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tv   Up Front 2020 Ep 7  Al Jazeera  March 15, 2020 7:32am-8:01am +03

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contain the corona virus outbreak there it's 12000000 residents have been told they should only leave home for work and emergencies for the next month the philippines has reported 8 deaths and 111 infections so far. sunday marks a year since $51.00 worshippers were killed at 2 mosques in new zealand special prayers were held on friday and flowers have been laid outside the mosque in the city of christchurch coronavirus has forced the cancellation of the main memorial service sat was planned an australian man is due to go on trial in june charged with terrorism murder and attempted that those are the headlines on al-jazeera as always much more news on our web site al jazeera dot com outfront is up next. what's behind the recent tensions between pakistan and india we've given them the opportunity to. but not realize it's focused politics it's the new book while the loss of freedom is still the foreign minister show. talks to
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al-jazeera. today on the front it's now officially a pandemic so how do you stop the spread of the corona virus and a year on from the massacre of muslims in christchurch how big is the threat from white nationalism. the corona virus has now hit every continent except antarctica on wednesday the world health organization officially declared it a pandemic so how do we stop it to discuss this i'm joined by eric feingold doing an epidemiologist and visiting scientist at harvard health economist and senior fellow at the federation of american scientists eric thanks for being on the show very rarely do we have a story like this that affects every corner of the world all of our viewers
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watching out front on almost every continent there's a tendency when we talk about story this big for some people to say you know what you guys are overplaying you're overstating your hyping it up the media is exaggerating and sensationalising what do you say to them i think there's absolutely no hype to this because we've been saying for a long time we've been telling w.h.o. you need to clear a public health emergency over a month and a half ago they drag their feet for several weeks it is just literally gone bonkers exponentially worldwide some people of the worried and i guess we're going to see it play out now that if you call it a pandemic it causes more panic it further hits market it may stigmatize certain people from certain countries that was the argument i mean i think the w.h.o. was even accused of exaggerating the 2009 swine flu like calling it a pandemic and those arguments are all dead they're basically completely water on the bridge because it's not that there's a stigma of where you're from
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a pandemic literally means is worldwide there's almost equal risk. infecting and in danger in every single country in the world so you mentioned kind of global the global context worldwide lips it to harvard university happy to be able to you professor has been heavily quoted after saying i think he's revised numbers down but he originally said he thought 40 to 70 percent of the world's population could end up being infected with covert 19 as it's known. in the next 12 months now whatever we argue about what the fatality rate is is it one percent 2 percent 3 percent less than one that's a huge number of people globally can you try to explain it is any kind of comparison analogy that we can make for that number of people to be infected yeah so that number he clarified is now for adults but still a lot of it is incredible out of people you know and there are other people who basically you know angela merkel also came out with 70 percent of germany in the coming months as well this number is sound large but it is actually foreseeable if
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we don't do any containment in mitigation this is if we just let the virus roam around and be and do what the british prime minister burrows johnson suggested recently i know not terrible and there are some traders and then you. know maybe everyone should get infected over the next month so it doesn't crash the market which is incredibly incredibly callous as a lot of people would die yeah it's called death and and you know 20 percent of people have mild a mild this means still fever and you know a lot of coughing but 20 percent need hospitalization and of that 20 percent 5 percent actually need i.c.u. just for the people watching at home maybe i'm being followed this closely maybe of listen to a certain president united states and say. thousands of people die from the flu every year why is this any defeat is not just the flu and the anyone who says so is completely looting themselves in danger because aid we have half of you already have some partial immunity to flu this is a brand new virus no one has immunity there is
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a vaccine that works most of the time for the most strains of the flu there is no vaccine on the horizon they were here years ago here there's anti-viral drugs tamiflu for the flu there is no anti-viral drugs yet that's proven for this and it's almost 2 times or 3 times as infectious and more importantly this virus can spread a symptomatically which is you don't know you have a yes no you don't know you have and you can spread it even when you don't know you have it it's when you have no symptoms and this is completely different from the previous sars so you wouldn't have it here at this table theoretically cigarillo 6 feet but no one shaking at the end but here's a question to you on the kind of mitigation and containment you mention the global what you do about it you don't get it past that or you take steps we're now seeing governments take varying degrees of steps so the chinese government going pretty early on in the u.s. government the president is playing golf not many tests have been done for quite a big population a big country in between you may have south korea for example which had
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a real problem but is seeing according to a lot of experts a lot of success yet bringing down numbers people even starting to use of containment when you look at the global picture. taken globally and it's hard to do how well do you think the world is doing and pushing back against the i think the world collectively is doing a be mine a c. plus for again there is a wide variation i think testing korea is absolutely a gold standard but testing the united states is absolutely abysmal and finally we have that enough kits but they basically said we have other than other problem we have we don't have enough regions and chemicals to actually extract the samples so we can run the tests and another roadblock potentially for america actually getting a handle on this virus and america many other countries. are literally in the dark and taking the ostrich approach in the so when you look at the introduction of just got some numbers here from as of march the 8th you got south korea would 3 and a half 1000 tests per 1000000 you got the u.k. would 350 tests per 1000000 people pretty bad for the u.k.
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comparatively and then you had the us with 5 tests 1000000 people number one how do you explain that discrepancy number to what kind of knock on effects as a half of one country is doing well but one's not absolute this is a serious problem u.s. is 730 times below south korea because south korea levant it's a lot of areas aren't rich south korea the size of maine population the west coast pacific states south korea literally has put all their national resources and has central core nature they run $15000.00 tests a day they've got drive through they're striving to america only as drive through in one location in seattle and because a lot of drive their restaurants and that's a restaurant that contributes a different type of morbidity but the issue here is the amount of testing without testing you need to testing to do contract tracing who are in contact to locking down isolation and that's why without that testing and the investigative team what
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work you cannot contain is epidemic when you look at whether it's prime minister burroughs johnson saying maybe we should let it go through lots of hands or donald trump playing golf saying i don't need to get tested and my opponents are treating this new hoax for my opponent. did these people potentially have blood on their hands i think so. because of their religion because boris johnson's own health minister already came down with code 19 the fact that you're neglecting the testing and us had frozen testing for 22 and a half weeks that is almost 3 tough old higher multiplication is that in terms of cancers if you fall into the epidemic there are people dead who might be alive had the government handled it different in the last 6 weeks i am pretty confident that is the case well because the u.s. literally we've lost 3 cycles of multiplications would probably 8 x. higher than our epidemic should have been had we had. for the u.s. the u.k. other european countries which seem to be slower than the chinese the japanese
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south koreans is it time to turn it around or is it too late i think there are pockets in which the united states this epidemic is not every single corner and yet some pockets like seattle has already run away infection potentially new york as well in l.a. but there the rest of the country there are still opportunities to prevent it from being a 50 state issue and how much do we change our lifestyles because in china they you know some scientists in the west are saying well the chinese are showing the way with a kind of dictatorship model you do need to crackdown on people's civil liberties and freedoms in order to fight this do you share that view unfortunately i think in certain ways you have to do extreme social distancing at least a minimum like all the sports games public venues but drac kone in this of china i don't know they could they have the war on lockdown but they also have a residential lock on for 750000000 people when you take off and when you say extreme social this is at the moment still voluntary please don't go to this place please stay at home please if you say where does the government step in and say you
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know what you're not allowed to do that we won't allow you to have gatherings of the other 52 are we going to get to that point even in kind of quote unquote small some small cities or municipalities they already did that for example south by southwest the organizers in cancer. austin declare an emergency and worse in the cancel we might have to do that if if literally they refused to cancel people who had thought that in the west and particularly at all about i don't 3 dylan government doesn't tell me what to do i don't think people have hit the reality of how bad this will be but when the reality hits and people realize it might be too late how bad will it be we're about probably 3 or weeks behind potentially italy right now in the us i think it will be really bad because the us is very very poor ratings in terms of hospital beds per capita especially compared to many european and asian countries i think it will get really bad and we will overwhelm our i.c.u. capacity this is why we have to flatten the curve until below the capacity of our
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hospitals but right without testing and containment the epidemic will way exceed our curve and that is when mortality will happen and people watching at home run the world we hear the advice wash your hands keep your distance is there any other advice that you would give someone who's following this closely. keep to the containment containment is really key keep to the quarantines you know also avoid public spaces and try to really really distance yourself because washing hands is only as good as how far you are from how many contacts you are exposed to i think at this time we have to focus on self isolation we have to leave it there eric feigele doing thanks so much for joining us on outfront. it's been a year since the deadliest mass shooting in new zealand history when
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a white supremacist opened fire on 2 mosques in christ church killing $51.00 muslim worshippers and injuring dozens of others since then across the world we've seen stabbings shootings the bombing of mosques and attacks on synagogues just recently a racist attack killed 9 people in germany and the police officer in the u.k. was arrested on suspicion of terror related offenses so how severe is the threat from white nationalists violence and can it be stopped joining me now to discuss this are cynthia military dreams senior fellow at the center for analysis of the radical right and author of the forthcoming book hate in the homeland the new breeding grounds for far right extremism and christian preacher leni a former neo nazi who now campaigns against the far right and is author of the book breaking hate confronting the new culture of extremism thank you both for joining me on front a year ago this week a white nationalist government massacred 51 muslims in christchurch new zealand shocking the world in the process question to both of you starting with you said
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this how shocked were you. i was shocked but not surprised i think is the best way to put it i think it wasn't at all surprising but of course it was shocking and yet horrifying and there were many dimensions of that which were different from previous kinds of attacks like the live streaming that kind of added that awful performance to you know an already horrific attack and christian you've been obviously talking about this immersed in this world for many decades you've been sounding the alarm bell you would have had conversations about this in the past as well how surprised were you you know the news came out of new zealand i mean i think like cindy i was also surprised but horrified because it really did change the game you know the level of violence the number of people killed the way it was live stream in the way that it had connections transnational and hose connected to other countries other organizations with the white supremacist movement i think was was really shocking just briefly on part about for viewers in what way was that connect to transnational because we often talk about domestic terrorism implying
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it's just local but it's not you know known facts those alliances overseas have been forged for decades when i was involved in the white supremacist movement in the u.s. from 87 to 96 we were already forging those connections in places like germany so i think that it's ramping up i think that these connections overseas are starting to get more violent since it how much does new zealand teach as we know we had a manifesto we know like a lot of other people but does brave it the killer in norway almost a decade ago is a kind of inspiration to all of these people we often talk and we've talked on this show about kind of isis recruits going online connecting with recruiters or groups in syria how much of that could we mirror to the white nationalist a white supremacist movement i think in many ways they're very similar and i think that christchurch was a wake up call for a lot of people around the world in governments who were had been thinking of these as either kind of french subcultural problematic groups of youth or really purely domestic problems and it also shows how in many ways it does mirror some of the
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strategies that have been used by islamist groups. i think people are realizing that these manifestos the last couple of tax in germany either the live streaming on the manifestos were in english for a reason right these were not domestic german attacks they were it to any they were but they were designed to communicate to a larger audience and trying to speak to people outside of the country so christened you but should because of how it goes back even decades it was even when you were in the movement there was global links but you of course joined the white nationalist group of the neo nazi groups in the late eighties i believe and you were 14 years old 14 how much has changed since when you look at the groups today and the groups you're studying today and some of the people with hearing about today in the u.s. and beyond how different is the scene today than it was in the eighty's you know instead of glee it's a lot different you know it was important for us when we were a fringe movement to be seen to terrorize people with the way we look the patterns we wore the flags we waved but because of the law enforcement infiltration it became existential to that movement to hide to not be noticed and not be seen so i
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call it this kind of boots to suits movement where they've ditched the be a static of what i used to look like 30 years ago and moved into looking more like you know the politician david duke was really one of the 1st people to do that when he got rid of the klan robe and put on a 3 piece suit of a politician and i was elected if i want to spend saturday her nerves either way far right activists in the us cynthia here's a question to what boots to suit is partly to do with law enforcement infiltration but also how much of that is to do with the fact that the ideology if we can call it that has been mainstream in a way that for example you know the ice is ideology just by definition can't be mainstream whereas right now in the u.s. for example you have members of the governing political party that sitting on panels with these people taking money from these people saying nice things about these people very fine people i seem to remember i reraise you absolutely have seen a mainstreaming into ways that i think are really important for how this has helped
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the public find these ideas more except about. or just less offensive them they are less likely to raise the alarm about it one is that you do see mainstream politicians here and overseas echoing the same kind of anti immigrant islamophobia against us a medic kinds of ideas or conspiracy theories that's really important to understand that went that sort of legitimizes but then we also see this static mainstreaming and i think that's a big transition from one question 1st came in that you're you're not seeing the kind of the shaved heads in the bomber jackets and the combat boots at the same time these are you know the khakis in the polo shirts and they look much more like the guys next door than the guys in the area and i don't you would commit to q 2 which isn't right exactly i'm so that's much harder to recognize when you when you have that kind of aesthetic package people think like oh that those ideas might not be as dangerous from for example where you have marine le pen who is now a leading candidate for the presidency came 2nd last time round in the u.s. you have donald trump in the white house you see i think the new zealand shooter
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called him quote a symbol of renewed white identity in his manifesto do these leaders is what i'm wondering is is that indifferent that they're in denial about what's going on within their own lives when these quote unquote trump who is a quote a good mainstream conservative father over the body or is it that they're actively in cahoots with them and insight to them and see them as part their base i think what we see across the board is that there's a legitimation of these kinds of ideas and words in ways that you know rally the troops that get people you know to come on board to get people to come out for votes that. get a lot of energy behind these kinds of political movements and so i think you know it's hard to say what to do to distinguish between intention and impact but i think what's really important is to pay attention to the impact and in a way it's matters whether that whether this is there's a tension there about what matters more from my 1st perspective is is what the impact and if these people feel legitimize it in like they can just walk around in public or an act of violence that is a problem and question do you think there is
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a connection do you all people in. group actually paying attention to the words of politicians and kind of drawing inspiration from the i think the fear rhetoric that's being put out is affecting these people who are unstable listen we are all imagine stable people sitting around this table and we are uncertain right now we're having a hard time with this society imagine the people who are unstable who are really struggling with what's happening and the words of a politician might make them so afraid that they feel they need to walk into a mosque and murdered 51 people because that's the reality that there are let me ask you a question because we often kind of even when we're talking about the kind of quote unquote islamist scene in the jihadist scene we often do a kind of conflation between you know people who believe in extreme things and people who carry out acts of violence not always the same thing clearly the guy needed to go and murder that many people something has to be wrong with which i kind of medically diagnose him but you say unstable let me ask you this are you saying everyone who joins one of these groups can be described as unstable or are
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they quote unquote normal people who have kind of gone off the you yourself as a very young man joined this group and stayed in it became one of the leaders of i mean of your group what was motivating you cannot you know i felt abandoned by my parents growing up my parents are telling immigrants who came to the u.s. in the mid sixty's and had to work 14 hours a day 7 days a week so i grew up not knowing why they were around and not being mature enough to ask so i went looking for a family elsewhere i think the misnomer is that people think that others join newsgroups because of ideology so only nobody is born a racist the nazi a you know islamic state supporter. they find their way because they're searching for identity community and purpose and if we're talking about unstable i think that they're hitting what i call potholes in their life's journey and sometimes it could be mental illness it could be poverty could be even privilege that might keep us so separate from society that it makes us afraid but in most cases it is trauma that is somehow pushing people to the fringes where these narratives live so that you
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agree with that it's about stronger in the polls or less about the ideology yeah. i mean the way i have been thinking about this is that you know for so long we've thought about terrorism or extremism as if it's a tumor a few bad cells that we can cut out of society and eradicate but if you think of it it's hard to say this at this moment but as a virus you know if you think of it as a virus instead that can infect people you have to think about what are the vulnerabilities that people have to that virus and there are many vulnerabilities and one might be mental illness but also a sense of isolation lack of belonging a desire for purpose desired and that meaning is when i hear you describe what i had to what paul's on the show we've had a lot of discussions about we've done a many many shows and many many puddles we've had people like mark's ajman former. f.b.i. guy we've scott who studies quote unquote jobs and they all say what you say about the quote unquote job is they say looking for purpose and meaning you know isolated trauma again i'm i wrong to draw parallels between people who radicalize and joined
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this enjoy the not wrong this is absolutely the parallel that we should be drawing and actually we can i think learn in many cases from what went wrong in terms of responding to vulnerable used for and terms of isis and islamist recruitment for responding to memorable use on this site and you know on the kind of on the side of white supremacist i think the mistake sometimes we make is by labeling by it by pointing to mental illness when it's white men who are the shooters you know are the attackers as as being driven by mental illness instead of really a muslim or never get to be mentally ill very ill these acts and let me be clear about the mental illness it's the isolation it's the bullying it's the inability in some cases to have those intimate relationships that pushes people to the friends i mean certainly there are millions of people with mental illness that never become i want to come about to the kind of parallel between the kind of muslim white nationalist thing but before i do just very quickly one thing we notice about a lot of these people whether actually whether they're kind of a quote unquote support to henri or a neo nazi is what if you look into the backgrounds of these people in the media starts going through their life you fall into kind of spouse or go for some history
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of domestic violence is what you. what it was so it didn't seem to be a streak and it's such an important question and it's one of these things that we're just starting to disentangle i feel like both a history of domestic violence and a broader massaging and then now this increasing awareness that the whole in cell movement is a part of the white supremacist and far right spectrum or at least has intersections with it in a way and i think it's one of the reasons why we are not seeing interventions that address these issues of belonging is because we have to also address issues of masculinity and what it means to be a man in the society what it means to enact purpose if you want to engage with heroism how can we you know channel that heroic impulse into something more positive about rescuing people humanitarian mission let's say instead of you know restoring your white civilization which you listen i think we've taught generations of men not to feel not the show emotion to fit the certain mold of who they are and i think of that's a white male problem that's been put on white males too so i think that we have
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a lot of work to do the massaging me that exists i think is really due in certain cases to the uncertainty that exists in these people's lives the fact that they're driven by ego but that they are not equipped to really understand how to work with a what do you do about well you know i try and build the resilience and i try and fill those potholes that i taught us to find the right if to identify who these vulnerable individuals oh yeah and they find me i actually don't go out and find anybody because if i had to do that i would be so overwhelmed the amount of people that work with them working with hundreds of people that reach out to me on a daily basis i have somebody new reaching out to me every day there are some people who look just you but they look at some of the muslim groups who are working with the british government or the american government in what's called the c.v. field accounting violence terms of it and they say you know there's no proof that any of this stuff works where the kind of empirical evidence that you kind of quote unquote do you radicalize someone what do you say to them i would say that does work if the resources are there and the resources just are not here right now in the united states but i also think that certain c.b.e.
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programs are making a mistake by thinking they can see. solve the ideology by tackling that specifically rather than the underlying heart holes that are really between people there do you think with the resources that can be done because in the in the field of kind of counter. very mixed results a lot of criticism of a lot of government funded programs can you do radicalize some of the way whether they're a quote unquote job just or a neo nazi i think some of what we need is much earlier intervention and clear outcomes for what we're looking for so if you're looking at you know in an occupation approach to a public health crisis you're talking about 11 year olds who need to be taught you know how to avoid you know how to respond to media this information or propaganda or white supremacist ideology when they encounter in gaming for example which 23 percent of them do encounter as we know from the statistics so you know when you're looking at how you prepare people before they even encounter this stuff on line then i think you can really easily develop measures that will show us whether effective so one thing i remember reading from mark sage when who's written
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a lot about this study like these guys and what the cia he said look at the end of the day we've done all this research since 911 when this whole kind of terrorism extremism industry kind of gets going and yet after all these years and all these acts of violence we still don't know what it is that spock's going from having the ideology and marching with the flags and saying horrible things to actually walking into 2 mosques and gunning down 51 people in cold blood absolutely i think the one thing we do know is that the more people you have moving into the extremist fringe the more likely you're going to have to have someone at the far extremist french who's going to become violent and so when we have more and more people accepting this in the mainstream moving into a being recruited radicalized exposed on line there is no way we're not going to see additional violence sincere christian will have to leave it there thank you for joining me in the arena show up front will be back next week.
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the shocking treatment of disabled people in eastern european state run caverns in these cages who cannot have access to a toilet or water and the bureaucratic indifference to their plight she has his hands and his fates tied to the bed 5 years after fast highlighting such abuses people in power returns with a 2 part investigation to continuing mistreatment and neglect europe's recurring shame hard won on al-jazeera. was.
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was. moved. to australia becomes a latest country to impose strict strabo restrictions to stop the spread of coronavirus ordering all international arrivals seem to isolation. play watching al-jazeera live from doha with the fully back t. ball also ahead. the president has made a decision to suspend all travel to the united kingdom and ireland no more an exemption say u.s. brought into this european travel ban to stop the spread of coronavirus spain prime minister meanwhile of course a spread of the virus quizes out with quiet extraordinary.

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