US targeting of Nigeria: Is it really about terrorist problem or is America fearful of Africa’s first superpower emerging?

Darius Shahtahmasebi

Darius Shahtahmasebi is a New Zealand-based legal and political analyst who focuses on US foreign policy in the Middle East, Asia and Pacific region. He is fully qualified as a lawyer in two international jurisdictions.

His writing has appeared in VICE, Newsweek, Stuff.co.nz, the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), the Strategic Culture Foundation, the Express Tribune, Truthout, Counterpunch, and the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, to name but a few.

30 Jan, 2020 16:21

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© Getty Images / Construction Photography / Avalon / Anadolu Agency 

The US is punishing Nigeria amid a current humanitarian crisis where the West African nation is grappling with a violent terrorist problem in the form of Boko Haram; a terrorist entity that the US indirectly helped rise to power.

The Trump administration is considering expanding its travel ban to include five more countries, including Nigeria. While there is opposition to the plan, it is still unclear to what extent this ban will go, as it may only target certain government officials, or certain types of visas.

As the media notes, Nigeria works together with the US in areas such as counter-terrorism and the intention came as a surprise to the Nigerian government, who will have to look for ways its officials can meet with investors.

It is therefore difficult to discern the official reason that has led the US to consider adding countries like Nigeria onto its hit-list, though a White House spokesman has defended the travel ban by saying it “has been profoundly successful in protecting our country and raising the security baseline around the world.”

As far as Nigeria is concerned, Trump did once say that if Nigerians came to the US, they will never “go back to their huts” in Africa.

Furthermore, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has been making it incredibly difficult for vital humanitarian aid to reach Nigeria over the past year. A relatively new clause in all grant contracts now requires the recipient agencies to have approval of a USAID Agreement Officer in advance “to individuals whom the Recipient affirmatively knows to have been formerly affiliated with Boko Haram” or Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), as combatants or non-combatants.

Families displaced by the Boko Haram insurgency line up for food being distributed by International Medical Corps in northeast Nigeria's Borno state on January 29, 2018 in Maiduguri, Nigeria. © Getty Images / International Medical Corps / Margaret Traub

This restriction goes against the core principles that govern humanitarian aid, one of which states that aid must be provided on need and can’t be influenced by other considerations. I’m reminded of an episode of Boston Legal in which a humanitarian-aid worker, charged as a terrorist and held at Guantanamo Bay, says under cross examination “When you’re trying to do aid work in a Taliban-controlled area, deals have to be made.”

The US appears to be targeting Nigeria in more ways than one, though this latter development has not been highlighted by the mainstream media. So are these latest moves simply due to Trump’s profoundly racist remarks, or is there something else at play here?

Hitting Nigeria where it hurts

Nigeria is facing one of the world’s gravest humanitarian crises as a result of a conflict which has dragged out for approximately ten years. As a result of the relentless violence perpetrated by the terror outfit known as Boko Haram, 7.1 million people are in need of life-saving assistance, and 1.8 million people have been uprooted from their homes (the majority of whom are women and children). 

In total, the conflict in Nigeria has killed at least 27,000 civilians. Even as I type, communities in the West African nation are still being targeted by violent attacks.

Nigeria was already struggling with a pending humanitarian crisis before the conflict erupted over ten years ago. Six states in north east Nigeria were already lagging behind the rest of the country in terms of their socioeconomic development. The situation affecting these states now has been described as “famine-like.”

According to the UN, insecurity in parts of Nigeria has played a major role in the reduction of humanitarian aid. Essentially, the new USAID requirements are making an already delicate situation even worse. For those of you who are unsure about this as a conclusion, consider that humanitarian funding to southern Somalia dropped by 88 percent from 2008 to 2010 after the US added Al-Shabaab to its designated terror group list, criminalizing the provision of anything that might be considered material support. As far as we can see, once the US puts restrictions on humanitarian aid that go against the very principles guiding the flow of humanitarian aid, we can expect to see less and less of it.

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The US role in the Nigerian situation

One could argue that the effect US foreign policy has on ordinary Nigerians is an unintended consequence of America’s reluctant duty as the world’s superpower police force to strangle and eradicate terrorism throughout the African continent. Though, this assertion would have to be tested against the available evidence, particularly when it comes to the US’ role in the region.

Nigeria’s deadly terror group Boko Haram was not always the fully-fledged menace it is today. It was only after a major US-NATO venture in North Africa that terror groups such as Boko Haram began to thrive.

After the US toppled Muammar Gaddafi’s leadership in Libya, his armories were looted and the proceeds were spread rampantly across the country. In an article published by The Week entitled ‘Who’s financing Boko Haram?’ Peter Weber noted that Boko Haram’s weapons “have shifted from relatively cheap AK-47s in the early days of its post-2009 embrace of violence to desert-ready combat vehicles and anti-aircraft/anti-tank guns.” A UN report conducted in early 2012 that the weapons Boko Haram was starting to acquire were being smuggled from Libya.

Statistically, the terror group is now far more deadly than the terror network IS. As secretary of state under the Obama administration, it was Hillary Clinton who repeatedly refused to place Boko Haram on the US official list of terror organizations, despite the fact that the CIA, the FBI and the Justice Department requested her State Department to do so multiple times.

When taken at face value, it makes little sense for the US to punish a country facing a crisis that the powers-that-be in Washington contributed to quite significantly. But what else have we come to expect from a country that allegedly closely works with Al-Qaeda, even to this day?

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Why target Nigeria?

We can never know for sure the reasons that Nigeria is in the crosshairs of the US foreign policy establishment, but we can always speculate based on what we know about the West African nation and the overarching geostrategic concerns that typically govern US foreign policy.

Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer and its largest economy, beating out South Africa for the top spot. Despite the many real issues plaguing the country, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has already projected that its gross domestic product could expand by 2.5 percent this year.

Its population is growing more than twice the speed of the world average and in just a few decades it will surpass that of the US. Whether or not this will be a positive development for the country remains to be seen, but the nation is showing a lot of signs that lead to countries like China and India outputting rapid economic growth over the last few years.

Nigeria’s largest export is no longer oil, but its people, who have sent back home roughly $40 billion in remittances. While Trump is picturing people from “shit-hole countries” exploiting the West and refusing to return to their “huts,” these people also obtain advanced qualifications and have spent half a billion dollars per year in the process.

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To put it simply, Nigeria has the potential to become Africa's first superpower. If there’s one thing the last few decades has taught us, it’s that the US hates to see African nations developing on their own accord. If you examine the reasons why the US targeted Libya for regime change and turned it into a failed state in the first place, it will become apparent that having strong, financially dependent countries in this region is not an option for the US war machine. Combine Nigeria’s potential for success and its close relations with US economic foes like China and what we have is a regime-change accident waiting to happen.

Of course, the US can turn up the pressure incrementally, beginning with travel bans and bans on humanitarian aid rather than resorting to an all-out war to contain its future rivals.

But what happens if Nigeria begins to copycat China’s economic success over the next few decades and develops closer relations with American adversaries. Will we continue to see an increased US military presence in Nigeria, and to what end?

My bet is that if the US has its way – and given the measures the US has recently taken – Nigeria will continue to struggle with issues like terrorism and poverty for years to come.  

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

The Mussolini-Jabotinsky Connection: The Hidden Roots of Israel Fascist Past

Ramzy Baroud

Romana Rubeo

It is hardly surprising that Italian opposition leader, Matteo Salvini, has vowed that if he becomes Italy’s next Prime Minister, he will recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Salvini heads Italy’s Lega Party, formerly known as Lega Nord – Northern League – a party that has long been perceived as a modern expression of the country’s long-dormant fascist ideology.

Salvini’s track record of pro-Israel statements and blind allegiance to Tel Aviv is as old as the man’s political career. The fact that Salvini made his political debut at a national level through an announcement made, not from Rome, but rather from Tel Aviv, is sufficient to express the centrality of Israel in his political discourse.

Moreover, Salvini is the golden child of  Italy’s far-right politics as a whole. Considering Lega’s performance in the May 2019 European elections, one could argue that the Italian politician is Europe’s most important far-right leader.

It is no secret that Israel has openly aligned its politics with that of the ascending far-right political movements everywhere, especially in the West. This applies to the Israel-India alliance as much as it applies to Israel’s disturbing ties to the US Trump administration, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, and the Tories-dominated British government.

Israel’s links to Italy, however, deserve further probing, and should not be lumped together with Tel Aviv’s growing political intimacy with the global far-right. The reason for that is that Italy was the originator of the modern fascist ideologies, which are linked directly to Israel’s Zionist ideology.

READ: On Holocaust Memorial Day, remember too that the Nakba is an indelible part of Israel’s history 

In the post-World War II era, Italy successfully managed to suppress the fascist political strand from within, starting with the last two years of the war when Rome joined the global push against the Nazi-fascist alliance. Italy’s post-war constitution has gone to great lengths to confront any form of fascism that continued to lurk within Italian society.

It was only natural, then, that on many occasions, the revolutionary forces that had a tremendous impact on shaping the Italian political discourse after the war found common ground with the Palestinian quest for freedom and the Palestinian people’s ongoing fight against Zionism and its reactionary allies anywhere in the world.

Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. As the truly radical left in Italy persists in its political hibernation – a process that began soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s – far-right forces have made great strides, allowing in recent years, the likes of Salvini and his racist hoards to return to the political arena. Expectedly, Salvini’s ascendency began paving the road for restoring a long-dormant neo-Zionist-fascist alliance.

Concurrently, the rise of far-right forces in Italy is forcing all political parties in the country’s parliament to redefine their own political agendas by inching closer to the right in a desperate attempt to appeal to the emboldened far-right constituency.

Pro-Israel Zionist groups, in Italy and elsewhere, are now exploiting the country’s fractious political scene to advance Tel Aviv’s global agenda.

On January 17, the Italian government unanimously adopted the erroneous and self-serving definition of antisemitism, as envisaged by the pro-Israel International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which equates antisemitism with anti-zionism.

The troubling “working definition” has little to do with racism and everything with politics, since Zionism is a modern political ideology, and is neither a race nor a religion. An Italian equivalent of this bizarre undertaking would be equating antifascism and anti-Italian or anti-Catholic sentiment. If this sounds odd in the Italian context, it should sound equally strange in the Zionist-Israeli context.

Read: Israel approves travel to Saudi under limited circumstances

However, this apparent oddity makes perfect sense when analysed within a historiographical context.

Anti-Zionism critics often describe the Zionist movement as fascist. This seemingly haphazard analogy is fully justifiable on historical grounds.

Indeed, what many are not aware of is that, during their formative years, Zionist and Fascist ideologies, had similar intellectual roots and numerous overlappings in terms of their philosophical and political structures. Some of the founding fathers of Zionism, especially revisionist Zionists, regarded themselves as ideological fascists, and their progression from Fascism to Zionism was a logical one, necessitated by political expediency only.

Italian opposition leader, Matteo Salvini on 18 January 2019 in Afragola, Italy [Ivan Romano Getty Images]

Before the opportunistic alliance between Germany’s Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, and Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, in 1936, resulting in Italy’s infamous racial laws, a degree of affinity existed between Zionist and Fascist leaders in Rome.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, of which Israel’s current Likud party and other right and far-right groups are the offspring, saw in Italy “a spiritual homeland”.

“All my views on nationalism, the state, and society were developed during those years under Italian influence,” Jabotinsky wrote in his autobiography, referring to his ideological formation years in Italy.

In return, Mussolini had expressly spoken in support of Zionism and of Jabotinsky in particular: “For Zionism to succeed, you need to have a Jewish State with a Jewish flag, and Jewish language. The person who understands that is your fascist, Jabotinsky,” Mussolini said during a private conversation with Nahum Goldman, founder of the World Jewish Congress, in November 1934, as reported by Lenni Brenner in his volume ‘Zionism in the Age of Dictators’.

Il Duce – the fascist reference to Mussolini, which translates to “The Leader” – had already allied with Jabotinsky’s Betar youth movement, which modelled itself around fascist ideas and symbols.

“By 1934, Jabotinsky and his Betar youth movement had allied with Il Duce, when the Betar established a naval base north of Rome,” Steven Meyer wrote in his article ‘Will Israel outlive its fascists?’, published in the Executive Intelligence Review in 2002.

Meyer elaborates: ‘L’Idea Sionistica, Betar’s Italian-language magazine, described the dedication ceremonies which launched the academy: ‘The order-’Attention!’ A triple chant ordered by the squad’s commanding officer – ‘Viva l’Italia, Viva Il Re! Viva Il Duce!’, resounded, followed by the benediction which rabbi Aldo Lattes invoked in Italian and in Hebrew for God, for the King and for Il Duce… ‘Giovinezza’ [the fascist party’s anthem] was sung with much enthusiasm by the Betarim.’

This account is confirmed in other sources, including by Italian historian, Furio Biagini’s Mussolini e il Sionismo – “Mussolini and Zionism”. Biagini argues that “in principle, Mussolini wasn’t against Jews’ aspiration to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine.”

READ: Charles’ words on Palestine must not go unnoticed 

Biagini also explained the budding Fascist-Zionist alliance based on geostrategic necessity,

“In its expansionistic design throughout the Mediterranean region, fascist Italy was in direct contrast with the British presence. The British fleet dominated the Mediterranean region from Gibraltar to Cyprus, unto Palestine. By supporting the Zionist movement in its fight against British Mandatory power, Italy wanted to weaken the British empire in the Eastern Mediterranean, while increasing Italian prestige at an international level.”

In truth, Jabotinsky was not Mussolini’s only link to Zionism, but one of many important allies who proved consequential in later years. Goldman wrote in his autobiography “The Autobiography of Nahum Goldman: Sixty Years of Jewish Life”  that Mussolini was a great admirer of Zionism.

“You must create a Jewish state. I am a Zionist, and I told Dr Weizmann so. You must have a real country, not that ridiculous National Home that the British have offered you. I will help you create a Jewish state,” Goldmann wrote, conveying Mussolini’s message to the Zionist leadership at the time.

Mussolini’s enthusiasm to establish a “Jewish state” paralleled the British plot to turn the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which committed the British crown to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

In October 1933, the head of the Jewish Agency in Geneva, Victor Jacobson, wrote to Chaim Weizmann, who served as the President of the World Zionist Organization, and later as the first President of Israel, that, “Mussolini is eager to open even wider the doors of Palestine to Jewish immigration, particularly to the refugees coming from Germany”.

In his afterword to the book, “Stato e Libertà” – State and Freedom –  Italian diplomat Sergio Minerbi wrote: “Mussolini thought that it was impossible to reconcile Jews and Arabs and that they had to be politically separated, so he floated the idea of the partition of Palestine”.

Read: The annexation of the West Bank is coming

All of this changed in 1936 when Mussolini’s son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, was appointed as Italy’s foreign minister. It was then that “Mussolini allied Italy unequivocably with Hitler,” as Susan Zuccotti wrote in her book ‘The Italians and the Holocaust’. Italy’s fascist party was then compelled to part ways with the Zionist leadership, leading to Mussolini’s decision not to meet with Jabotinsky.

Following the triumph of the Zionist movement, crowned in the establishment of Israel on the ruins of historic Palestine in May 1948, Zionists have, once again, successfully managed to rebrand their movement as a progressive force, though it never truly abandoned its fascist ideology.

The Nation-state law of July 2018, which defines Israel as an ethnic-racial state was one of many proofs that Israel remains, until this day, fully committed to Fascism.

To say that Zionism is a form of fascism is neither an overstatement or a haphazard claim. Indeed, the root causes of both ideologies should be apparent to any astute student of history.

The fact that Salvini and Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, are now renewing or, at least, openly embracing the old bond between these two destructive ideologies, reflects two troubling realities – on the one hand, it speaks of Italy’s failure to uproot Fascism as a political model following World War II, and, on the other hand, the true ideological basis of Zionism, thus the State of Israel itself.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200127-the-mussolini-jabotinsky-connection-the-hidden-roots-of-israel-fascist-past/

Top 5 ways Trump plan for Palestinians is a Crime against Humanity JUAN COLE

JUAN COLE01/29/2020

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On Tuesday, an American president being impeached for abuse of power announced a historic plan for Israel-Palestine alongside an Israeli prime minister who was just indicted for bribery and corruption. (The Israeli parliament declined to grant Netanyahu immunity, and he withdrew the request, allowing the formal indictment to be filed.)

The plan was drafted by a team allegedly led by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who has no real government position and is a far right wing Israel nationalist, in consultation with the far right wing Likud government of Israel, headed by PM Binyamin Netanyahu. The Palestinians declined to be involved in what was obviously a crooked and fixed process that gave away their East Jerusalem to Netanyahu before it even got going.

Just as the Palestinian people were not consulted in 1917 when the British cabinet adopted the Balfour Declaration, designating geographical Palestine as a site for a “homeland” for the Jewish people, so the doomed-to-failure Trump plan also did not consult them about their own fate. It is no longer the age of Western Empires when pudgy men in pinstripe suits in the drawing rooms of London and Paris drew the borders of other people’s countries and dictated the forms of their political lives.

If you want to know what Iran is really about, it is mostly a protest against these imperial injustices. For that reason, the Trump Plan is a huge boon to Iran, since it makes transparent precisely the “global arrogance” of Washington that Iran is always going on about.

In turn, imperial practices were and are underpinned by a latent White Nationalism, such that they attempt to keep the brown and black people subordinate and to reserve wealth and privilege and global power to the “white” European and European-descent nations. Even though Jews in twentieth-century Europe and the United States were often seen as “not Aryans” and “not White,” nowadays the usefulness of Israel to imperial designs on the region has led to the Israelis being coded as “white” and the Palestinians as “brown.” If you want to understand how millions of people can daily be screwed over as the Palestinians are, it isn’t actually much more complicated than that.

About 5 million stateless Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation (the Palestinian West Bank) or under Israeli military siege (the Gaza Strip). Some 400,000 stateless Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are from families that were expelled from the British Mandate of Palestine by militant Zionist militias. Another 400,000 stateless Palestinians in Syria are from families expelled from the British Mandate of Palestine by Zionist militias. About 40,000 stateless Palestinians in Jordan are from families . . . you get the picture. That is, About 6 million stateless Palestinians are being kept without basic human rights by Israel’s refusal to allow them to return to their homes and by Israel’s refusal to allow the Palestinians to establish a genuine state to which the refugees could return.

Although the Trump Plan uses the diction of allowing a Palestinian “state,” the entity proposed does not have control over its borders or airspace or coastal waters and cannot make treaties with other states or go to the United Nations over continued Israeli violations of international law. In other words it is not a state at all. It is a Bantustan of the sort the Apartheid South African government created as a way of unloading its African population so that they could be stripped of South African citizenship.

Ben Silverstein@bensilverstein

This map is verrrrry generously shaded to give appearance of contiguity.

100% final map will appear closer to archipelago map on the right.

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Palestine president Mahmoud Abbas is said to have reacted to the Plan’s unveiling by calling Trump a “dog, the son of a dog.”

The Trump Plan is full of measures that constitute War Crimes in international law, and a systematic pattern of War Crimes is categorized as a Crime against Humanity. The latter term is the one appropriate to the Trump Plan. Here are the War Crimes the Plan proposes

1.

Israel has flooded 400,000 of its citizens into the Occupied Palestinian West Bank, where they have stolen Palestinian land and built squatter-only settlements on it, where Palestinians are not allowed to live. These Israeli squatters are often armed and some of them routinely stage attacks on Palestinian villages or commit sabotage against Palestinian orchards and agriculture.

This squatting on Palestinian land contravenes the Fourth Geneva Accord of 1949 on Occupied Territories, which forbids transferring populations from the Occupying Power into the occupied lands.

“The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

This rule was to prevent the repetition of the war crimes committed by Nazi Germany, which occupied other lands and sent Germans in to settle them.

The Trump plan rewards Israel’s illegal activities, saying “Approximately 97% of Israelis in the West Bank will be incorporated into contiguous Israeli territory.”

2. The Trump Plan allows Israel to annex about a third of the Occupied West Bank, on which Israeli squatters have squatted. Annexation is an act of aggression, forbidden by international law. By the Fourth Geneva Convention, Israel cannot actually deprive Occupied Palestinians of their land rights by simply declaring those lands “annexed.”

3. The Plan envisages depriving many Israeli citizens of Palestinian heritage of their Israeli citizenship, which amounts to denaturalization. Since they would be instead given “citizenship” in a “state” that no one will recognize and which is a Bantustan rather than a state, in which they will enjoy no actual rights over their own property because Israel won’t permit the Bantustan to so guarantee them, that would amount de facto to forcing these Israeli citizens into statelessness, which contravenes the UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, signed by 75 member states.

4. The Plan envisages that the Palestinian Bantustan will be disarmed, which means that Palestinians will be deprived of the right of self-defense. The Right of Self-defense is recognized in Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter:

“Article 51. “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”

Palestine was in 2012 granted by the UN General Assembly non-member observer state status, like the Vatican, which puts it under the authority of the Charter.

5. The enclaves to which the Palestinians would be consigned give them no control over their lives, as B’Tselem pointed out.. The Israeli human rights organization pointed out,

“With no territorial contiguity, Palestinians will not be able to exercise their right to self-determination and will continue to be completely dependent on Israel’s goodwill for their daily life, with no political rights and no way to influence their future. They will continue to be at the mercy of Israel’s draconian permit regime and need its consent for any construction or development. In this sense, not only does the plan fail to improve their predicament in any way, but, in fact, it leaves them worse off as it perpetuates the situation and gives it recognition.”

Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights puts the right to freedom of movement into treaty law: “(1) Everyone lawfully within the territory of a State shall, within that territory, have the right to liberty of movement and freedom to choose his residence.”

Actually a whole book could be written about all the ways the Trump Plan for the hapless Palestinians contravenes international law. Since the over-all rubric is Apartheid, and Apartheid is a War Crime in the Rome Statute that underpins the International Criminal Court, the whole plan is a series of War Crimes, which amount in the aggregate to a crime against humanity.'

https://www.juancole.com/2020/01/palestinians-against-humanity.html

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Bonus Video:

CTV: “Analyst says Trump’s Mideast peace plan is “dead on arrival””

Filed Under: Featured, Israel/ Palestine

Influenza? Instagram influencers post Coronavirus PHOTOS in desperate bid to go VIRAL

31 Jan, 2020 13:05

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YouTuber Logan Paul and an assortment of models (left); German influencer 'Fitness Oskar' and his girlfriend (right). © Instagram/Loganpaul/Fitnessoskar

Influencers are known for making the most out of any and all new trends and challenges sweeping the globe. Now, however, these Instagram stars are posing in face masks to mine the coronavirus for all the clicks it’s worth.

With the virus spreading further every day, public interest around the world has continually ratcheted up. The coronavirus hashtag has become a trend on Instagram and over 200,000 posts using the tag have been uploaded to the social media platform.

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Some conscientious posters have sought to inform their followers about the disease however many have seized on it as another opportunity to cash in on some clicks.

Youtuber Logan Paul posted a photo featuring a bevy of gas-mask wearing models and pornstars with the provocative caption: “F**k the corona virus.”

German influencer ‘Fitness Oskar’ wanted his followers to know that the disease, which has already claimed over 200 lives, wasn’t going to stop him having fun with his girlfriend on a trip to Phuket, Thailand.

"We are not afraid of the virus... We still enjoy our vacation and hope that this misery will be stopped soon!," he wrote alongside a photo of him and his girlfriend passionately kissing while wearing facemasks.

While some so-called ‘influencers’ are sharing facts about the virus, social media stars are proving to be not the most reliable source of information on the deadly outbreak which has quickly spread across the planet. 

Take instagrammer Jada Hai Phong Nguyen for example. The Vietnamese woman posted a  photo of her donning a black surgical mask while sharing some tips for protecting yourself from the disease.

Some of her 88,000 followers, though praising her “cute outfit,” couldn’t help but criticize her for insinuating that surgical masks were an effective method of staving off infection. 

“Am sorry if you have misunderstood me, I love how you are so caring towards others. I really don't think these face masks will stop the virus from spreading, though you look cute, it won't protect you,” wrote one of Nguyen’s fans.

Nguyen is not alone in cashing on #Coronavirus, as the social media platform is riddled with influencers clamoring for those lucrative clicks while millions remain in quarantine.

Malaysian Chinese influencer Jeii Pong showed her mask off paired with a plaid skirt and crop top while standing in Kuala Lumpur airport. Rather than sharing the information up front with her 422,000 followers, she instead directed them to her Instagram Stories where she regularly promotes sponsored products and services.

“Y u at a airport tryna travel n infect others,” joked one of her fans. “When u gonna die but photos shoots are life,” quipped another. 

The Philippines' Adena Wilson instead advocated a more preventative approach to tackling the coronavirus crisis, coupled with prayer, of course #blessed. She also informed her 27,700 followers that surgical masks are now out of stock in stores across The Philippines.

Avoiding contact with the infected and thoroughly washing your hands and face are still some of the best methods of preventing infection, as authorities around the world work to develop a vaccine and a cure. 

At least 213 people have died and 9,700 have been infected so far during the coronavirus outbreak. Sales of face masks have spiked around the world, with China introducing penalties for those caught price gouging.

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