RUTHFULLY YOURS

In one of the immortal lines of Godfather 2, mafia boss Michael Corleone discusses the fate of his brother, who betrayed him, with his enforcer.

“I don’t want anything to happen to him while my mother is alive,” Corleone said.

Message received.

The brother was murdered after their mother’s funeral.

Last week it was reported that the Obama administration has delivered a message to the Palestinian Authority. The administration has warned the PA that the US will veto any anti-Israel resolution brought before the UN Security Council before the US presidential elections on November 8.

Message received.

Open season on Israel at the Security Council will commence November 9. The Palestinians are planning appropriately.

Israel needs to plan, too. Israel’s most urgent diplomatic mission today is to develop and implement a strategy that will outflank President Barack Obama in his final eight weeks in power.

Lobbying the administration is pointless. Obama has waited eight years to exact his revenge on Israel for not supporting his hostile, strategically irrational policies. And he has no interest in letting bygones be bygones.

Before turning to what Israel must do, first we need to understand what Israel can do.

A good place to begin is by considering what just transpired at UNESCO, where twice in a week, UNESCO bodies resolved to erase 3,000 years of Jewish history in Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.

The fight that Israel waged at UNESCO is not the fight it needs to wage at the Security Council. The stakes at the Security Council are far higher.

Like the UN General Assembly, UNESCO’s decisions are non-binding declarations that have no legal or operational significance. As such, there is no reason to expend great resources to fight them. For Israel, the goal of the fight at UNESCO is not to defeat anti-Israel initiatives. That is impossible given the Palestinians’ automatic majority.

The purpose of the fight at UNESCO is to humiliate European governments that side with antisemitic initiatives, and to weaken the congenitally anti-Israel body itself.

The government achieved both of these objectives. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s disavowal of his own government’s abstention from the vote on the first resolution – like the similar position taken after the fact by the Mexican government – was a diplomatic victory for Israel.

So too, the fact that UNESCO’s own Secretary-General Irina Bukova felt compelled to disavow her own agency’s actions by rejecting the resolution’s denial of the Jewish people’s ties to Jerusalem was a significant victory for Israel. Her statement was deeply damaging for UNESCO and its reputation.

The Palestinian “resistance” is not a struggle to create a Palestinian state next to the state of Israel.No group or leader within the “resistance” movement has ever considered that their goal. Their position is summed up in the slogan chanted by many students and pro-Palestinian groups, “Palestine will be free, From the river [Jordan] to the [Mediterranean] sea”.

It is not, in fact, illegal in the slightest for the Jews to be in a country in which they have continuously lived for 3000 years. The only title to the land the Palestinians seem to have is that under the Ottoman empire, the land had been subject to Muslim governance; and if one applies Islamic law, rather than common law, any land that has once been under Muslim control must stay that way forever — including of course “el-Andalus,” all of southern Spain and Portugal.

Seamus Milne added that Palestinians in Gaza have the right to “defend themselves” and claimed: “It isn’t terrorism to fight back. The terrorism is the killing of citizens by Israel on an industrial scale.” No, the terrorism is the tens of thousands of rockets and missiles fired from Gaza into Israel for more than a decade.

Given that Gaza had long been unoccupied by anyone at that date and that Israel had never killed “citizens” on an industrial scale, we can see something at play totally at odds with reason, fact, and political knowledge. That something is creeping out from beneath an unpleasant rock, and that it has a deep connection with anti-Semitism, if it is not anti-Semitism in its purest modern form.

A central feature of Labour’s anti-Semitism is a staggering failure to understand the difference between traditional hatred of Jews from some religious and far-right sources, and modern expressions of that hatred through the medium of Zionism. The Labour enquiry into anti-Semitism entirely ignored several important definitions of anti-Semitism that included the singling out of Israel for condemnation, the use of double standards for Israel, and delegitimisation of Israel by negation of Zionism as the movement for self-determination of the Jewish people. The U.S. Department of State issued just such a new definition in 2010. Several of its clauses mention anti-Israel charges, including this: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, and denying Israel the right to exist”.[1]

The Palestinian “resistance” is not a struggle to create a Palestinian state next to the state of Israel. From the PLO to Hamas to the PFLP to Hezbollah, no group or leader within the “resistance” movement has ever considered that their goal. Their position is summed up in the slogan chanted by leftist students and pro-Palestinian groups across the world, “Palestine will be free, From the river to the sea”. The “river” is the Jordan and the “sea” is the Mediterranean, meaning that there is no room whatever for a Jewish state in the region. Self-determination, an ideal loudly proclaimed for practically every ethnic and cultural group in the world by people on the left, is denied for one community only: the Jews.

Despite the unceasing waves of murdering innocent Israeli civilians, Western politicians speak as if Israel were not under attack. The politicians are not interested in hearing what Palestinian leaders say when they call for the ethnic cleansing of Jews.

These Western leaders can well imagine what those consequences would be if the Arabs had their way: genocide. One can only assume they are pleased with that.

In private, some people say that the burial of Shimon Peres was also the burial of the Oslo Accords and of a never-ending “peace process” that brought only war.

Understanding that the economic relations between Israel and Europe could deteriorate, Netanyahu set about negotiating free trade agreements with China, India, South Korea and Japan, and he signed economic and military cooperation agreements with seven African countries also threatened by Islamic terrorism.

Against all odds, Israel is now in a much stronger position than it was even a few years ago.

The death of former Israeli President Shimon Peres led to a wave of almost unanimous tributes. Representatives from 75 countries came to Jerusalem to attend the funeral. Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas even left Ramallah for a few hours to show up.

Such a consensus could seem to be a sign of support for Israel, but it was something else entirely.

Those who honored the memory of Shimon Peres put aside the years he dedicated to creating Israel’s defense industry and to negotiating key arms deals with France, Germany and the United States. Those who honored the memory of Peres spoke only of the man who signed the Oslo Accords and who embodied the “peace process.” They then used the occasion to accuse Israel.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTSwww.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

Controlled release innovation gets European patent. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Intec has received a European patent for its Accordion oral treatment delivery system. Designed to improve efficacy and safety of any oral treatment, Accordion utilizes an efficient gastric retention and specific release mechanism. Intec itself has incorporated Accordion into its Parkinson’s, insomnia and gastric ulcer treatments.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160906005739/en/Intec-Pharma-Granted-European-Patent-Accordion-Pill%E2%84%A2%E2%80%93Carbidopa http://israelactive.com/?s=Accordion

Rosacea treatment is safe and effective. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Foamix has reported good results from the Phase II trials of its FMX103 treatment for papulopustular rosacea. The condition, suffered by millions, is characterized by facial redness from inflamed lesions. http://www.foamixpharma.com/

500 aneurysms successfully treated. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Rapid Medical has announced its 500th successful operation to treat life-threatening aneurysms (swellings of arterial wall) using its Comaneci Adjustable Remodeling Mesh. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rapid-medicals-comaneci-adjustable-remodeling-mesh-exceeds-500-successful-aneurysm-treatments-592723241.html

An easier thyroid cancer test. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Rosetta Genomics thyroid cancer diagnostic test (“RosettaGX Reveal”) can now be performed from a sample on the ThinPrep slides popular with clinicians. Previously, the sample had to come from a thyroid Fine Needle Aspirate (FNA) biopsy.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160907005941/en/RosettaGX-Reveal%E2%84%A2-Thyroid-miRNA-Classifier-Utilized-ThinPrep%C2%AE

Dispelling myths about celiac disease. A team of Tel Aviv University researchers has analyzed the medical records of 10,000 Israeli teenagers with celiac disease. The findings show no evidence of clinicians’ belief that sufferers are likely to be underweight or below average height.
https://www.fromthegrapevine.com/health/new-research-long-held-belief-celiac-disease-dispelled#!

A decade of IDF bone marrow donations. It is now ten years since the Ezer Mizion bone marrow registration booth became an integral part of the IDF recruiting station. Since then, 1100 IDF soldiers have donated their stem cells to cancer patients worldwide. Many of those saved told their stories at an event honoring the donors.
http://www.ezermizion.org/blog/1100-thank-yous/

13 miles in an Israeli bio-suit. (TY Geoffrey) Paraplegic Claire Lomas completed the UK’s Great North run in an exoskeleton from Israel’s ReWalk. Claire, who is 16-weeks pregnant, took five days to complete the 13.1-mile race. (The BBC, of course, doesn’t mention that ReWalk is Israeli.)
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-37332178
http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/163142/israeli-invention-helps-paralysed-woman-finish-race

Combined PET/MRI scanner. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Aspect Imaging has launched a brand new integrated simultaneous PET-MRI that combines PET and MRI modalities. The system is based on Aspect’s compact MRI plus the SimPET system from Seoul National University’s Department of Nuclear Medicine.
http://www.aspectimaging.com/news/aspect-imaging-seoul-national-university-partner-launch-worlds-first-commercial-simultaneous-preclinical-petmri-complete-solution/

GSK markets Israeli growth formula for children. Multinational GlaxoSmithKline signed an agreement with Israel’s Nutritional Growth Solutions for GSK to produce and market Horlicks Growth+, developed by Schneider Children’s Medical Center for enhancing height and weight in underdeveloped children.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-israels-ng-solutions-signs-child-formula-deal-with-gsk-1001157015

Even with today’s safer and more targeted anti-cancer drugs, scientists have been unable to satisfactorily explain the phenomenon of why treated cancers so often recur. The common theory is that the cancer cell develops internal resistance to treatment, and overrides the toxic effects of the drug.

Now, a team of Israeli scientists provide the key for reducing recurrence, allowing anti-cancer drugs to do work as intended.

Led by Prof. Yuval Shaked of the Technion-Israel Institute, the study shows that tumor relapse occurs when the body, in effect, mobilizes itself in favor of the tumor, causing recurrence of the disease, increasing its aggressiveness and creating metastases (tumor spread). Even selective, highly focused treatments that almost exclusively harm cancer cells lead to a similar response.

“The administration of an anti-cancer drug is very aggressive intervention in the body,” Shaked said in a statement. “Therefore, the body responds to chemotherapy the way it responds to trauma. This creates the effect of a double-edged sword: although chemotherapy kills cancer cells, it also causes the secretion of substances that confer resistance to the tumor.”

The study, which was recently published in the scientific publication The Journal of Pathology, mice with multiple myeloma – a malignant disease of the plasma cells produced in bone marrow and spread throughout the body – were treated with the selective anti-cancer drug Velcade (bortezomib). Velcade is based on the discovery of ubiquitin, for which professors Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover of the Technion won the Nobel Prize (along with the late American biologist Irwin Rose) in 2004.

Shaked found that treatment with Velcade led to a physiological reaction that actually reinforced the intensity of the myeloma in the mice. According to Shaked, the drug caused inflammatory cells in the bone marrow to enhance the aggressiveness of the disease and provide the cancer cells with resistance to treatment. Still, “treatment with Velcade is essential and necessary,” says Shaked, “but its disadvantage is that along with the benefit there is damage.”

Next steps: Inhibiting the mechanism that enhances the tumor

Understanding the mechanisms that enhance the tumor and accelerate the spread of metastases “will enable us to develop methods to inhibit them,” he stresses. In fact, when the researchers inhibited the secreted factor related to the activity of inflammatory cells, they observed a decrease in the proliferation of cancer cells. Now, they are working on various ways to inhibit the body’s response to anti-cancer treatments.