franco presented himself not merely as the anti-Communist “Sentinel of the West,” but also as a cunning statesman who had managed to keep Spain out of the war (when in fact he had aspired to join the Axis) and, most notably, as a savior of thousands of European Jews from extermination.