RUTHFULLY YOURS

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — During the 1980s and ’90s, the historic alliance between the wealthy monarchy of Saudi Arabia and the country’s powerful clerics emerged as the major financier of international jihad, channeling tens of millions of dollars to Muslim fighters in Afghanistan, Bosnia and elsewhere. Among the project’s major patrons was Prince Salman Bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, who last month became Saudi Arabia’s king.

Some of those fighters later formed Al Qaeda, which declared war on the United States and later mounted major attacks inside Saudi Arabia as well. In the past decade, according to officials of both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, the Saudi government has become a valuable partner against terrorism, battling Al Qaeda at home and last year joining the American-led coalition against the extremists of the Islamic State.

The Anti-Defamation League has also now been pulled on to the Netanyahu Congressional Speech Drama.

Oooh, another bit of drama in the ‘Obama-Bombing-Bibi Soap Opera’ …

The White House has started bringing out the heavy artillery: The New York-based Anti-Defamation League is the latested to be recruited to pressure Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu into canceling his address to the U.S. Congress on March 3.

Yes. It’s another round of messing with Israeli politics, cloaked in the guise of harassing a prime minister over a speech to Congress. But it’s really about trying to rally enough bad blood to make Netanyahu look bad to people who know he’s probably one of the few in Israel who actually knows how to lead, mistakes notwithstanding.

Ah — and lest we forget — it’s also about trying to distract the American public from that other thing: the Iranian nuclear threat that’s being carefully hidden away in a pretty package with a shiny pink bow. It’s about to be sealed in an agreement between Tehran and world powers led by President Barack Obama at the end of March. Obama’s not very happy that Netanyahu is planning to talk about that with Congressional lawmakers.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Building muscle after hip replacement. Israel’s Pluristem Therapeutics has announced that the improvement in muscle force of hip-replacement patients treated with its PLX-PAD cells was 40-times better than those who received a placebo.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-further-posiitive-trial-findings-for-pluristem-1001006064

The tiniest pump for diabetes and Parkinson’s. (Thanks to Israel21c) Israel’s TouchéMedical is developing the world’s smallest, cheapest and smartest patch pump, for patients of all ages with diabetes, Parkinson’s and other chronic conditions.
http://www.israel21c.org/headlines/worlds-smallest-cheapest-patch-pump-for-diabetics/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=B7wf7EiLT64

Making it easier to remember your meds. Israel’s MediSafe is opening an office in Boston. It will help market MediSafe’s medication reminder app, which up to now has been promoted mainly by world of mouth. Despite this, the app has been downloaded 1.3 million times and is used regularly by hundreds of thousands.
http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/startups/2015/01/israeli-startup-medisafe-raises-6m-for-move-to.html?page=all https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seE6rCZGm2Q

“MEDinISRAEL – The heartbeat of Medical Innovation.” Representatives from 60 countries will attend Israel’s MEDinISRAEL conference from 23-26 March. They will join 120 Israeli medical device companies and biotechs to discuss and demonstrate Israel’s latest developments in medical innovation.
http://itrade.gov.il/singapore/2015/02/03/health-nation-israeli-medical-innovation-healthier-world/

Two Israeli-Arabs develop app to treat ADHD. Aziz Kaddan and Anas Abu Mukh began degree courses at Haifa University when they were 16 years old. They were just 19 when they thought up Myndlift – an app that teaches ADHD children and adults to concentrate by using their brainwaves to display a bright image.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-myndlift-an-israeli-app-being-developed-to-cure-adhd-1001007206

ISRAEL IS INCLUSIVE AND GLOBAL

Israel’s “Lego man” tells of Ezer Mizion’s kids. Maor Cohen is known in Israel as the Lego man. Three years ago Maor went to Israeli cancer charity Ezer Mizion to donate some Lego to young cancer sufferers. But seeing children with sick parents reminded him of his early life. So Maor stayed, and the Lego sets just grew.
http://www.sdjewishworld.com/2015/02/04/israels-lego-man-tells-ezer-mizions-kids/

Female cancer survivor becomes IDF officer. Rotem Chiprut made aliya and joined the IDF as a lone soldier, only to discover she had cancerous cells in her thyroid gland. Following surgery and treatment she completed her officer’s training and has now been promoted to 2nd lieutenant.
http://www.algemeiner.com/2015/02/01/idf-lone-soldier-who-survived-cancer-promoted-to-2nd-lieutenant/

Give your heart out. 90% of jewelry manufacturer YVEL’s employees arrived in Israel from 20 countries. YVEL also trains Ethiopian Jews in all jewelry crafts. It is now supporting the latest campaign by Israel’s Save A Child’s Heart (SACH) to raise funds for performing free heart surgery to children from developing countries.
http://www.yvel.com/magazine/yvel-save-childs-heart-giving-hearts-valentines-day/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9BAOpoKRYI

Haiti – five years on. (Thanks to Israel21c) Five years after the devastating earthquake, Israel has not abandoned its work in Haiti. Humanitarian organization IsraAID is running a medical facility, an agriculture program, a youth empowerment center and a gender violence prevention program for Haitian women.
http://www.israel21c.org/headlines/five-years-post-quake-israel-is-still-helping-haiti-heal/

Clean water for Tanzanian school. Students from Tel Aviv University have built a 48,000-liter rainwater harvesting and advanced filtration system that provides 400 school kids and staff at Nkaiti Secondary School in Minjingu, Tanzania with safe drinking water. It will stop the children growing up with skeletal deformities.
http://nocamels.com/2015/01/tau-engineering-tanzanian-school/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLdjTekHhb4

Solar energy to Rwanda. Israelis have helped install the largest solar field in East Africa. Gigawatt Global, with its Israeli R&D center Energiya Global, has built an 8.5 Megawatt facility in Kigali, Rwanda, at the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village, a kibbutz-style orphanage for victims of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israelis-to-dedicate-largest-solar-field-in-east-africa/

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Detecting cancer with the SniffPhone. The NaNose cancer breathalyzer technology developed by Professor Hossam Haick of Israel’s Technion will soon be installed in a mobile phone – to be called, appropriately, the SniffPhone. Using a tiny smell-sensitive sensor, the phone will be able to detect cancer on a users’ breath.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/mobile-sniffphone-will-detect-cancer-on-a-users-breath/

Music Messenger is an instant hit. Israelis invented the first instant messaging system ICQ. Now the Israeli startup Music Messenger allows friends to send music to each other. Recent investors include some major players and celebrities from the music industry, some who have never before worked with an Israeli company.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-music-sharing-app-music-messenger-raising-30m-1001006392

How the Cornell Technion is developing. Whilst the new 2 million-square-foot Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island is being constructed, its 2nd semester is underway in temporary offices provided by Google. Graduates from the two-year program will receive dual degrees from the New York and Israeli schools.
http://www.fromthegrapevine.com/innovation/innovative-tech-incubator-campus-evolving-new-york

Israel is one of world’s most innovative countries. (Thanks to Michelle) Depending on which report you read, Israeli innovation is rated 3rd in the world by the World Economic Forum and 5th by Bloomberg.
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/New-Tech/Israel-ranked-5th-in-Bloomberg-innovation-index-389639
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jerry-jasinowski/innovation_b_6603514.html

my sentiments exactly and I would add Ben Carson….rsk
Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie, in case you’re wondering.

I’ve said this before, in various places. But here’s Andrew Ferguson, saying it over at the Weekly Standard:

Boy, that didn’t take long. Over the span of a few short days in late January and early February, three members of the top tier of Republican presidential candidates demonstrated why they’ll never be president. They didn’t do anything to disqualify themselves directly, just revealed the traits that will make them appear unsuitable to most voters by the time the campaign really heats up, say, when the presidential election is a mere 18 months away. As it is, all three of them—Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, and Chris Christie—can pack it in right now and save months of time and tons of money. They’d be doing themselves a favor, and us too.

Couldn’t agree more. Huckabee, who reminds me of no literary character more than Elmer Gantry, has zero chance of getting elected outside of Arkansas and the Protestant part of Louisiana. Rand Paul is the acorn that landed mere centimeters away from the paternal tree. And Christie… well, let’s just say there’s a lot less there than meets the eye, conservative-wise.

And I had thought that Hillary Clinton was having trouble developing her message. In a single tweet this week she may have revealed the slogan for her 2016 campaign. Jumping on gaffes by Chris Christie and Rand Paul, Clinton wrote: “The science is clear: The earth is round, the sky is blue, and #vaccineswork. Let’s protect all our kids. #GrandmothersKnowBest.”

I have read this tweet several times now and cannot help being amazed. Clinton not only omits her own flirtation in 2008 with anti-vaccine politics, she also breaks the unstated rule of limiting oneself to a single hashtag per tweet. And she is, less surprisingly, remarkably condescending and clichéd — blue skies, spherical earths, it’s all about the children. Gag me.

Naturally the press marveled at the ability of a rich and powerful woman to hire someone much younger and trendier, with smaller and nimbler fingers, to compose and edit tweets for her. How savvy Clinton is, how above it all, floating to coronation while the two idiot Republicans adopt a hippie cause as their own. And yet the most depressing aspect of the controversy, for me, was that second hashtag, the one about #GrandmothersKnowBest.

Dear Reader (Unless you’re Brian Williams, who’s busy helping the brave boys at the Alamo),

Okay, so I am not immune to piling on Brian Williams, but I have to say that I think this is being overblown.On Thursday, I was the guest host on Bill Bennett’s radio show. When I wasn’t performing some of the greatest mime ever recorded on radio (prove me wrong!), I took a lot of calls. One of the callers was livid about Williams, insisting that we have another Dan Rather situation here. I stopped my rendition of “Man in a Box” to respond that I didn’t think so.

As I wrote at the time — and said on air on Thursday — and will look for any opportunity to say again, Dan Rather climbed up the Jackass Tree and hit every branch on the way down. Rather tried to take out a president he didn’t like with forged documents he should have known were forged. He defended the forgeries, attacked his critics, fell back on the defense that the story was fake but accurate, and in every way dragged the mess out far longer than any rational man would and, let’s be honest, more than I could ever have hoped. As I wrote in 2004:

The insipid moral equivalence in President Obama’s apologia for Islam at the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday morning has already been deconstructed by such commentators as Roger Simon, Victor David Hanson and Jonah Goldberg. I am bothered, though, by the president’s presumption of equivalence between doctrinal apples and oranges. If, as he maintains, we must engage in comparative religion with a focus on what believers do in the name of their varying faiths, then we should also analyze what their varying faiths tell them to do.

Sounding more like the executive director of CAIR, the president of the United States warned Christians and other non-Muslims to stay off “our high horse” regarding the sadistic murder of a Jordanian pilot, Lieutenant Mouath al-Kasaebeh, by Islamic State terrorists. We must have some humility, explained famously humble Mr. Obama. After all, over the last millennium, “people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”

There is a method to their barbarism.

The Islamic State’s barbaric murder of Lieutenant Mouath al-Kasaebeh, the Jordanian air-force pilot the jihadists captured late last year, has naturally given rise to questions about the group’s objectives. Charles Krauthammer argues (here and here) that the Islamic State is trying to draw Jordan into a land war in Syria. It is no doubt correct that the terrorist group would like to destabilize Jordan — indeed, it is destabilizing Jordan. Its immediate aim, however, is more modest and attainable. The Islamic State wants to break up President Obama’s much trumpeted Islamic-American coalition.

As the administration proudly announced back in September, Jordan joined the U.S. coalition, along with the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar. The only potential value of the coalition is symbolic: It has enabled the president to claim that Muslim countries were lining up with us against the Islamic State. Militarily, the coalition is of little use. These countries cannot defeat the Islamic State.

Obama Says He Won’t Meet With Israeli Leader During Visit

WASHINGTON—The diplomatic fracas over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ’s planned speech to Congress next month escalated with Vice President Joe Biden ’s disclosure that he would miss the appearance while traveling abroad.

The announcement by his office—which gave no details about his travel plans—made it more likely that congressional Democrats will follow suit and skip the appearance, which increasingly threatens to fray a rare, long-standing bipartisanship in Congress over U.S. dealings with Israel.

President Barack Obama has said he won’t meet with the Israeli leader while he is in Washington, after House Speaker John Boehner ’s (R., Ohio) office arranged it with Israeli officials without consulting the White House. The visit is planned just two weeks before Israeli voters head to the polls. In his speech, Mr. Netanyahu is expected to question a central foreign-policy objective of Mr. Obama’s: rapprochement with Iran over its nuclear program.

Democrats over the past week were sharply critical of the plans for the prime minister’s speech during closed-door meetings with the Israeli ambassador and the speaker of Israel’s parliament. “I just think it’s a serious mistake by the speaker and the prime minister,” Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.) said, suggesting the speech would be a “divisive event.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) was more blunt, telling reporters on Thursday, “I think it would be better if we didn’t have it.”

he Army commander in Europe on Putin’s new way of war, Russia’s growing arsenal, and coping with U.S. military budget cuts.

Wiesbaden, Germany

‘I believe the Russians are mobilizing right now for a war that they think is going to happen in five or six years—not that they’re going to start a war in five or six years, but I think they are anticipating that things are going to happen, and that they will be in a war of some sort, of some scale, with somebody within the next five or six years.”

So says Lt. Gen. Frederick “Ben” Hodges, commander of U.S. Army Europe. It’s Monday evening at the Army’s Lucius D. Clay garrison near Wiesbaden, a small town in southwest Germany. The air outside is freezing, the ground coated by a thin layer of snow. Moscow lies 1,500 miles east, but Russia comes up almost immediately as I sit down to dinner with Gen. Hodges and one of his aides in a cozy dining room at the base.

“Strong Europe!” reads a sign on one of the walls. Next to it is the U.S. Army Europe insignia, a burning sword set against a blue shield. The two signs represent the strategic framework the three-star general has introduced—building on America’s decades-long role on the Continent—since taking command last year of the 30,000 or so U.S. soldiers stationed in Europe.