RUTHFULLY YOURS

Countering the ‘shrinking Palestine Maps’ scam
One of the most pernicious and common scams propagated by anti-Israeli activists is the so-called ‘shrinking maps’ of Palestine (see bottom of this article). As with most anti-Israel propaganda (like “Israelis are baby-killers” whereas in fact Israel does everything to avoid any civilian casualties while Palestinians specifically target young children; and “Israel is an apartheid state” whereas Israel is the only country in the Middle East to provide full rights for all religious groups while the Palestinian Authority allows no Jews at all) the claims are a perfect inversion of reality.

In 2010 I decided that the best way to counter these maps was to show the following alternative (I could not find anything like this on the web so I developed it myself – there have been copies since). The map demonstrates the extent to which it is Israel that has been shrinking since 1973, in its desperate but increasingly futile hope to trade ‘land for peace’:

One of the most frustrating things about debating feminists and feminist academics is how readily they reach for words such as “abuse,” “harassment” and “safety” – particularly, it seems, when they are losing the argument.

Yesterday I debated Dr Emily Grossman on women in science and, sure as night follows day, she reached for the same vocabulary afterwards, claiming on Twitter that she was “absolutely reeling” from the “mysogynistic [sic] backlash” and that she “hadn’t quite realised the extent of #everydaysexism.”

That troubled me, because I hear this allegation a lot and I wouldn’t like to think that just because I have a large and enthusiastic fan base that women will stop debating me on important topics because of the bigoted social media backlash that follows.

What principally mattered in accepting Christian support was whether such support served the followers of Islam in spreading the faith. The same thing could also apply to an alliance with the Jews and Israel in defending Saudi interests.

In the age of totalitarianism — which in the last century flourished under the various headings of Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, Hitler’s National Socialism and Maoism — Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb added Islamism. Shariah, as God’s law, in covering and monitoring every detail of human conduct, as Qutb insisted, is total; its enforcement through jihad made for an ideology — Islamism — consistent with the temperament of the totalitarian era.

American support in the reconstruction of Germany and Japan after 1945 was crucial. The transformation of imperial and militaristic Japan into a peaceful democracy was testimony to how American support can make for a better world. In the Korean Peninsula, American troops have held the line between the North and South since the end of the Korean War in 1953; this has made the vital difference in turning South Korea into a democracy and an advanced industrial society.

The Greek Coast Guard recently arrested a “refugee” coming from Syria, who had 200,000 euros in cash. Apparently this Syrian “investor” did not think that Turkey, Jordan or Lebanon — countries that border Syria — were safe for his “investments.” He preferred to deposit his money in Greek “zombie banks.”

The network of Greek police officers and intelligence agents, cooperating with human traffickers from Turkey in transporting illegal migrants into Greek territory, had such access and influence that police officers and intelligence agents could be transferred from one city to another and from one department to another, to sideline honest officers who stood in the way.

When you visit Greece, the customs officers will put in your passport the stamp of the Greek Republic. You will see the Greek flag waving at Athens International Airport; taxis waiting for customers, gas stations still in operation and public infrastructure being kept at a mediocre level. This, however, is just an illusion. Greece is a collapsing country.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Israeli shrub treats diabetes. Israeli researchers at the Judea Research and Development Center have discovered that the Israeli shrub Chiliadenus iphionoides increases sugar absorption and reduces blood sugar levels. They are now trying to isolate the active ingredient in order to make an accessible diabetes treatment.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-researchers-discover-shrub-that-can-treat-diabetes/

Blocking receptor prevents diabetes. Professor Ofer Mandelboim of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem has won the 2015 Kaye Innovation for discovering that blocking the NKp46 receptor on Natural Killer cells delays or prevents the onset of Type 1 (Juvenile) Diabetes. Israel’s BioLineRX developed BL-9020 to target NKp46.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/26933

Trials for dry-AMD treatment begin. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Cell Cure is commencing a Phase I/IIa study of its OpRegen treatment for geographic atrophy (GA), the severe stage of the dry form of age-related macular degeneration (dry-AMD). Cell Cure has received another NIS 6.24 million grant from Israel’s Chief Scientist.
http://investor.biotimeinc.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=83805&p=irol-newsArticle&id=2047497

Israeli & Irish scientists join up to fight cancer. (TY Margaret) The 2nd Joint Symposium took place last week between Dublin’s Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute and Israel’s Weizmann and Technion Institutes. See the pdf report on last year’s event and joint Israeli-Irish research into cancer and inflammatory diseases.
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/conferences/TBSI2015/
https://www.tcd.ie/biosciences/assets/pdf/IT_supple_tbsi_weiz.pdf

Study neuroscience for free online with the Hebrew U. Here’s another chance to take the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s free nine-week introductory course by Professor Idan Segev on neuroscience. Over 60,000 took the original “Synapses, Neurons and Brains” course, including many from Arab countries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5fd65aS7kA https://www.coursera.org/learn/synapses

Not for the first time. BBC and Sky TV headlines hailed a first for a baby born after ovarian tissue taken from the mother was transplanted back. Readers (see newsletter 31/5/15) will know that Israeli doctors also have done this, without any international media fanfare. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-33063838

The recent enhancement of strategic coordination between Israel and Saudi Arabia highlights Israel’s role in bolstering the national security of the House of Saud. This coordination has become particularly critical, for Riyadh, due to the erosion of the US’ posture of deterrence, while the clear and present lethal Iran-fueled threats to Saudi Arabia are dramatically exacerbated.

While the blossoming Jerusalem-Riyadh coordination is consistent with short-term, surgical Saudi national security interests, it is inconsistent with the long-term, inherently puritanical Islamic, Wahhabi worldview of the Saudi regime, which considers the Jewish State an illegal, infidel, usurper, provisional entity in “the abode of Islam,” as documented by Saudi school textbooks and religious sermons. Could the enemy (Saudi Arabia) of Israel’s enemy (Iran) become Israel’s friend?

Meretz is again sponsoring a bill to label all products made beyond the Green Line. This is geared to facilitate boycotts within Israel proper – inside the 1949 armistice line that reflected the situation at the end of the War of Independence and which has since been elevated to an internationally hallowed border demarcation.

This isn’t Meretz’s first effort to spawn a local boycott.

The initiative predated the second intifada and has been assiduously reintroduced ever since – most notably in 2003 and most recently in 2012.

The legislation’s aim is to clearly declare on all consumer goods packaging precisely where the manufacturing process took place and thereby foil any attempt at camouflage.

For more than a decade Israel has marked all products that it exports with a code that allows customs officials in Europe to know “the point of origin.” The marking allows the custom officials to know the geographic location where the product was produced, grown or manufactured.

The US president holds Israel to a standard of immaculate altruism, while holding the Palestinians to no standards at all.
The raucous ruckus that erupted at The Jerusalem Post’s 2015 Conference in New York on Sunday, when US Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew tried to persuade the skeptical audience of the merits of the emerging nuclear deal with Iran, and of the unmatched security benefits that the Obama administration has provided Israel, served to somewhat obfuscate the fact that there was harsh condemnation of White House policies from numerous other sources.

With the world going to hell in a hand-basket, ISIS spreading like a hideous pestilence across more and more areas of the globe, the United States fast descending into a soft tyranny with its Constitution laying in tatters, all thanks to the benighted presidency of one, Barack Hussein Obama, what does this resident of the Oval office choose to proclaim?

“Climate change is the biggest threat to the world.”

Even when Barack Obama was choosing members of his new administration back in 2008, he selected Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Chu as energy secretary and Carol Browner to lead a White House council on energy and climate.

Ms. Browner had headed the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration. Mr. Chu was director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a leading advocate of reducing greenhouse gases.