https://jamieglazov.com/2019/12/04/katie-hopkins-they-plotted-to-behead-me/
When a female Jihadi wants your head as a wedding present.
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/294982/everyones-trying-to-get-nukes
For more than 50 years, Israel’s national security has been guided by the Begin Doctrine, named after the country’s sixth prime minister. It holds that no regional enemy committed to destroying the Jewish state can be allowed to obtain weapons of mass destruction. To that end, Israel’s air force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 and Syria’s al Kibar plutonium-producing facility in 2007.
Today’s cascade of nuclear technologies across the Middle East, however, is raising serious questions about Israel’s ability to enforce this mandate going forward. The debate over the Begin Doctrine’s viability will not only have a profound impact on Israel, but also on security in the broader Middle East. Israel has proven more than once to be the only regional player willing to curtail by force the spread of nuclear weapons to rogue states, despite the international opprobrium the Jewish state has reaped for its actions. But current concerns inside Israel reflect just how much the threat of nuclear proliferation has increased in recent years as the countries of the Middle East have changed and transformed the region.
Israel views Iran as by far the most likely regional power to acquire nuclear weapons in the near term and has openly vowed to use military force to stop it. But a slew of other Mideast countries, some nominally Israel’s allies or strategic partners, have also made significant advances in their nuclear programs. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan openly warned in September that Ankara could seek to develop atomic weapons in response to its changing relationship with the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto leader, Mohammed bin Salman, has said his country would match any nuclear technologies that Iran, Riyadh’s arch rival, acquires.
Israeli officials and analysts say that, as a result of these evolving threats, the tools required to enforce the Begin Doctrine will need to change. Israel deployed cyber weapons, in collaboration with the U.S., to attack Iran’s uranium-enrichment facilities in the late 2000s. The operation destroyed thousands of centrifuge machines, but Tehran’s overall nuclear-fuel production quickly returned to pace. Israel also signed on to the U.S. sanctions campaign that has used financial warfare to pressure Iran into giving up or constraining its nuclear activities. The strategy helped birth the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—the Obama-helmed Iran nuclear agreement between Tehran and world powers, which President Donald Trump pulled out of last year with the backing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Both leaders believed the deal offered, at best, only a short-term solution to the Iranian nuclear threat while forfeiting the sources of economic leverage that may have forced Iran to accept more permanent restraints.
But the standard tools of economic and military coercion, even including the high tech instruments of cyberwar, might not be enough any longer to prevent nuclear proliferation in the Middle East as countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia—both official U.S. strategic allies—grow their own nuclear programs. Israel has diplomatic relations with Turkey, which remains an active member of NATO and houses 50 American nuclear weapons at the U.S. military base in Incirlik. But the Israeli-Turkish relationship has been strained under Erdogan’s Islamist government and by conflicting approaches to the Syrian civil war on their respective borders. Israel has also developed a strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia, with the on-and-off foes, united by a common enemy, now sharing intelligence and technology to try and constrain Iran’s regional activities.
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.jns.org/opinion/why-do-they-hate-us/
Europeans, specifically those in the United Kingdom as they approach elections, “are reluctant to accept and admit that, despite all the Holocaust education and commemoration that’s taking place—and all the solemn declarations about having thoroughly learned the lessons of the past—anti-Semitism has returned in such strength.”
As part of an evening news segment on Dec. 2, Israel’s Channel 12 examined the panic among British Jews over the prospect that Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn could become the next prime minister of the United Kingdom. The broadcast focused on a small meeting of anti-Corbyn activists at the London home of a woman named Ida Simmons. Simmons had participated the previous week in a demonstration against Labour’s “Race and Faith Manifesto,” which denounces all forms of ethnic or religious discrimination, except those behind the very specific verbal and physical battery of Jews.
No surprise there.
In the first place, Corbyn—like his fellow anti-Semites the world over—denies that anti-Semitism is a particular, rather than general, form of hatred, deserving of a category all its own. Secondly, he uses his antipathy towards Israel as an excuse to enable what has become a shocking revival of the kind of anti-Semitism that had been taboo in Europe for decades after the Holocaust.
His self-described “friends” in Hamas and Hezbollah skip the pretense, boasting that their efforts to eliminate the Jewish state and to kill Jews everywhere derive from the same Divine commandment.
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/
