RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON (AP) — In what is becoming an increasingly nasty grudge match, the White House is mulling ways to undercut Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming trip to Washington and blunt his message that a potential nuclear deal with Iran is bad for Israel and the world.

There are limits. Administration officials have discarded the idea of President Barack Obama himself giving an Iran-related address to rebut the two speeches Netanyahu is to deliver during his early March visit. But other options remain on the table.

Among them: a presidential interview with a prominent journalist known for coverage of the rift between Obama and Netanyahu, multiple Sunday show television appearances by senior national security aides and a pointed snub of America’s leading pro-Israel lobby, which is holding its annual meeting while Netanyahu is in Washington, according to the officials.

The administration has already ruled out meetings between Netanyahu and Obama, saying it would be inappropriate for the two to meet so close to Israel’s March 17 elections. But the White House is now doubling down on a cold-shoulder strategy, including dispatching Cabinet members out of the country and sending a lower-ranking official than normal to represent the administration at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the officials said.

“Shutting out the messenger.
President Roosevelt sneaked out of the White House through a rear exit rather than meet with the 400 Rabbis who were to plead for the Jews in Europe and thus created a Disgraceful Precedent. If Roosevelt could do that why not Obama to Benjamin Netanyahu who is coming to plead with him not to sign a bad agreement with Iran?”…..Nurit Greeger
“I was seven years old, in 1943, and becoming comfortable in the United States, where my parents and I had arrived as refugees from Poland, via Japan, in 1941.

Almost from the moment we hit the blessed shores of America, my father, Rabbi Dr. Isaac Lewin, z”l, worked day and night with the Va’ad Le-Hatzala to rescue the Jews trapped in Poland and the rest of Europe. They included my grandfather, Rabbi Aaron Lewin, z”l, the revered rabbi of Rzeszow who had twice been elected to the Polish parliament, and who had – unknown to my father – already been murdered by Ukrainians in Lvov in June 1941.

I remember the days leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur 1943, as news of the slaughter of Jews by Hitler and his cohorts dribbled out to the free world and reached American media. I was already a New York Yankees fan, and attention was focused on the World Series between my Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals. As a seven year old, I could not really appreciate why my father was ignoring the World Series and was busy soliciting volunteers among the Orthodox rabbinate and rank-and-file Jews to make the arduous train ride from New York to Washington to convey personally to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt how precarious the lives of Jews in Europe had become and to request decisive action against the death camps to which Jews were being transported.

Riots, restrictions on speech and religion, and the takeover of politics and law enforcement are just a few of the unwelcome changes that can be expected in non-Muslim societies as Muslim immigrants increase in number, according to Dr. Peter Hammond. A Christian missionary based in South Africa and author of 40 books, Hammond delineates how Muslims change societies in his book, Slavery, Terrorism and Islam. Citing examples of countries worldwide, Hammond outlines typical activities that occur as the Muslim percentage of the total population increases. It is a warning bell about the gradual, step-by-step changes that can be expected in other countries still undergoing significant Muslim immigration.

These societal changes occur because devout Muslims are bound by a 1,400-year-old doctrine of immigration originating in Islamic scriptures and based on Mohammed’s migration from Mecca to Medina. Under the religious edict or Hijra, Islamic expansionism and submission of all non-Muslims to shariah or Islamic doctrine must occur. Islamic expansionism and its counterpart, jihad, are first expressed as Muslim demands for special status and privileges within the host country. A higher percentage of Muslims in the host country can soon translate into Muslim control of political processes, law enforcement, media, and the economy, as well as restrictions on freedom of movement, speech and religious practices. The appropriation of goods and property, as well as violence with impunity, can also occur.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
Winning medical advice. (Israel21c) Israeli startup Medivizor uses patent-pending technology to find the most essential information applicable for each individual’s medical situation. Medivizor won 4 prestigious competitions in 2014, was highlighted by Forbes and is recommended by doctors to their patients.
http://www.israel21c.org/headlines/goodbye-dr-google-hello-medivizor/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe01iuVH0E8

A traffic-light pacemaker. (M) A joint Israeli-UK project is testing whether a pacemaker emitting pulsating blue and yellow light can be used to regulate the beating of newly implanted heart tissue generated by stem cells. Also interesting because the UK’s Independent newspaper rarely includes any positive Israeli news.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/tests-begin-on-traffic-light-pacemaker-that-could-revolutionise-heart-treatment-10045618.html

ReWalk makes miracles possible. (M) Here’s a rare positive Israel article from CNN. It describes the exoskeleton from Israel’s ReWalk that is changing the lives of paraplegics. People previously confined to wheelchairs can now walk upright once again. (Stop video after 2 minutes.)
http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/08/technology/innovationnation/rewalk/

Turning darkness into light. (Israel21c) Ben-Gurion University is hosting “Light and Blindness” – a full-day exhibition of research-and-development activities in Israel designed to improve the quality of life for people with visual impairment. It includes a startup contest and the opening of a trail for the blind.
http://www.israel21c.org/israel-in-the-spotlight/turning-the-darkness-into-light-with-innovation/

Boost for ice treatment to destroy tumors. Israeli biotech IceCure Medical has received $21 million of funds from Epoch Partner Investments to speed up the sales and distribution of its IceSense3 cryoablation system to treat breast cancer. IceSense3 uses extreme cold to destroy targeted tumors in less than 15 mins, with no pain.
http://jewishbusinessnews.com/2015/02/17/israeli-icecure-gets-21-2-million-international-investment-to-treat-breast-cancer-with-extreme-cold/

$9 million donation to fight cancer. Philanthropists Laura and Isaac Perlmutter have pledged $3 million to finance six joint cancer research projects between NY University and Israel’s Technion, plus a further $6 million to establish a state-of-the-art research facility focusing on cancer metabolomics at the Technion.
http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/NYU-and-Technion-to-forge-groundbreaking-partnership-in-cancer-research-391503

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

The most efficient desalination plant in the world. (M) Israel’s new Sorek desalination plant is now at full capacity, producing 627,000 cubic meters of drinking water daily. With the lowest rate of energy consumption in the world, its water is the cheapest of any large-scale desalination plant.
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534996/megascale-desalination/

Washington to host US-Israeli cyber security conference. The Israel Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) will hold its 5th annual Defensive Cyberspace Operations & Intelligence Conference and Exhibition in Washington, DC, April 27-28, 2015. This is the first INSS cyber conference to be held in the US.
http://www.dcoi.org.il/#!about/cvz5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDaCNHKupDI

Israel establishes Cyber Defense Authority. Israel’s cabinet has approved the establishment of a national cyber defense authority which will have overall national responsibility for cyber defense. It will also operate an a Cyber Event Readiness Team to strengthen the resilience of organizations and sectors in the economy.
http://www.sdjewishworld.com/2015/02/15/israel-establishes-cyber-defense-authority/

The importance of technology and education. (M) Graduates of Israel Technion have won 4 Nobel Prizes and have either founded or are managing two-thirds of the Israeli companies on NASDAQ. Technion’s President Peretz Lavie describes why Israel’s foremost technical institute has been so successful.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/israels-technion-president-peretz-lavie-on-technology-and-education-1423854912

Israeli Sci-Tech schools. 100,000 Israeli kids – 10 percent of all Israeli high school students (Jews, Muslims, Christians and Druze) – attend a Sci-Tech school. The Sci-Tech network builds curricula based on the demand for professionals in various Israeli industries, and it currently has 18 industrial vocational schools.
http://www.jewishledger.com/2015/02/seeds-start-nation-cultivated-israel-sci-tech-schools/

Israeli cleantech in Germany. Nine Israeli cleantech companies attended Leipzig’s Green Ventures Forum – Germany’s leading B2B platform in the cleantech arena. Thanks to the Israeli Economic Office in Berlin and Israel NewTech, Israeli companies held over a hundred meetings with companies from over 30 countries.
http://israelnewtech.com/2015/02/international-cleantech-forum-germany-provides-platform-israeli-companies/

Technion’s new hi-tech student lab. Israel’s Technion and Microsoft have together built a development lab that resembles that of a startup company. Students can develop innovative technologies that will add to the “Internet of Things” – Internet-enabled devices and applications to rival anything a hi-tech company can design.
http://www.israelscienceinfo.com/en/hightech/internet-objets-incubateur-technion-microsoft-simule-lenvironnement-start-ups/

Your TV interacts with your smartphone. (M) Israel’s Applicaster lets you watch a program on your TV set whilst interacting with the program and its characters on your smartphone. Applicaster has released more than 100 mobile apps for 36 broadcasters, including Fox International and Mediacorp.
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/17/applicaster-scores-10-5m-so-more-tv-characters-can-become-your-mobile-buddies/

Israeli technology with every diamond. (M) If you’ve got a diamond on your finger, there’s an 80% chance it’s been touched by Israel’s Sarine. (Stop the automatic video sequence at the end of the Sarine clip)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-02-18/diamonds-too-expensive-blame-technology
http://sarine.com/about-us/about-us-2/

M. D. Aeschliman is the author of The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism, and he recently edited a new edition of Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities (Ignatius Press). He studied with Morris Dickstein at Columbia University nearly 50 years ago.
Morris Dickstein left Jewish Orthodoxy, but never embraced a Mailer-like egotism. In any moderately literate and moderately free society there is always and inevitably a “battle of the books” (as Swift put it) as part of a larger “culture war,” either chronic or acute: a battle over beliefs and values as articulated and conveyed in books and films, school curricula, and music and art works, as well as in political elections and legislation. As the cultural critic Morris Dickstein noted in 1997, “We are a nation . . . at war over basic social and moral values.” But we are also part of an increasingly interdependent global culture where a similar “Kulturkampf” is being waged.
One of Dickstein’s teachers, Harold Bloom, has been very influential in the world of literary criticism and literary studies — of how and what our very brightest students read in college and graduate school — and both Dickstein and Bloom, ten years apart in age (Bloom was born in 1930 and Dickstein in 1940), are important figures in a massive cultural-social development in post–World War II America: the emergence of Jewish intellectuals in positions of prominence in American cultural life. There is a great and grievous irony behind this emergence, itself a proof of the promise of American life through mobility: The last 75 years have represented both a Hell and a Promised Land for Jews.

There may well be a civil war going on within Islam, but it will be Muslims, not American politicians, who settle it. In Egypt, the president is Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a pious Muslim. Having grown up in the world’s center of sharia scholarship and closely studied the subject, he has courageously proclaimed that Islam desperately needs a “religious revolution.” In the United States, the president is Barack Obama, a non-Muslim. His childhood experience of Islam, which ended when he was just ten, occurred in Indonesia — the world’s most populous Muslim country, but a non-Arabic one where the teaching and practice of Islam is very different from what it is in the Middle East. While Sisi sees a dangerous flaw in Islam, Obama believes America needs to be “fundamentally transformed” but Islam is fine as is.
You see the problem, no? Said problem was very much on display this week at the president’s “summit” on “countering violent extremism,” the administration’s euphemism for confronting violent jihad. The latter phrase is verboten because Obama will not concede the close nexus between Islam and modern terrorism. In reality, the summit had so little to do with confronting terrorism that the president did not invite the FBI director — you know, the head of the agency to which federal law assigns primary responsibility for terrorism investigations.
The summit was really about advancing the “social justice” agenda of “progressive” politics. The president and his underlings somehow reason that the answer to the barbarity of ISIS and al-Qaeda is to “empower local communities” here and abroad. Apparently, if the community organizers rouse the rabble to demand that government address “injustice” and Muslim “grievances,” the alienation that purportedly drives young Muslims into the jihadists’ arms will abate.

A Globe-Trotting Celebration of Erudition
Claudio Magris unleashes a lifetime of encyclopedic learning on the page in his magnificent ‘Danube: A Sentimental Journey From the Source to the Black Sea.’

The real adventure of travel is intellectual. Heart-stopping landscapes invite research into their history and culture, and books pile up in one’s library. Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” (1940) and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “Mani” (1958) and “Roumeli” (1966) are memorable travel books in large measure because they celebrate erudition. But arguably the supreme example of this category is Claudio Magris’s “Danube: A Sentimental Journey From the Source to the Black Sea,” published in Italian in 1986 and translated into English by Patrick Creagh in 1989. Mr. Magris is an academic from Trieste, that quintessential Central European city, although located on Italy’s Adriatic coast. Every spot along the Danube provides an opportunity for him to unleash a lifetime of encyclopedic learning on the page. Mr. Magris is periodically mentioned as a possibility to win the Nobel Prize in Literature: It is primarily because of this one book, which is not even a novel.

Whereas the Rhine, he writes, “is Siegfried, symbol of Germanic virtus and purity, the loyalty of the Niebelungs, chivalric heroism,” the Danube “is Pannonia, the kingdom of Atilla, the eastern, Asiatic tide.” More pointedly, the Rhine is about the “purity” of one race; while the Danube, with its link to the Austrian Habsburg Empire, evokes a “supranational culture” beyond ethnicity. In this way, he explains, the German language forever maintains the possibility to connote universal values. This Austrian mind-set, both imperial and cosmopolitan, rooted as it is in a specific landscape, recognizes the “stupid nonsense” that is postmodernism, “while accepting it as inevitable.”

Mr. Williams is a political analyst for Fox News and a columnist for the Hill. He is the author of “Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary” (Times Books, Random House, 1998).

In his office hangs a copy of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in America. When his critics, and he has many, call him names, he likes to point to it and shout out, “I’m a free man!” This black history month is an opportunity to celebrate the most influential thinker on racial issues in America today—Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas .

Justice Thomas, who has been on the court nearly a quarter-century, remains a polarizing figure—loved by conservatives and loathed by liberals. But his “free”-thinking legal opinions are opening new roads for the American political debate on racial justice.

His opinions are rooted in the premise that the 14th Amendment—guaranteeing equal rights for all—cannot mean different things for different people. As he wrote in Fisher v. University of Texas (2013), he is opposed to “perpetual racial tinkering” by judges to fix racial imbalance and inequality at schools and the workplace. Yet he never contends racism has gone away. The fact that a 2001 article in Time magazine about him was headlined “Uncle Tom Justice” reminds us that racism stubbornly persists.

Wesleyan President Michael Roth on the importance of understanding religious experience—and the difficulty teaching it

It happens every year. In teaching my humanities class, I ask what a philosopher had in mind in writing about the immortality of the soul or salvation, and suddenly my normally loquacious undergraduates start staring down intently at their notes. If I ask them a factual theological question about the Protestant Reformation, they are ready with an answer: predestination, faith not works, etc.

But if I go on to ask them how one knows in one’s heart that one is saved, they turn back to their notes. They look anywhere but at me, for fear that I might ask them about feeling the love of God or about having a heart filled with faith. In this intellectual history class, we talk about sexuality and identity, violence and revolution, art and obscenity, and the students are generally eager to weigh in. But when the topic of religious feeling and experience comes up, they would obviously just prefer that I move on to another subject.

What’s with Kim Jong-Un’s Hair? By Rick Moran

Who would have thunk it? North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un a fashion maven?

Say it ain’t so, Kimmy.

“Quirky” is an understatement. It looks like a cross between a 1950s “rocket” haircut and a bad afro from the 1980s.

And check out those “emoticon” eyebrows. Does Kim plan to star in an anime porn film?

Kim Jong Un’s latest hack job created another international incident.

North Korea watchers combing through the supreme leader’s appearance at a politburo meeting Wednesday were struck by Kim’s new look.

Kim was photographed with shrunken eyebrows the size of emoticons and cartoonishly high hair.