RUTHFULLY YOURS

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

New target for cancer treatments. Researchers at Israel’s Bar Ilan University have discovered a new enzyme called FerT, which exists only in the energy-generating mitochondria of cancer cells. When the enzyme was targeted in lab tests, the malignant cells were unable to produce energy and died.
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/on-campus/israeli-scientists-discover-new-enzyme-to-destroy-in-metatastic-cancer-cells/2017/10/24/

US approval for Leukemia treatment. Following a Priority Review, the US FDA has approved Israel TEVA’s Leukemia treatment, TRISENOX® (arsenic trioxidec). Trisenox is to be used in combination with tretinoin for treatment of recently-diagnosed low-risk adults with acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL).
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/us-news/fda-approves-teva-leukemia-treatment/2018/01/15/

Lymphoma treatment approved. I reported previously (3rd Sep) on the US takeover of Israeli biotech Kite for $12 billion. The US FDA has now approved Kite’s Yescarta treatment for adults with relapsed or refractory large B-cell lymphoma. The treatment uses Israeli-developed CAR-T therapy from the patient’s own T-cells.
http://www.jns.org/news-briefs/2017/10/20/israeli-developed-breakthrough-cancer-drug-receives-fda-approval

Stem cell treatment inhibits cancer. I’ve reported previously (18 times) on Israeli biotech Pluristem’s PLX stem cell treatment for many life-threatening conditions. Recent lab trials with modified PLX cells showed significant inhibitory effect on various lines of breast, colorectal, kidney, liver, lung, muscle and skin cancers.
http://www.pluristem.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/PLX_Cancer_Publication_final_isa.pdf
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-18428-1

Successful trials of implant to prevent OAB. (TY Atid-EDI) I reported previously (July 2016) that the minimally invasive RENOVA leg implant from Israel’s BlueWind to treat Overactive Bladder (OAB) had been granted European approval. Recent trials show that device gave over 50% improvement to 71% of participants.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bluewind-medical-announces-the-publication-of-breakthrough-results-for-bluewind-renova-implantable-tibial-nerve-neuromodulator-668016233.html
http://www.bluewindmedical.com/products

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas launched into a long-winded diatribe last Sunday against President Trump and against Israel’s legitimate right to exist as a Jewish state. Abbas called President Trump’s decision on Jerusalem a “slap in the face” and threatened that the Palestinians “will slap back.” Abbas declared, “Politically, Jerusalem is our capital; in our religion, it is our capital; geographically, it is our capital.” As for Israel, Abbas claimed that “Israel is a colonialist project that has nothing to do with Jews. The Jews were used as a tool under the concept of the promised land — call it whatever you want. Everything has been made up.”

Abbas even insisted that Great Britain apologize and pay reparations for the 100-year-old Balfour Declaration, which had stated British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

One is tempted to agree with Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who said that Abbas had “lost his senses.” However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was closer to the mark when he observed that Abbas “tore off the mask” of feigned moderation and revealed the “root” of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians – the Palestinians’ “continuous refusal to recognize the Jewish state in any borders.”

Abbas used his 2½-hour speech to the PLO Central Council to falsify history with anti-Semitic rhetoric worthy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. One problem he has, however, is in reconciling his own current brand of anti-Semitism in defense of an independent Palestinian state with, for example, the brand of anti-Semitism put forth by an Arab leader in 1937, who claimed that the notion of an independent Palestine was a Zionist plot. Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi submitted the following statement in 1937 to the British Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Palestine: “There is no such country [as Palestine]! ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries, part of Syria. ‘Palestine’ is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it.”

Palestinian boss Mahmoud Abbas recently declared that Israel is “a colonial enterprise that has nothing to do with Jewishness.” Moses, King David and thousands of years of Jewish history would disagree. Israel and the Jews are part of the story of human civilization. Over 50% of the human race has a holy book that tells of the Jewish journey to Israel. That includes Mohammed’s own copy of the Koran.

Israel isn’t a “colonial enterprise.” Palestine is.

Anyone who wants to find out where the name Israel comes from can open the Book of Genesis 32:29. The story even appears in Islamic hadiths. But where does “Palestine” really come from?

Palestine isn’t a Hebrew or Arabic word. The Greeks used it to describe the area. And when the Romans and their Arab mercenaries repressed the indigenous Jewish population, they renamed it all Palestine.

Palestine, after the Philistines: but why did the Greeks and Romans name the area after the Philistines?

The Philistines were one of the Greek origin sea peoples who had originally invaded and colonized the area. The Jewish resistance to Philistine colonialism is chronicled in the histories of Samson, King Saul and King David. It was natural for the Greek and Roman colonies that the Jews of the Second Temple era clashed with to use “Palestine”, the name associated with earlier colonies, to refer to their new colonies.

That latest phase of Greek colonialism led to an extended conflict between the Persian Empire and Greco-Roman civilization. The Romans made extended use of Arab mercenaries and rulers to secure their dominions. One such ruler was Herod, the son of an Idumean father and a Nabatean Arab mother, (according to the Greek historian Strabo they were both Arabic peoples), who repressed the Jews.

The eventual decline and fall of the Roman and Persian empires made way for the Islamic conquests of the region. But the Islamic bandit hordes had no original ideas. Their religion was a hodgepodge of Judaism, Christianity, assorted pagan beliefs and Mohammed’s violent fantasies. The rest of their culture they took wholesale from the Greeks. This game of historical Idiocracy ended with a collection of Arab colonists who call themselves “Palestinians” and claim to be descended from… somebody.

In Germany, Abbas declared that, “the nation of Palestine, throughout its long history, has been a beacon of generosity, and our people are an extension of the 3,500-year-old Canaanite civilization.” The Palestinian Authority that the unelected dictator runs was created in 1993. There was never any such independent country before that. And inquiring minds would love to know what an Islamic terrorist group and the Arab clans it oversees have in common with the Canaanite civilization. Fire, the wheel?

But then, Abbas also insisted that, “Mohammed the Prophet was a Palestinian”. According to Islamic tradition, Mohammed was an Adnanite Arab from Arabia. They claim descent from Ishmael and Abraham. That means they aren’t Canaanites. And a number of the Arab clans who make up the “Palestinians” do have their origins in Arabia. For a brief, shining moment, Abbas was telling the truth.

Previously, Abbas had also claimed that Jesus was a Palestinian. If you’re keeping track, that means the Palestinians are Canaanites, Arabs and Jews. That certainly covers a lot of historical bases.

But we’re just getting started.

Economic indicators for Israel showed another successful year in 2017 as, for the first time ever, Israel’s GDP per capita has surpassed that of major industrialized countries such as Britain, Japan and France.

http://en.mida.org.il/2018/01/15/israel-successful-powerhouse-collapsing-middle-east/

Israel stands out among the nations that won their independence after the Second World War. Despite facing more challenges than virtually any other country, Israel has transformed from a poor and fragile socialist backwater to a first world Start-Up nation of cutting-edge technologies and knowledge during seven brief decades, while fighting for its existence.

The failures of the Arab boycott and later the Boycott Divestment Sanction (BDS) campaign movement to destroy Israel’s economy are no less spectacular than the Muslim Arab failures to defeat Israel in the military battlefields. Israel’s economy is far stronger today than when BDS was launched in 2005.

The Economist publishes an annual global report with numerous data on the countries of the world. In its newly released report, Israel’s GDP per capita has, for the first time ever, surpassed $40,000. According to the Economist’s data, Israel’s GDP per capita grew from $38,127 in 2016 to $44,019 in 2017.

Israel’s economy expanded by 4.4 % during 2017, the highest growth rate among advanced economies. By contrast, the GDP per capita of France was almost $41,000 and nearly $40,000 for Japan.

Private consumer spending rose 3.0% in 2017, 1.1% per capita. Per capita spending on semi-durable goods (clothing etc.) grew 4.7%. Per capita spending on current consumption (housing, food, services, etc.) was up 2.2%. The account deficit in the government sector totaled NIS 8 billion in 2017, making up 1.1% of the GDP, down from NIS 15.6 billion in 2016.

The contrast between first world Israel and the surrounding third world Arab world is larger today than ever before. Israel’s GDP per capita is almost 20 times the GDP per capita of impoverished Egypt and five times larger than semi-developed Lebanon.

Like any human project, Israel is a never-ending work in progress and much work remains to integrate Haredi Jews and Israeli Arabs into Israel’s knowledge economy.

Properly addressing Israel’s high costs of living requires more economic and legislative reforms and breaking up inefficient oligopolies that keep the prices artificially high. However, by any standard, the reborn Jewish state is a remarkable success story that overcame tremendous odds and obstacles.

According to Professor Jonathan Adelman, author of the book The Rise of Israel – a history of a revolutionary state, Israel’s current success was far from certain and required two Zionist revolutions.

The first Zionist revolution was Socialist democratic and lasted roughly from the first modern Aliyah in 1882 to the defeat of the Israeli Labor party in the 1977 national election.

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is accelerating efforts to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and has decided to modify an existing property to accommodate the new mission that will open next year, U.S. officials said.

The U.S. won’t be building a new structure, in a shift from what Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and others from the Trump administration have said in describing the move recently. Mr. Tillerson has also said previously that the move is at least three years away.

“The secretary’s primary focus is on security,” said Steve Goldstein, undersecretary of state for diplomacy and public affairs. “We will not be moving to a new facility…we are going to retrofit a building,” which will be ready in 2019.

People familiar with the plans say officials intend to reconfigure portions of an existing U.S. consular facility in West Jerusalem, an area Israel has held since 1948, so that it can be designated as the U.S. Embassy.

“There is no plan for anything temporary,” Mr. Goldstein said.

Jerusalem is contested by Israel and Palestinians.

While a 1995 U.S. law requires officials to move the embassy to Jerusalem, Mr. Trump’s predecessors routinely have exercised their statutory power to postpone the project.

Mr. Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December and directed the State Department to begin to move the U.S. embassy there.

State Department officials at first said this would involve locating property and building a new facility, which could cost as much as $1 billion and take several years. Under that scenario, it might not have opened until a second Trump term or beyond.

Many career diplomats and others have been dismayed by Mr. Trump’s decision, which some believe has infuriated Palestinians while producing no obvious benefit to American diplomatic objectives.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, now in the fourth year of his four-year term, delivered a speech to the Central Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization that directs a curse at President Trump, insults the U.S. ambassadors to Israel and the United Nations, and denies that Israel has anything to do with Judaism.. The New York Times responded that Abbas “shied away from urging the kind of provocative acts, like ending the Palestinian Authority’s security cooperation with Israel or disbanding the authority itself, that could raise the costs of occupation for Israel and shake officials in Jerusalem and Washington.”

Many Google sources on the speech included the curse that Abbas directed at President Trump: “‘may your house be demolished.” ABC News included the curse and also a call from the PLO to suspend recognition of Israel and end security cooperation with the Jewish state.

The Times acknowledged that Abbas “attacked” President Trump for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, along with David Friedman, U.S. ambassador to the Jewish state, and U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley. It did not provide readers with the language of the curse, which drew laughter from Abbas’s audience, according to media reports. At the Times, attacks on President Trump and members of his administration apparently are not to be considered “provocative acts.”

The Times also reported that Abbas indicated he would never meet with Ambassador Friedman. Curiously, Abbas missed the chance to bolster his attack on Friedman by way of the Times, which, in a December 16, 2016 editorial, called Friedman “A Dangerous Choice for Ambassador to Israel.” The Times also quoted Abbas’s comment that Palestinian reaction to administration policy on Jerusalem would “be worse, but not with high heels.” It is not to be expected that Abbas will be cited by the Times for making a provocative “sexist” comment.

The Times further reported that Abbas, in the course of his two-hour speech, “delivered broadsides against Hamas, other Arab leaders[,] and Britain.”

It is not clear why the Times omitted the anti-Trump curse from its account of the Abbas speech (whose complete text seems to have not yet been posted on the internet). After all, would a Times columnist like Charles M. Blow have difficulty with the curse directed at President Trump?

Mr. Revivi is chief foreign envoy of the Yesha Council, which represents the 450,000 Israeli residents of Judea and Samaria.

‘Today is the day that the Oslo Accords end,” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared Sunday. “We will not accept for the U.S. to be a mediator, because after what they have done to us”—namely, recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital—“a believer shall not be stung twice in the same place.”

The 82-year-old Palestinian leader cursed President Trump: “Yekhreb beitak!” (literally, “May your house be demolished”). He called Ambassadors Nikki Haley and David Friedman “a disgrace.” He denounced the British for enabling the establishment of a Jewish State, and he described Zionism as “a colonial enterprise that has nothing to do with Jewishness,” and whose real purpose is to “wipe out Palestinians from Palestine.”

Two weeks ago President Trump threatened to stop funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which subsidizes the descendants of Palestinians who left their homes 70 years ago, to which Mr. Abbas replied: “Damn your money!” On Tuesday the administration announced it would withhold $65 million of the planned $125 million.

Mr. Abbas’s tirade shocked the diplomatic world, especially those who regarded him as a statesman. One thing that did not seem to occur to Mr. Abbas was that if Oslo has failed, so has the Palestinian Authority, a corrupt fief that subsists solely on international aid and can barely pay its own personnel. The Palestinian Authority has monopolized peace negotiations for a quarter-century with no progress. Instead, it has taken its place in the multibillion-dollar “peace” industry, made up of bureaucrats, diplomats and pundits whose perspectives haven’t changed since the early 1990s.

The jihadist aim is to isolate Israel politically; to influence political leaders, public opinion, international institutions and international organizations so that on the day their planned offensive begins, no one will be there to support Israel and the Jews. The Palestinian Authority, the PLO and the Arab/Muslim states will be unhampered to do what Hitler was unable to do in historic Palestine — make it Judenrein (free of Jews).

Terror is “to achieve Palestinian political goals, to influence Israeli politics, to favor a given Israeli candidate for the post of Prime Minister, to compel the Israeli government to conceal more land, to prevent a final peace settlement by maintaining a state of conflict that could eventually lead to total war, to erode Israeli and American resolve and to demonstrate to Arab population that peace is not an option and that the existence of the Jews on their land cannot be recognized”. Some of the attacks occurred just when foreign representatives landed in Israel, “to prevent the revival of the peace talks.” Mr. Jason Greenblatt should take that into consideration.

The same jihadist war is also underway against the Americans and all “infidels”: Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Hindus, Buddhists, and in a general manner all those who do not believe in the “religion of truth”, namely Islam; and against those Muslims who compromise with such so-called infidels.

The critical question of why the Middle East seems unable to achieve peace has just been rigorously considered again, this time by Michael Calvo, an international lawyer, in an important new book, The Middle East and World War III: Why No Peace? It is worth being read by all political leaders, academics, journalists, students and anyone who wants to understand why there is no peace and what may happen.

The book analyzes why the Israeli-Palestinian/Arab/Muslim conflict has not been resolved, in spite of the Oslo Accords and many years of active involvement by the European Union, individual European states, the U.S., Russia and the United Nations.

The long-term Palestinian use of terror, for instance, looked at chronologically:

“to achieve Palestinian political goals, to influence Israeli politics, to favor a given Israeli candidate for the post of Prime Minister, to compel the Israeli government to conceal more land, to prevent a final peace settlement by maintaining a state of conflict that could eventually lead to total war, to erode Israeli and American resolve and to demonstrate to Arab population that peace is not an option and that the existence of the Jews on their land cannot be recognized”.

Some of the attacks occurred just when foreign representatives landed in Israel, “to prevent the revival of the peace talks.” Mr. Jason Greenblatt should take that into consideration.