RUTHFULLY YOURS

Catherine Chatterley
Historian of Modern Europe; Founding Director, Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism (CISA)

Antisemitism presents a serious challenge for the global community today. The last decade has seen a shocking growth in antisemitic rhetoric and agitation, and routine acts of violence against Jews have returned to European cities 70 years after the Holocaust.

The battle between Israel and the Palestinians has become intractable, and the idea of a “peace process” that might finally resolve the issues is not taken as seriously as it was years ago. This fact does not bode well for Israelis or Palestinians, and given the obsessive focus on this conflict by the media and by both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel activist organizations, the lack of resolution and mounting frustration is an ongoing concern for all of us.

“When people stand before the complete collapse of what they believe in, they enter a state of denial,” wrote Yigal Carmon, in a Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) article titled “The Emperor Has No Clothes.”

Carmon, MEMRI’s president, was referring to the response of politicians and journalists to the nuclear deal with Iran, which he claims was never approved by the Islamic Republic.

“What is mistakenly perceived as an agreement under the title of ‘Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’ (JCPOA), that was concluded on July 14 in Vienna, and celebrated by the White House as an ‘historic agreement,’ is neither a contract nor even a real agreement between Iran and the P5+1,” he wrote. “It is a set of understandings and disputes compiled into a single document.”

“For example, regarding the sanctions, it stipulates that there will be a snap-back in case of Iranian violations, yet the next sentence says that Iran will regard such a snap-back as a violation of the agreement by the West,” Carmon told The Algemeiner on Tuesday.

A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.

The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.

According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.

“We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica,” said Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study, which was published on Oct. 30 in the Journal of Glaciology. “Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica – there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.” Zwally added that his team “measured small height changes over large areas, as well as the large changes observed over smaller areas.”