RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2019/12/01/gm-crops-like-golden-rice-will-save-the-lives-of-hundreds-of-thousands-of-children/

Any day now, the government of Bangladesh may become the first country to approve the growing of a variety of yellow rice by farmers known as Golden Rice. If so, this would be a momentous victory in a long and exhausting battle fought by scientists and humanitarians to tackle a huge human health problem—a group that’s faced a great deal of opposition by misguided critics of genetically modified foods.

Golden yellow rice ear

Compare two plants. Golden Rice and Golden Promise barley are two varieties of crop. The barley was produced in the 1960s by bombarding seeds with gamma rays in a nuclear facility to scramble their genes at random with the aim of producing genetic mutations that might prove to be what geneticists used to call “hopeful monsters.” It is golden only in name, as a marketing gimmick, with sepia-tinged adverts helping to sell its appeal to organic growers and brewers. Despite the involvement of atomic radiation in its creation, it required no special regulatory approval or red tape before being released to be grown by farmers in Britain and elsewhere. It went almost straight from laboratory to field and proved popular and profitable.

Golden rice

Golden Rice, by contrast, was produced in the 1990s by carefully inserting just two naturally occurring genes known to be safe—from maize and from a common soil bacterium—into a rice plant, disturbing no other genes. It is quite literally golden: its yellow color indicates that it has beta carotene in it, the precursor of vitamin A. It was developed as a humanitarian, non-profit project in an attempt to prevent somewhere between 200,000 and 700,000 people, many of them children, dying prematurely every year in poor countries because of vitamin A deficiency. (Vitamin A deficiency causes children to go blind and lose immune function.) Yet the rice has been ferociously opposed by opponents of GM foods and, partly as a result, has been tied up in red tape for 20 years, preventing it from being grown. One study in 2008 calculated that in India alone 1.38 million person-years of healthy life had been lost for every year the crop has been delayed.

Golden Rice was the brainchild of two scientists, Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer, aimed at helping the 250 million children—predominantly in Asia—who subsist mainly on rice and suffer from vitamin A deficiency. Telling the parents of these children to grow vegetables (most don’t have land), or distributing vitamin capsules—the preferred alternative of some environmental activists—has not proved remotely practical.

Potrykus hit upon the idea of awakening the molecular machinery in the seed of a rice plant—it is active in the leaves—to make vitamin A while casting around for something he could do to help the world towards the end of his career. Within a few years, and with Beyer’s help, he had succeeded. With additional assistance from scientists at the agricultural company Syngenta, organized by Adrian Dubock, they eventually produced a version of Golden Rice that was sufficiently rich in beta carotene to supply all the vitamin A a person needs. (Dubock wrote about the development of Golden Rice here.) With some difficulty, they cleared the many intellectual property hurdles, getting firms to waive their patents so that the rice could be sold or given away. Potrykus and Beyer insisted that the technology be donated free to benefit children suffering from vitamin A deficiency and Syngenta gave up its right to commercialize the product even in rich countries.

Given the scale of human suffering Golden Rice could address, there may be no better example of a purely philanthropic project in the whole of human history. Yet some misguided environmental activists still oppose Golden Rice to this day.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/12/04/thousands-of-brazilians-take-part-in-israeli-

Thousands of Brazilians gathered on Sunday at Sao Paulo’s Estaiada Bridge to take part in a popular Israeli social musical initiative held for the first time in Latin America.

The Koolulam project centers around mass singing events in which large groups of non-professionals come together “from all walks of life to do one thing: stop everything for a few hours and just sing,” according to its Facebook page.

The group in Brazil, comprised of Jews and non-Jews, sang “Tempos Modernos,” or “Modern Times,” a famous Brazilian song from the 1980s composed and sung by Lulu Santos, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported.

The show includes a rehearsal of one song led by a conductor and performed by the audience members, who are given music sheets with the lyrics and divided into different voices. The final performance is filmed, edited and posted online.

Conductor Ben Yaffet said about the experience, “Participants go through a creative process surrounded by a sense of unity and belonging rarely achieved in our daily lives.”

Producer Jussara Gontow added, “Koolulam’s main goal is to bring together strangers who have no singing experience and provoke an innovative, creative, sensory and unforgettable musical moment. Children, youth, adults and the elderly become artists.”

Koolulam, established in 2017, has been performed in Israel, the United States, Canada and South Africa.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/shouldnt-take-tragedy-get-jihadis-streets/

It was one of those glittering frosty mornings in Cambridge on Monday, the kind of day that makes you glad to be alive. It only added to the terrible poignancy of the gathering in Market Square to mark the deaths of Jack Merritt, 25, and Saskia Jones, 23.

Some of my friends’ kids, who had known Jack socially (“he was popular, really lovely”), were there to lay flowers. The minute’s silence went on and on as if returning to the normal babble of life were intolerable. In a chilling irony, the two young criminologists had been murdered at a conference to mark five years of Learning Together, a programme for students and prisoners, by one of the very men who had benefited from Jack and Saskia’s shared passion for rehabilitation.

Usman Khan was let out of jail last December on licence after serving only eight years, because his sentence had been reduced (by Lord Leveson) on appeal. A crazy change in the law meant that the release was automatic. Khan didn’t need to appear before the parole board, although the judge at his original trial had been clear that this cunning fanatic should not be released if he posed a continuing danger to the public.

Now wearing an electronic tag, Khan was given permission to travel from his home in Staffordshire to the event at Fishmongers’ Hall, even though he was once part of a terrorist group that had planned to blow up the London Stock Exchange, and the beautiful livery hall lay right next to London Bridge, scene of a horrific attack in 2017.

Did alarm bells really not ring? I’m afraid not.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15240/norway-free-speech-koran

Norwegian police chief Marie Benedicte Bjørnland is unable to rid from her mind the certainty that mistreating a copy of the Koran is wrong and that she and her fellow flatfoots should, under some statute or other, have the power to do something about it. In short, for the Norwegian police, the Koran is, in a way, as holy as it is for Muslims.

Once again, one was reminded of the cartoon crisis, when the Norwegian diplomatic corps saw it as urgent to apologize to authoritarian governments for whatever is left in Norway of individual liberty.

A teacher at the school explained that she had “made a conscious decision not to buy napkins with ‘Merry Christmas’ written on them” or to use a red tablecloth or red tree ornaments because “certain religions are very sensitive” and care needs to be taken “not to offend anyone.”

The Norwegian government has recently spent well over $100,000 to convert churches in Stavanger and Skien into mosques and is kicking in a huge sum of taxpayer money for the construction of a mega-mosque in Bergen with, according to journalist and political activist Hege Storhaug, “open ties to extremism.”

Recently I wrote here about how, on November 16, the group Stop Islamization of Norway (Stopp Islamisering av Norge – SIAN) set fire to a copy of the Koran in a public square in Kristiansand, only to have the fire doused pronto by a group of 30 or more police officers. It later emerged that they were under secret orders from the chief of the Norwegian police, Marie Benedicte Bjørnland, not just to put out any such fire but to prevent SIAN members from committing any such act.

Bjørnland defended her orders by citing the so-called “racism clause” of Norway’s criminal law, and the Minister of Justice, Jøran Kallmyr, stood behind her, making the baffling statement that while burning a Koran was not illegal, it could (depending on how you translated his words) “become” or “morph into” a crime.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/a_womans_murder_reignites_visions_of_frances_antisemitism.html

Kobili Traore, 29, a Muslim immigrant to France, killed Sarah Halim, 65, his Jewish neighbor, while armed French police stood outside her door, listened to her anguished screams, and did not respond until she was thrown off her balcony to her death.

Sarah Halim was the mother of three, a physician, and a kindergarten teacher.  She had long feared Traore.  Her death was a minor item in the French media.

The French government is refusing to prosecute Traore for his crime because he was high on cannabis and deemed not responsible for his actions.

If Traore had run over someone while drinking, he most certainly would be held responsible, for France has some of the strictest drunk driving laws in Europe.  Drinking does not mitigate one’s responsibility for vehicular homicide.

Whether that would apply if the driver were Muslim and the victim were Jewish, however, now seems a fair question.  Since 2003, twelve Jews have been killed in France for being Jews.  Their assailants were Muslims.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15234/turkey-fake-secularism

“Everyone is equal before the law regardless of his language, race, sex, color, political opinion, philosophy, religious belief, sect…” — Turkish Constitution, Article 10.

Why was the teacher suspended? Simple — even though Turkish officials cannot officially say what got unmasked as an open secret. The Conscious Teachers Association stated: “It is unacceptable that a teacher of religious culture in a country where 90% of the people are Muslim is not Muslim herself”.

If a Muslim Turkish teacher were suspended in Christian-majority Germany because he is Muslim, they would turn the world upside down. They would rush to the European Court of Human Rights decrying religious discrimination. But in Turkey, religious discrimination against non-Muslims is fine because Turkey is 90% Muslim.

A century ago, Christians made up 20% of Turkey’s population. Today they are at just 0.2%. But the Turkish mindset is still fearful of a handful of fellow citizens belonging to a different religion.

In theory, Turkey has a secular regime. Its constitution dictates the state and its institutions to be at equal distance to every faith, including no faith. In theory, discrimination based on religious belief is a criminal offense. Turkey’s Islamist strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said he is at equal distance to every faith, and that he is against “religious nationalism”, and he told the media at the White House on November 13 that Turkey would restore damaged churches in Syria.

In reality, however, Erdoğan and his Islamist governance stand as an excellent example to illustrate how political Islam cannot be secular.

The 2019 annual report by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) concluded that the Turkish government continues to discriminate against the minority Alevi community, and interfere in the affairs of what remains of the country’s historic Armenian and Greek Orthodox populations.

https://wp.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/

I attach four articles below (three from today, one from yesterday) on Iran, Iraq, Libya and China. There are extracts first for those who don’t have time to read them in full.

In the first piece, the New York Times finally reports that up to “450 people, and possibly more, were killed in four days of intense violence after the gasoline price increase was announced on Nov. 15, with at least 2,000 wounded and 7,000 detained.”

I attach this piece not because it is news to readers of this Middle East dispatch list, but to note that the New York Times is finally reporting that “Iran is experiencing its deadliest political unrest since the Islamic Revolution 40 years ago.”

The BBC has also finally begun to report that it is Iran, not Iraq, that has been coordinating the shooting dead of hundreds of pro-democracy protestors in neighboring Iraq these past weeks.

The failure of these two influential news organizations to report news in the Middle East accurately is part of a long-standing pattern of downplaying or appeasing the crimes of the Islamic regime.

In fact the New York Times, late as ever, is behind with the figures. At least 600 have been shot dead in Iran according to reliable reports.

Meanwhile (as not reported in the NY Times) the head of the feared Iranian Revolutionary Guards, General Qasem Soleimani, who controls large parts of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon on behalf of the Iranian regime, and also financed and directed last month’s Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket attacks on Israel, is ready to pick a new puppet prime minister for Iraq:

http://www.shafaaq.com/en/iraq-news/sheikh-ali-controllers-in-iraq-submitted-three-candidates-to-soleimani-waiting-for-his-approval/

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/iranian-koran-scholar-apply-koran-533-protesters-andrew-bostom/

Abolfazl Bahrampour, is a prominent Iranian Koran scholar, and author of the widely respected “One Volume Commentary on the Koran,” (in Farsi, Qom, 2007). Interviewed on Iran’s state run television network during its daily “Eastern Sun” program, Tuesday, November 26, 2019, Bahrampour condemned those protesting Iran’s oppressive theocratic regime, en masse, as “Moharabeh”—enemies of Allah, who sew “corruption” of an Islamic societal order. Moharabeh is a standard allegation leveled against Iranian protesters, who are then routinely sentenced to death. 

Bahrampour’s fulmination advocated (video) the protesters’ appropriate Koranic punishment—per Koran 5:33.

They should be tortured to death (i.e., crucified), not just simply killed. It is the exact meaning of the verse (Koran 5:33), Our Allamah (Muslim religious scholars and authorities) are good interpreters of the Koran…if they’ve (the protesters) been dealt with in such ways, they wouldn’t dare to protest again…And they should be punished and executed publicly and where the crime was actually committed…their hands a feet should be cut off on oppsote sides in the worst way possible…

Here is the verbatim translation of Koran 5:33:

“Indeed, the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] corruption is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land. That is for them a disgrace in this world; and for them in the Hereafter is a great punishment.”

Radio Farda reported that even an Iranian regime cleric, Ayatollah Kazem Qazizade, allegedly dissented from Bahrampour’s draconian, if Sharia-sanctioned punishment.

Notwithstanding Ayatollah Qazizade’s contention, Koran expert Bahrampour’s understanding of Koran 5:33, and its potential application to the recently arrested protesters, is entirely consistent with that of the most authoritative modern Shiite Koranic commentator, Allameh Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Tabatabai (d. 1981), and his gloss on this verse.

https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/politics-current-affairs/2019/12/the-moderates-who-turn-a-blind-eye-to-jeremy-corbyns-anti-semitism/

Last week, Richard Evans, the eminent historian of Nazi Germany whose testimony was a deciding factor in the trial of the Holocaust denier David Irving, announced on Twitter that he would be voting for Labor in the UK’s upcoming election. Evans offered the caveat that “the failure to deal with anti-Semitism in the party makes me very angry”—but wasn’t enough to change his vote. Since then, spurred in part by an open letter from the historian Anthony Julius, Evans has evidently changed his mind. But, writes Stephen Daisley, his original position is all too typical of many of Labor’s moderate supporters:

[T]he Corbyn moment, counterintuitively, is not the story of far-left anti-Semitism but of liberal collaboration, of those who know in their gut this is wrong but deploy a series of strategies to avoid, minimize, invert, excuse, and deny what is happening. Extremists have always believed these things, but liberals have made it acceptable to air them within the mainstream.

There is a nexus of complicity among anti-Semites, their defenders and amplifiers, and those who fail to resist [what Ruth Wisse has termed] “the organization of politics against the Jews.” It includes those who, though awake to the evils of anti-Semitism, will still vote, campaign, and stand for an institutionally anti-Semitic party. Some rationalize this as acting for the greater good—securing more money for the vulnerable or an end to cruel cuts in benefits. In doing so, they define the good as something greater than mere comfort and security for Jews and juxtapose, in telling ways, Jews’ welfare and that of the poor.

This nexus rests on two instincts: one fundamental to Labor politics and the other an import from progressive identity theory. The Labor impulse is home to a burning certainty that politics is a struggle between good and evil in which one side is the Elect and the other demonic. This is why Labor supporters have vilified Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis’s [wholly unprecedented decision to write an article condemning Labor]. Can’t he see Labor is on the side of the angels and the Tories are foot soldiers of wickedness? If not, it must be because he, too, is from the ranks of the reprobates.

The other conviction, born of the Jew-exclusionary theories of racism that took hold in the universities in the 1980s and on the broader left more recently, is that anti-Semitism is a lesser form of racism because Jews are beneficiaries of “white privilege.” . . . [I]ntersectionality only intersects with Jews on its own terms.