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November 2017

The Jewish-Arab demographic about-face Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

In 2017, Israel is the only advanced economy and Western democracy endowed with a relatively high fertility rate, which facilitates further economic growth with no reliance on migrant labor. Moreover, Israel’s thriving demography provides for bolstered national
security (larger classes of recruits) and a more confident foreign policy.

In contrast to conventional demographic wisdom, Israel is not facing a potential Arab demographic time bomb. In fact, the Jewish State benefits from a robust Jewish demographic tailwind.

At the outset of 2017, for the first time – and in defiance of projections made by Israel’s demographic establishment since the early 1940s – Israel’s Jewish fertility rate (3.16 births per woman) exceeds Israel’s Arab rate of fertility (3.11). Actually, in 2017, Israel’s fertility rate is higher than most Arab countries (e.g., Saudi Arabia – 2.1 births per woman, Kuwait – 2.4, Syria – 2.5, Morocco – 2.1, etc.).

The Westernization of the Arab fertility rate has also been in effect in Judea and Samaria: from 5 births per Arab woman in 2000 to about 3 in 2016; from a median age of 17 in 2000 to 21 in 2017.

The substantial, systematic Westernization of Arab fertility – from 9.5 births per woman in 1960 to 3.11 in 2016 – has been a derivative of the accelerated integration of Israeli Arabs into modernity, in general, and the enhanced status of Israel’s Arab women, in particular.

For example – as it is among the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, whose fertility rate is similar – almost all Israeli Arab girls complete high school, and are increasingly enrolling in colleges and universities, improving their status within their own communities. This process has expanded their use of contraceptives, delaying wedding-age and reproduction, which used to start at the age of 15-16, to the age of 20 year old and older.

Professors Not Happy That Jordan Peterson Wants To Warn Students About ‘Radical Left’ Classes Photo of David Krayden David Krayden

Professor Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto instructor who won’t use “gender neutral” pronouns, says students should know what they’re getting into when taking courses from hard-core leftist faculty. That’s not sitting well with some of Peterson’s colleagues who say identifying their politics amounts to harassment.

Peterson told the Toronto Star on Friday that he has discussed the idea of creating an “information website” that would forewarn students that a course they’ve selected has an ideological axe to grind with “radical left social justice-oriented courses.”

“I’m not happy with the fact that a huge chunk of the humanities and the social sciences have turned into an indoctrination cult. So I thought, well, the students need to be informed. Because they don’t have the information necessary to make an informed choice, and this would help them make an informed choice,” Peterson told the Star.

The professor says he’s surprised that there would be objections raised now when he hasn’t even discussed the website for over three months. What Peterson envisioned at that time was a reference of “courses and professors and disciplines that should be avoided” for students not interested in left-wing social justice teaching.

But that isn’t sitting well with the U of T facility. Faculty association president Cynthia Messenger issued a statement on Friday that explained how her group “has taken the unprecedented step of asking that the entire executive meet with the provost’s office to express our deep concern about this threat to our members and to the academic mission of the university.”

Peterson was unfazed by the “unprecedented” action, telling the Star that if “what the faculty association did today was an attempt to intimidate me into not doing it, you can be bloody sure that they’ve failed completely.”

The free speech advocate dismissed the statement as another example of university groups “bowing to pressure from a radical minority.”

Peterson asked where the “threat” is to anyone. “It isn’t obvious to me, at least, that providing students with more information about the courses that they’re going to take and their philosophical underpinnings actually constitutes a reprehensible move.”

What Happens In Jerusalem Does Not Stay In Jerusalem By Philippe Assouline

Israel is tritely known as the start up nation, the incubator for ideas and products that change our lives – usually for the better – in an increasingly high-tech world. Your ever-smaller cell phone, that GPS app that saves you 7 minutes on your commute to work, that suddenly non-invasive medical procedure and those persimmons that magically never seem to go bad, those were all created in Israel, and tested on Israelis, before getting the OK to go global.http://jewishjournal.com/opinion/226791/what-happens-in-jerusalem-does-not-stay-in-jerusalem/

So too, alas, with the modern scourge of undiscriminating Jihadi mass murders, occasionally referred to as terrorism by Western media. Like the most famous of technology companies, Jihadi terror tragically also uses Israel as its R&D center, and the Israeli populace, it pains me to write, as its guinea pigs.

After doing so with suicide bombings in the 90s, Palestinian Jihadists (whether of the admittedly religious Hamas variety, or of the “secular” Al Aqsa Martyrs brigades of the PLO) invented, tested and made ever more lethal truck terrorism, stabbing rampages and mass shootings through Israeli “experiments,” that is, through attacks on Israeli moms, dads, sons, daughters and grandparents. Palestinians saw that those indiscriminate and savage murders of Israeli innocents going about their day not only didn’t backfire politically or trigger any meaningful Western outrage, they instead earned Palestinians an endless stream of gushing profiles in liberal media outlets, a global pulpit, wall to wall political support, and the permanent benefit of any moral doubt with Western intelligentsia. There are many psychological reasons why this is so, why so many who might be expected to know better instead respond to plain evil with moral acrobatics, overwrought compassion and Orwellian understanding. Regardless, it is no coincidence that the mass-killing tactics developed in Ramallah, tested in Jerusalem and rewarded in Norway are becoming ubiquitous in London, Nice and, now, New York City.

Debra Nussbaum Cohen : Island of Science Technion Teams Up With Cornell to Bring Startup Nation to America

Roosevelt Island is a curious spit of land in the East River, nestled between Manhattan and Queens. It began as farmland, then housed a penitentiary and lunatic asylum and, later, hospitals.http://jewishjournal.com/news/nation/227185/technion-teams-cornell-bring-startup-nation-america/

Once home to the diseased and criminally insane, today it is home to a cutting-edge complex that is a marriage of Cornell University and Israel’s Technion Institute of Technology. Their union is launching new companies in an effort to create New York City’s own Silicon Valley. And, not incidentally, boost Israel’s image.

Based on what is already percolating at Cornell Tech and the related Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, they are on their way.

The Cornell-Technion marriage — and a great deal of philanthropic and city funding — has produced architecturally interesting, environmentally sensitive new buildings, which house academic programs and the nascent businesses.

Cornell Tech is the overall owner of the Roosevelt Island enterprise. Within it is the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, a first-of-its-kind partnership between the two universities that includes a double degree-granting master’s program and a post-doctoral fellowship designed to launch inventive tech businesses.

Cornell Tech and the Jacobs Institute moved into their new home in August, in time to open their doors for the current school year. The programs are housed in two buildings at the south end of the almond shaped, 2-mile-long, 800-feet-wide island. Elsewhere on the island, some 14,000 people now live in apartment buildings that first opened in 1975.

The story of the joint venture begins seven years ago, when then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a competition to create an applied sciences campus on Roosevelt Island. Fifty educational institutions were invited to compete. Technion was the only one from Israel.

Technion President Peretz Lavie recalls asking Bloomberg why Technion was invited. The mayor told him that “you took Jaffa oranges and turned them into semiconductors and I’d like you to do the same in New York,” Lavie said in an interview with the Journal. At its home campus, Haifa-based Technion has 14,500 students majoring in engineering, science, medicine and architecture.

The ultimate goal of their union? To create New York’s own Silicon Valley.

The ‘Not So Much’ Hollywood Sex Scandals By Frank Salvato

You cannot turn on a television or cable news show these days without hearing about another Hollywood celebrity claiming to have been sexually assaulted by someone with influence in show business. From influential producers to prominent actors to lesser knowns trying to make it to stardom, there appears to be a wave of predatory depravity emanating from the elite circles in entertainment. I say “appears” because we all know the truth. This stuff; the people who do these acts and are willing to have these acts done to them have been around since the first movie studio and recording contract.

When the revelation that movie mogul Harvey Weinstein used his power and position to intimidate women – young starlets – to have sex with him came to light, one of the most disingenuous gasps wafted across the information sphere. News programs and social media were on fire in their castigation of the man. Somehow, in an industry that created the term “casting couch,” the idea that a powerful movie producer would extract sex in exchange for making someone famous was suddenly foreign and appalling.

Just as with the transition from darkness to light in the flip of a switch, many who once found moral relativism in advancing their careers through gratuitous sex acts with the powerful now see themselves as victims. It is as if being a predatory victim of the elite in Hollywood is now a prize to be coveted; a label that gains the wearer entry into the “in crowd.” The designation is a cloak of relevance in today’s entertainment industry.

This is not to say that all of those who are claiming victimhood in this wave of wanton subjugation are not indeed victims. Many naïve people have gone to Hollywood only to become the prey of maniacal degenerates and megalomaniacs who dwell in that sphere; opportunistic cretins whose only way to find self-worth is to oppress and damage others, physically, emotionally and intellectually. Those people, the bright-eyed and star-struck who end up used and cast aside, they are the real victims of an industry peppered with human refuse that has been allowed to ascend to influence.

However, just as there are naïve innocents that get chewed up in the pornographic gears of Hollywood, so, too, are there the opportunists employing moral relativism who intellectually barter their dignity for stardom. There are, and there can be no doubt about this, people – both men and women – who will and have rationalized getting on their backs and/or knees to be “anointed” to fame and fortune. One can only imagine the “stains” a fluorescent light would reveal if shined on the inhabitants of Tinsel Town’s red carpets. It is enough to make one feel the need for a hot shower.

The allegations in the Bibi-hunt: Spine-chilling stuff P. David Hornik

A report on Channel 10—a known stronghold of Bibi-animosity—claims that:

“senior law enforcement officials have concluded there is sufficient evidence to file an indictment against [Prime Minister Netanyahu] on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust…. The report quoted an unofficial police opinion according to which the evidence that has accumulated against Netanyahu is robust…. The State Attorney’s Office, Channel 10 reported, was also coming to the opinion that there are grounds to file an indictment on bribery, but was not as sure as the police.”

Most of the latest purported information—once again leaked by the police, guardians of virtue in the Bibi-hunt who have leaked ruthlessly and systematically throughout this affair—concerns Case 1000, in which Netanyahu is alleged to have done favors for his longtime friend, businessman and movie mogul Arnon Milchan, in return for gifts of cigars and champagne.

In other words, the suspicions center on bribery—Netanyahu illicitly receiving stuff from Milchan as a quid pro quo.

And what is Netanyahu alleged to have done for Milchan in return for the “bribe”?

The charge that keeps reappearing is that Netanyahu asked then-secretary of state John Kerry to help get Milchan a ten-year visa so that Milchan could stay in the U.S. to do what he does there.

If it’s true, it’s not exactly spine-chilling. Let’s say you have a friend in the States who badly wants a long-term visa, and you have an ongoing connection with the secretary of state, with whom you converse for hours at a time. What would you do?

In normal times—one might even say in a normal country—this is not the stuff of which “corruption scandals” are made. If Netanyahu indeed asked for Kerry’s help with Milchan’s visa, it was absolutely routine behavior of a kind that very few people involved in public life have not engaged in.

Even stranger in this case is that the ostensible “bribe” did not consist of money—usually the stuff of which bribes are made—but of nonmonetary gifts. Netanyahu appears to acknowledge receiving these gifts of cigars and champagne from Milchan for years, saying that—again—this was within the normal, noncriminal bounds of human behavior, a friend giving presents to a friend.

What, then, constituted the bribe? If the Netanyahu-Milchan friendship goes back years—and that is not in dispute—it’s hard to imagine Netanyahu, in return for Milchan asking for help with the visa, needing some certain quantity of cigar boxes, or some certain set of champagne crates, as “the bribe.”

“I Am On a Mission”: Muslim Terrorist Runs Over Chinese Students in France Daniel Greenfield

This latest Muslim terrorist attack took place near Toulouse. You may remember Toulouse as the location of the vicious Muslim terror spree by Mohammed Merah which included the murder of Jewish children in a school. There was widespread support for Merah’s actions among Muslim colonists in France.

Now we have yet another terrorist attack.

Abdellah B, a 28-year-old, rammed a Renault Clio into three students at the IGS campus, in a suburb of Toulouse. The victims are Chinese students in their early 20s. Two women and one man.

The French authorities are pivoting to their usuals standby, psychiatric problems. Most media accounts emphasize the psychiatric angle without using the terrorist’s name.

But the L’Express account offers something more.

“When he was arrested, he told the police, ‘I am on a mission,'” one of our sources said. The prosecutor’s office of Toulouse also specifies that he said he planned his attack “for a month”.

Abdellah (Slave of Allah) had the usual criminal record that most of these attackers do.

The Mayor of Toulouse is very shocked. And the French media is compulsively interviewing shrinks. But here’s a little context about Islamic terrorists and mental illness.

A Muslim terrorist stabbed four people at a train station near Munich while screaming, “Allahu Akbar”. In between proclaiming the glory of Allah, he also shouted that his victims were all “unbelievers”. A woman heard him say, “Infidel, you must die”.

The German authorities came to the inescapable conclusion that the attack had nothing to do with Islam. Instead the Muslim terrorist had been “mentally ill” and was probably not even fit to stand trial. The Koran wasn’t to blame. It was the fault of his psychological problems.

In Russia, Muslim monster Gyulchekhra Bobokulova beheaded a 4-year-old girl and displayed her head in the street while shouting, “Allahu Akbar. I hate democracy. I am a terrorist. I want you dead.” Faced with these bafflingly inscrutable statements, the authorities blamed mental illness.

Dems Fuming as Trump Remakes Federal Judiciary By Michael Walsh

Meanwhile, back at the Swamp:

In the weeks before Donald J. Trump took office, lawyers joining his administration gathered at a law firm near the Capitol, where Donald F. McGahn II, the soon-to-be White House counsel, filled a white board with a secret battle plan to fill the federal appeals courts with young and deeply conservative judges.

Mr. McGahn, instructed by Mr. Trump to maximize the opportunity to reshape the judiciary, mapped out potential nominees and a strategy, according to two people familiar with the effort: Start by filling vacancies on appeals courts with multiple openings and where Democratic senators up for re-election next year in states won by Mr. Trump — like Indiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania — could be pressured not to block his nominees. And to speed them through confirmation, avoid clogging the Senate with too many nominees for the district courts, where legal philosophy is less crucial.

Nearly a year later, that plan is coming to fruition. Mr. Trump has already appointed eight appellate judges, the most this early in a presidency since Richard M. Nixon, and on Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to send a ninth appellate nominee — Mr. Trump’s deputy White House counsel, Gregory Katsas — to the floor.

Republicans are systematically filling appellate seats they held open during President Barack Obama’s final two years in office with a particularly conservative group of judges with life tenure. Democrats — who in late 2013 abolished the ability of 41 lawmakers to block such nominees with a filibuster, then quickly lost control of the Senate — have scant power to stop them.

Gee, that’s too damn bad. As I wrote at the time, the Harry Reid Democrats were acting like a party that thought the fix was in, and that they would never lose another election for a long, long time. Oops. CONTINUE AT SITE

MORRIS “MOE” BERG -CATCHER, COACH AND SPY

Morris “Moe” Berg (March 2, 1902 – May 29, 1972), was a baseball catcher and later coach in the Major League. Berg graduated from Princeton University and Columbia Law School. He was a polyglot with scholarly interests in history.

In 1934 during a trip to Japan, ostensibly to play in baseball demonstrations, Berg was able to surreptitiously film Tokyo City harbor. As spy he traveled in Europe to gather intelligence on resistance groups and the German nuclear program.

During World War 2 Berg traveled throughout Europe gathering intelligence on partisan groups and German nuclear programs.

At great risk as a Jew, Berg spent parts of 1944 and 1945 in Germany, helping arrange for the capture of several prominent German atomic scientists by U.S. troops before the Russians got them. At war’s end, Berg was offered the Medal of Merit, the highest award given to civilian in the war effort, but he modestly declined it. His sister accepted on his behalf.

He died in May 1972. His remains were cremated and the ashes spread on Mount Scopus in Israel.

His baseball card is displayed in the CIA.

The other DiMaggio got lots of hits…also served in World War II By Silvio Canto, Jr.

One of my favorite things is to read about baseball players who served in World War II, from Bob Feller in the U.S. Navy to Jerry Coleman in the U.S. Marines.

How do you get any attention when your brother Joe is the best paid player in the game and your teammate playing right field is arguably the best hitter ever?

Well, that’s the story of Dominic Paul DiMaggio, who was born in San Francisco and actually wanted to be a chemical engineer. Eventually, baseball caught up with engineering, and Dom played in the majors with his famous brother Joe and other brother Vince.

The story goes like this:

Dominic made his major-league debut on April 16, 1940, and had little trouble adjusting to the big leagues, hitting .301 and scoring 81 runs in 108 games in his rookie season. Going into spring training, Dom was concerned that he might not get to play because Boston was loaded with good outfielders: Ted Williams in left, Doc Cramer in center, Lou Finney in right, and Joe Vosmik, a 10-year veteran, as backup.

But Dom, at age 23, had a solid spring and was able to beat out Finney, a .300 hitter the year before, for the starting right fielder’s job. Later in the season, Dom was moved to center field, and there he remained for the rest of his career. The Red Sox showed confidence in DiMaggio by trading Doc Cramer to the Senators during the offseason.

Dom had fond memories of the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry, and especially the media interest in the DiMaggio brothers in center field. He recalled that the newspapers made a big deal out of the first time in 1940 when the Yankees visited Boston for a five-game series.

Dom had 11 hits to Joe’s nine, or as Dom said, “Twenty hits for the family in one series.”

One week later in New York, Joe advised his younger brother to move back because the ball carried well in that part of the ballpark. The next day Dom, taking Joe’s advice, was able to run down a fly ball hit 460 feet to deep center – off the bat of brother Joe.

Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and baseball had to take a back seat: