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ISRAEL

Another anti-Israel movie – from an Israeli. Jack Engelhard

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/24412?utm_source=activetrail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

Call me sentimental, but I prefer those big fat movies that celebrate the glory of Israel.

Pass the popcorn for epics like Paul Newman in “Exodus,” and Kirk Douglas in “Cast a Giant Shadow.”

I am still surprised to find that the screenplay for Leon Uris’s “Exodus” was written by Dalton Trumbo, a diehard leftist. I guess leftists were different back then. They had a heart. Nor was Trumbo Jewish, and I shudder to think how “Exodus” would have come out in the hands of a Jewish screenwriter. 

Many of these are so busy implanting moral equivalency into their scripts, like Tony Kushner for Spielberg’s “Munich,” that before you know it, the good guys become the bad guys. 

That’s where we seem to be with famed Israeli writer/director, Joseph Cedar. In partnership with another Israeli, and a Palestinian Arab, and through Israel’s Channel 12 Television, we get an HBO seriestitled, “Our Boys,” a real downer, and shown in 10 parts, so that not just once, but 10 times viewers across the world get to watch a Jewish filmmaker lick the dust and blaspheme his own people.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls the production “anti-Semitic,” and apparently that is a justified rebuke and review.

Jason Greenblatt, diplomat pushing Middle East peace plan, to leave Trump administration by Alex Pappas

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/jason-greenblatt-diplomat-pushing-middle-east-peace-plan-to-leave-trump-administration

President Trump on Thursday announced the departure of Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt from his administration as he commended the diplomat for his efforts to pursue peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Greenblatt, a former Trump Organization lawyer, has served as the president’s special representative for international negotiations and was tasked with developing a Middle East peace plan.

“After almost 3 years in my Administration, Jason Greenblatt will be leaving to pursue work in the private sector,” Trump said. “Jason has been a loyal and great friend and fantastic lawyer.”

The president continued, “His dedication to Israel and to seeking peace between Israel and the Palestinians won’t be forgotten. He will be missed. Thank you Jason!”

A senior administration official said Greenblatt has decided to return to New Jersey to be with his wife and six children.

“It has been the honor of a lifetime to have worked in the White House for over two and a half years under the leadership of President Trump,” Greenblatt said in a statement. “I am incredibly grateful to have been part of a team that drafted a vision for peace.”

Greenblatt worked in concert with White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, on the Middle East peace plan.

Clarifying the Palestine Saga Yoram Ettinger

https://bit.ly/2lYTD4F

The Palestinian leadership is rehashing the notion that Palestine has been Arab/Muslim from time immemorial. But, is such a claim consistent with historic documentation?

According to Brown University Prof. David Jacobson, “the Greek Palaistine and the Latin [Rome] Palaestina… appear to refer not to the Land of the Philistines [Pleshet in Hebrew], but to the Land of Israel…. The Philistines [Plishtim in Hebrew] arrived on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean from Greece or Cyprus in approximately the 13th century BCE…. The Israelites’ traditional foes, the Philistines lived in a small area along the Mediterranean coast south of what is today Tel Aviv, an area that embraced the five towns of Gaza [hometown of Delilah], Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gath [hometown of Goliath] and Ekron….

“As early as the Histories of Herodotus [the Greek founding father of Western historians] written in the second half of the 5th century BCE, the term Palaistine is used to describe not just the [Philistines’] geographical area, but the entire area between Phoenicia and Egypt – in other words, the Land of Israel [including the Judean Hills, referred to by some as the ‘West Bank’]…. Like Herodotus, Aristotle [along with his teacher, Plato, the founding fathers of Western philosophers] gives the strong impression that when he uses the term Palestine, he is referring to the Land of Israel…. In the 2nd century BCE, a Greek writer and historian Polemo of Ilium made a similar link between the people of Israel and Palestine….   

“The early 1st century Roman poet, Ovid, writes of ‘the seventh day feast [the Sabbath] that the Syrians of Palestine [the Hebrews] observe….’ Another Latin poet, Statius, and the writer Dio Chrysostom use ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinian’ in the same sense….
“Likewise the early 1st century CE Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, occasionally, uses the name Palestine when referring to the Land of Israel….

“’Palestine’ is the Greek equivalent of ‘Israel.’”  The Greek word ‘Palaistine’ is remarkably similar to the Greek ‘Palaistes’, meaning ‘wrestler’…. The name ‘Israel’ arose from the incident in which Jacob [the Patriarch] wrestled with an angel (Genesis 32-25-27).  Jacob received the name Israel because he wrestled successfully (sarita’ in Hebrew) with the Lord (El in Hebrew)…. 

Right from Wrong: A (Likud) party to remember A longtime champion of Likud Pride efforts on behalf of the party, he began his tribute to Cohen by lauding the country’s achievements. By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-from-Wrong-A-Likud-party-to-remember-600771

Just when I was beginning to wonder this week whether the wondrous paradoxes of Israeli society had been drowned to oblivion in pre-election sewage, I attended an event in Tel Aviv that restored my faith in the health of the country. It also reminded me of the reason I am a member of the Likud Party, headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and will be voting accordingly on September 17.

Netanyahu neither attended the event in question, however, nor was he even the focus of my attention on Tuesday evening. Of course, the fact that he has been keeping Iranian aggression at bay afforded me the luxury to take a short break from obsessing over and writing about the very real and present dangers along our borders.

No, this party was a tribute to Tel Aviv University linguist Dr. Evan Cohen, Netanyahu’s new foreign media adviser. It was a going-away gathering held by Likud Pride – the party’s LBGTQ faction that Cohen headed – to thank him for his years of devoted service to the group, and to welcome his successor, Oded Schwartzberg.

Originally slated for August 8, the party was canceled at the last minute due to the brutal murder that day of 19-year-old yeshiva student and IDF recruit Dvir Sorek, from the Judea and Samaria community of Ofra, at the hands of Palestinian terrorists. Like the rest of the country, Likud Pride was in mourning. It was clearly not an appropriate moment to celebrate new beginnings – no matter how starkly the stabbing attack manifested the need to keep a right-wing government in power.

After all, the Left still clings to the false premise that Palestinian terrorism is Israel’s fault. It thus continues to spread the lie that giving more land to the Palestinian Authority, which encourages and pays hefty stipends to terrorists, will make Israelis safe from stabbing, car-ramming, bombing and rocket attacks.

Israel’s Good and Bad New Realities By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/israel-new-alliances-dangerous-old-enemies/

New alliances with Arab nations are positive but unstable, and old enemies are most dangerous when in a weakened state.

One of the most radical changes in the labyrinth of the Middle East is the near cessation of the old formal hostility of the Arab nations to Israel. That does not mean that the destruction of the Jewish state is not still a commandment among hundreds of millions of Arab speakers throughout the Middle East in general and on the proverbial West Bank in particular.

Rather, a number of currents has convinced most of the Gulf monarchies, frontline Arab states such as Jordan and Egypt, and the other North African nations that of all the existential crises in the world threatening their regimes, Israel is no longer perceived as their font.

Instead, elemental dangers to Israel arise mostly from Iran, Iranian-backed Hezbollah in the badlands of Syria and Lebanon, and Turkey. Why this fundamental realignment?

One reason, of course, is Iran’s likely soon-to-be nuclear status. Iran detests Israel. But such hatred is relatively recent and dates from 1979 — unlike the ancient schisms between Shiite and Sunni, Persian and Arab, and the Straits of Hormuz versus the Persian Gulf.

Arab nations believe that a nuclear Iran will threaten them explicitly. They assume that a messianic Tehran is quite capable of carrying out what would be serial nuclear threats. And they are certain that such constant tensions would embolden Shiite minorities in their own states, much like millions of Eastern European Germans of the 1930s were suddenly deemed oppressed, and believed that they could be liberated only by eventual protection from and incorporation into Hitler’s ascendant Third Reich.

Voting against Israeli electoral apathy We Israelis are used to having our tax shekels spent on futile, top-down endeavors born of nanny-state committee meetings held to interpret and tackle societal phenomena. No wonder there’s a sense that voting won’t change anything. Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/voting-against-israeli-electoral-apathy/

An informal man-in-the-street survey broadcast on Monday evening on Israel’s Channel 12 revealed what everybody has been predicting: that voter turnout for the Sept. 17 Knesset elections is going to be low.

Israelis have been claiming for months that they “have nobody to vote for,” so the item wasn’t all that surprising. What was astonishing about it, however, was that—with a mere two weeks to go before the public heads to the polls to determine the makeup of the next government—not a single person interviewed in the short clip could remember when the elections are actually taking place. It is a level of apathy rarely seen in Israel—a country filled with news junkies and busybodies.

One might argue that such a small, on-the-fly sampling constitutes flimsy anecdotal evidence. It turns out, however, that research conducted by the Central Elections Committee backs it up with more reliable statistics. These indicate that voter turnout will be even less than the 68.46 percent that it was on April 9, the election that ended in a coalition impasse.

This is not the lowest Israeli voter turnout, by any means. The only election that has seen a higher turnout since 1999, when it was 78.7 percent, was in 2015, when it reached 72.36 percent. In 2003, it was 67.8 percent; in 2006, it was 63.5 percent; in 2009, it was 64.7 percent; and in 2013, it was 67.8 percent.

Exposing Physical and Intellectual Terrorism to Awaken the Oblivious The risks to free society are too high to remain timid or silent and let evil prevail. Dr. Shmuel Katz

Reprinted from IsraelNationalNews.com.

It is terrible that incidents like using cars to run over innocent children and other means of terror are still happening in Israel and around the world, and that so many oblivious individuals are not being informed about these events – and even if they get to know about them, they do not care.

They do not understand that once evil is unleashed, ALL people from ALL walks of life, will become its victims.

Unfortunately, terror today is taking two major forms. One is the physical attack, by all kinds of weapons which may include cars, knives, bullets, rockets, bombs, etc. The other one is the verbal attacks which intend to incite, malign, deceive, rewrite history and educate the oblivious to become the perpetrators of malicious action. These actions could be physical terrorism and/or no less aggressive non-violent terrorism, which includes Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.

Our fight against evil is relentless but there is too much uncontrolled evil to address with too few people fighting it. Therefore, it is imperative to educate as many people as possible with the correct information. This will help them join the effort to stand up against evil and expose the perpetrators of the deception, even if those perpetrators are members of Congress, University Professors, High School Teachers or any other person in important decision-making or educational positions.

The risks to free society are too high to remain timid or silent and let evil prevail.

Peace with Islam: The disquieting truth Victor Sharpe

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe

“Even if Israel shrank to one downtown city block in Tel Aviv, the Arab and Muslim world would still not truly recognize a Jewish state or agree to live with it in peace and harmony.”

“Much of the Islamic world now feels empowered, as perhaps never before, to seek global domination. This is the tangible and growing threat to the world; not man-made global warming.”

“What we have witnessed for far too long are Israeli and some world leaders constantly making endless concessions to the deceitful leaders of the terrorist crime family known as the Palestinian Authority.”

“Wherever the Muslim foot has once trod triumphal, that territory is forever regarded by them as Islamic. If such territory is lost to Muslims, then Allah has been diminished and the land must be retaken, however long it takes. Peace, then, is merely a mirage in the desert sands.”

In 2008 I wrote an article titled: “Forget Waiting for Peace.”

It is heartbreaking to look back now, in this year 2019, at what I feared would unfold for Israel those eleven long years ago.

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

Dear E-pals, I always post Michael Ordman’s good news from Israel separately. In spite of the libels and bashing this amazing democracy gets from the media and academia and the “ignoranti” of various boycott movements, Israel whose life is constantly endangered by well-armed enemies, works overtime to improve and save lives all over the world. What an accomplishment! rsk

 

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Preventing secondary brain tumors. (TY UWI) Up to 40% of cancer patients develop secondary brain tumors shortly after surgery to remove a primary tumor elsewhere in the body. Researchers at Tel Aviv University have shown that an intravenous injection of CpG-C (synthetic DNA material) can prevent these metastases forming.
https://www.israel21c.org/novel-immunotherapy-may-prevent-brain-metastases/
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2006859
 
New research into age-related immune failure. In lab tests on aging and the immune system, biologists at Israel’s Ben Gurion University have profiled over 24,000 T-Cells. They identified that 30% deteriorate during the aging process and could establish new areas of medical intervention to prevent age-related illnesses.
https://in.bgu.ac.il/en/pages/news/t_cells.aspx
 
Software to monitor cancer patients at home. I reported previously (see here) on Israeli startup Telesofia when it developed personalized medical videos. Now Israel’s Sheba Medical Center is to pilot Telesofia’s tele-medicine software for cancer patients at home to communicate with doctors about chemotherapy side effects.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/oncologist-startup-develop-software-that-monitors-cancer-patients-at-home/
 
Alzheimer’s treatment also benefits autistic children. Israeli researchers at Sheba Medical Center have found that a medication used to treat Alzheimer’s patients also has strong therapeutic effects on autistic children. 60 such children were given Donepezil and Cholin for six months and their language skills improved significantly.
https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/08/22/israeli-researchers-find-alzheimer-medications-may-help-treat-autistic-children/
 
US approval for blood pressure wristband monitor. Israel’s Biobeat develops wireless products (wristwatch and patch) to measure blood pressure, oxygenation, pulse, stroke volume and more. Both items sync data to the cloud, enabling remote monitoring. The US FDA has just given clearance to the combined products.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3769057,00.html   https://www.biobeat.cloud/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58_XlpvyfEs
 
A stable vaccine for malaria. Malaria kills half-a-million people annually. In this “Weizmann in Focus” video, Dave Doneson explains that current anti-malaria vaccines break down in hot climates. However, scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute redesigned the protein RH5 to enable the vaccine to be stored at room temperature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfcjyr94GM0
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/WeizmannCompass/sections/students/adi-goldenzweig
 
Hope for multiple myeloma patients. Thanks to Israeli discoveries and research, patients with the bone marrow cancer multiple myeloma are leading longer, better lives.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/267943
 

To European Leaders: Jewish Flesh Is Cheap by Guy Millière *****

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14786/europe-jewish-flesh-is-cheap

The Oslo Accords were based on the illusion that the PLO could totally change and suddenly become a “partner for peace”… It soon became clear that the Palestinian Authority was still the PLO: terrorist attacks quickly multiplied. The money received by the Palestinian Authority was used to continue incitement to murder and payments to incentivize it.

In 1967, a change of strategy took place. No one, the PLO decided, would speak of a “war for the destruction of Israel”. Instead, they would call it a “war of national liberation”. From then on, the PLO was presented as a “liberation movement”.

Arabs who had left Israel in 1948-49, many of whom remained in refugee camps, were defined as the “Palestinian people”; in this way were the Palestinian people invented. As PLO Executive Council member Zuheir Mohsen said in 1977: “The Palestinian people does not exist… Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people…”

The leaders of the Palestinian Authority have, in fact, never stopped resorting to “armed struggle”, the name they give to terrorism and murdering Jews. To “frustrate all the schemes of Zionism”, they invented the Palestinian people; their “struggle for national liberation” gave them international recognition. By renaming terrorism and murdering Jews “armed struggle”, they made their use of terrorism and murder acceptable. By signing the Oslo Accords, they could appear interested in peace without having to renounce terrorism. They could even demonize Israel and give it the image of a barbaric and cruel country while continuing to murder Jews.

“If you look at history… what ends conflicts is one side giving up…. and then it’s over…. in World War II, [the Germans] were forced to give up… and note how much they benefited by giving up.” — Daniel Pipes, historian, November 19, 2017.

August 7th. Israel. When Dvir Sorek, an 18-year-old student returned from Jerusalem to his school after having bought some books for his rabbis as an end-of-year gift, he was stabbed to death by two Arab terrorists.

As his funeral took place, while his father was delivering the eulogy, the inhabitants of the Arab village of Silwad, two miles North, to celebrate the murder, were setting off fireworks.

Sorek was apparently a peaceful teenager who had never hurt anyone. Among the books he brought was one by an Israeli left-wing writer, David Grossman, supporting the need to create a Palestinian state.

Sorek’s “fault” was to be a Jew.