Displaying posts published in

February 2016

BOOKS Comments turned off

French ambassadors back Palestinians in ‘knife intifada’ against Israel By Salomon Benzimra

By on February 21st, 2016

Backing the French initiative to convene an international conference in the near future on the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” a group of eleven prominent French ambassadors published an appeal in Le Monde on February 3, 2016, urging Paris and Brussels to “save the Palestinian state.”

Their 900-word opus can be summarized as follows:

The ongoing “knife-intifada” is an expression of the “frustration and humiliation” of the Palestinians “after nearly 50 years of occupation,” and the “spontaneous violence” it produced has nothing to do with Islamic terrorism as practiced by the Islamic State (ISIS). Besides, “Israel’s repression” has produced “a far greater number of victims” than Israeli casualties.

Since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1996, “all peace initiatives have failed,” thus preventing the Palestinians from “being granted a portion of Palestine since 1967.” In theory, negotiations should conform to the “principle of two-states, recognized by the United Nations since 1947” but the policies of Prime Minister Netanyahu – which aim at “establishing a Greater Israel from the sea to the Jordan River” — have reduced the potential area of the future Palestinian state. The unresolved Palestinian question fuels the animosity of the “Arab/Muslim world against the West.”

While the U.S. will continue to pledge their allegiance to Israel, Europe remains “inhibited by the specter of the Shoah and the power of the [pro-Israel] lobbies.” But the “power of the law” should address the “sense of injustice that is spreading in public opinion.” To that effect, the French Government will introduce a Security Council resolution to “resume negotiations under international control” and, “should these negotiations fail, France would recognize the Palestinian State.” As the international community confronts ISIS, why wouldn’t it deploy “an equivalent effort” toward peace, which would “at last grant the Palestinian people their rights”?

But we should not wait. Without delay, “France should immediately recognize the Palestinian State.” As long as Israeli “colonization” continues, “the association treaty between Israel and the European Union should be suspended” as well as “the special economic and scientific cooperation from which Israel benefits.” These measures are necessary to prevent Israel from “losing its soul” in the pursuit of its “apartheid policies.” What is at stake in this conflict are the “values of the Western world” and it behooves everyone to contribute to its solution “in terms of civilization.”

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

Anti-Israel demonstrations are in danger of morphing into anti-Semitism by Simon Schama

By on February 21st, 2016

Much of the student left has “some kind of problem with Jews”, said
the bravely decent Alex Chalmers last week in his resignation
statement as co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club following a
vote in favour of Israeli Apartheid Week.

Labour’s national student organisation is launching an inquiry but the
“the problem with Jews” on the left is not going away. In January a
meeting of the Kings College London Israel Society, gathered to hear
from Ami Ayalon, a former head of Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic
intelligence service, who now champions a two-state solution, was
violently interrupted by a chair-hurling, window-smashing crowd.

Last summer the Guardian columnist Owen Jones made a courageous plea
for the left to confront this demon head on. Since then, however,
criticism of Israeli government policies has mutated into a rejection
of Israel’s right to exist; the Fatah position replaced by Hamas and
Hizbollah eliminationism. More darkly, support in the diaspora for
Israel’s right to survive is seen by the likes of Labour’s Gerald
Kaufman, who accused the government of being influenced in its Middle
Eastern policy by “Jewish money”, as some sort of Jewish conspiracy.

The charge that anti-Zionism is morphing into anti-Semitism is met
with the retort that the former is being disingenuously conflated with
the latter. But when George Galloway (in August 2014 during the last
Gaza war) declared Bradford “an Israel-free zone”; when French Jews
are unable to wear a yarmulke in public lest that invite assault, when
Holocaust Memorial day posters are defaced, it is evident that what we
are dealing with is, in Professor Alan Johnson’s accurate coinage,
“anti-semitic anti-Zionism”.

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

The Young and the Economically Clueless Millennials are flocking to Sanders, and in the GOP they favor Trump. Why are young people voting against their own interests? By Daniel J. Arbess

By on February 21st, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-young-and-the-economically-clueless-1455924699?mod=trending_now_4

B ernie Sanders, the 74-year-old self-described democratic socialist, is surprising even himself with his primary-season success against Hillary Clinton, fueled by a staggering 83% majority of the under-30 vote in New Hampshire and 84% in the Iowa caucuses.

As this newspaper reported on Tuesday, voters in the millennial bracket, 18- to 34-year-olds, will for the first time equal the baby-boomer share of the electorate, at 31%. These young voters appear to be falling headlong for the Vermont senator’s plaintive narrative of economic “unfairness.” His throwaway prescriptions for redistributing income and wealth are being echoed by an increasingly nervous Mrs. Clinton—despite such policies’ having been jettisoned during her husband’s administration in the 1990s.

Then again, Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s vague promises that he will “make America great again” aren’t much more comforting—except to the masses of Americans responding to his populist diatribes against free trade and immigrants. He too scored well with the young in New Hampshire, though, winning 38% of the 18-29 support, more than double his closest competitor for that group, Ted Cruz, at 17%.

These young voters seem not to realize that the economic policies they find so resonant are the least likely to promote the growth and the social mobility they desire. They deserve to be lead from the discredited backwater of equalizing outcomes, forward with policies that instead help eliminate barriers frustrating their access to opportunities. READ MORE AT SITE

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Better Britain Outside the EU Brexit—a British exit from the European Union—would give the U.K. self-determination and free it from the dysfunctional European project By Tim Montgomerie

By on February 21st, 2016

Margaret Thatcher predicted that it would end in tears. She described “the drive to create a European superstate” as “perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era.” The late British prime minister knew the lesson of the past: When politicians try to impose grand designs on peoples of different histories, languages and cultural allegiances, the edifice totters and collapses.

Once devoutly pro-European, Thatcher had come to worry by the late 1980s that grand projects emerging from Brussels, like the effort to create a single European currency, would centralize power and create a vast bureaucracy. She saw that democratic accountability would be impossible across a wildly polyglot European Union. And she feared that the sort of cronyism and collusion among big business and politicians that she had dismantled in the U.K. would re-emerge in Brussels. Almost every one of her fears has been vindicated.
Britain will soon have the opportunity to decide whether or not to remain a part of the European project that it joined in 1973. After EU leaders agreed late Friday to several key British demands, including a so-called emergency brake to let the U.K. restrict welfare benefits for EU migrants, a nationwide referendum is likely to be held in June, fulfilling a promise made by Prime Minister David Cameron at the last general election. Polls suggest that the outcome of the vote is too close to call, but a British exit—or “Brexit”—is a real possibility. It would also be a wise choice, for the U.K., for Europe and for the U.S.

Prominent Conservative politicians, including Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Gove, are expected to campaign for Brexit, endangering the unity of the government. But Mr. Cameron, most of his top ministers, the leader of the opposition Labour Party and the country’s largest businesses will hold firm with the EU. They will argue that Britain should not walk away but should remain at the EU’s highest table, helping to fix the continent’s problems. They worry that if Britain leaves the EU, London won’t be able to influence the rules that govern the world’s richest single market, with more than 500 million people. READ MORE AT SITE

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Greatest Democratic Judicial Hits What Republicans learned from Harry Reid and Barack Obama.

By on February 21st, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/greatest-democratic-judicial-hits-1455925914

Senate Democrats haven’t made much progress shaming Republicans into yielding on President Obama’s upcoming Supreme Court nominee, and no wonder. As much as they’re trying, they can’t erase their own abusive history of double and sometimes triple standards in confirmation politics.

Earlier this week we chronicled New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s faked alibi for his categorical 2007 demand that Democrats reject any George W. Bush nominee if a vacancy had emerged in his last 18 months in office. But there is so much more to recall:

• When Democrats ran the Senate from June 2001 to January 2003, they denied even a hearing before the Judiciary Committee to 32 of Mr. Bush’s nominees. When Republicans regained a 51-49 majority in the next Congress, Democrats broke the then-longstanding Senate norm of granting nominees an up-or-down vote. Before 2003, only one judicial nominee had been blocked with a filibuster, and that was the bipartisan 1968 rebellion against promoting the ethically challenged Justice Abe Fortas to Chief Justice.

Democrats applied the higher 60-vote standard to a rainbow coalition of Bush nominees, judging them not by traditional measures like experience or temperament or even “diversity.” They simply didn’t like their politics.

The targets included Priscilla Owen (a woman), Janice Rogers Brown (a black woman) and Miguel Estrada (a Hispanic). The 28-month Estrada filibuster was especially egregious because Democrats feared the smart young attorney’s ethnic background might make him formidable Supreme Court material if he served on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

• When Mr. Bush nominated Samuel Alito to the High Court in 2005, Democrats attempted to give him the same treatment. Some 25 Senators voted to support a filibuster, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, John Kerry, Pat Leahy and Mr. Schumer. READ MORE AT SITE

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

A recent survey suggests growing American public divides over Israel, yet also strategies for Israel to win American public opinion.Andrew Harrod

By on February 21st, 2016

A recent Brookings Institution survey presented at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. indicated a growing American partisanship toward Israel and the Middle East. But an analysis of an online survey taken in November suggests strategies for Israel’s friends to counter growing Democratic Party estrangement with Israel amidst an enduringly pro-Israel and Philo-Semitic American population.

Survey director Shibley Telhami said that Israel is dramatically becoming what fellow panelist and Brookings expert Tamara Cofman Wittes called a wedge issue. As Telhamiwrote in “Politico,” the Republicans’ pro-Israel base is an indicator that “GOP candidates are principally catering to an evangelical base that has become Israel’s biggest support base in American politics.” A survey press release noted that while Evangelical Republicans make up only 10 percent of the American population, 23 percent of all Republicans and 77 percent of Evangelical Republicans want the United States to favor Israel. In all, 40 percent of Republicans and 55 percent of self-identified evangelicals “say a candidate’s position on Israel matters a lot,” compared to 22 percent for Independents and 14 percent for Democrats.”

Telhami pointed out that, by contrast, the biggest story of all was the 49 percent of Democrats who said that Israel has too much influence on American politics; 14 percent said too little, and 36 percent said about the right amount. The striking partisan divide of this key finding impressed him, as the corresponding survey results among Republicans for too much, too little, and appropriate Israeli influence were respectively 25 percent, 22 percent and 52 percent. The overall American breakdown is 37, 18 and 44 percent, while 39 percent of evangelicals said that Israel has too little influence (23 percent too much and 38 percent the right amount), and views of too little Israeli influence increase with age.

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL: MICHAEL ORDMAN

By on February 21st, 2016

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Breakthrough leukemia cure is “Israeli”. I was suspicious of the BBC’s report on the “innovative” US immunotherapy that cured 27 of 29 “no-hope” leukemia patients. Sure enough, the genetic modification of T-cells was developed by Weizmann Institute Professor Zelig Eshhar, and the US researchers accredited him.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/breakthrough-cancer-cure-has-deep-israeli-roots/#.VsSHARjfTx8.email

Positive trials for treatment of Graft vs Host disease. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Kamada has reported positive interim results from a Phase 1/2 clinical trial of its proprietary alpha-1 antitrypsin (AAT) to treat steroid-refractory Graft Versus Host Disease (GvHD). Subjects responded well to treatment in the small study.
http://www.kamada.com/news_item.php?ID=217

Patent for kidney cancer test. (TY Atid-EDI) Israeli biotech Rosetta Genomics has been granted a US patent for its gene signature method of distinguishing four different types of kidney cancer. The molecular diagnostic test recognizes the profile of 29 microRNAs that are expressed in patients with renal cancer.
http://www.rosettagx.com/files/press_releases/2016/012516_ROSG_Kidney_Tumor_Classification_Patent_FINAL.pdf

Watching memory at work. Tel Aviv University Professor Itzhak Fried has completed his study of how memory neurons behave in real time when they are “remembering.” He will present his findings at an upcoming Jerusalem symposium. These have important implications for understanding dementia such as Alzheimer’s.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/doh-how-homer-simpson-helps-researchers-understand-memory/

ReWalk is medically necessary. (TY Dan) A US surgeon, confined to a wheelchair following a spinal cord injury, has successfully won his case to be reimbursed by his health plan for a ReWalk exoskeleton. The ruling will help make ReWalk available to all eligible patients. http://rewalk.com/rewalk-robotics-exoskeleton-deemed-medically-necessary-by-independent-medical-review-organization/

Hospital search engine wows Russia. Russia’s most dominant email service Mail.Ru is integrating the database of Archimedicx. Health Mail.Ru is one of the most popular health portals in Russia. Israeli Moni Milchman (see here) developed ArchimedicX, the world’s first search engine for information about hospitals.
http://www.geektime.com/2016/02/16/belgian-israeli-archimedicx-to-feature-its-listings-on-russian-mail-ru/

Israel-California biotech agreement. Israeli Science, Technology and Space Minister Ofir Akunis signed a biotechnology agreement with the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) Its focus is stem cell research and breakthroughs in treating diseases such as cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and HIV-AIDS.
http://www.jns.org/news-briefs/2016/2/10/israel-and-california-sign-biotech-deal-with-emphasis-on-stem-cell-research

Continue reading →