RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Israel’s Jewish population is approaching six million. If current birth rates hold steady that significant milestone will be reached in time for next year’s Independence Day. If there is to be one.
In the sixty-four years that the revived country has existed, there has been a dramatic population shift. Western and Eastern Europe and Russia, where the majority of Western Jews once lived, now hold a fraction of the Jewish population. The Muslim world, former location of the majority of Eastern Jews, is barely worth mentioning.

Globally the Jewish population is divided between Israel and the United States. Israel is the home of the majority of the world’s Jews, but the combined Jewish Anglosphere is still larger, not so much because of the United Kingdom, but because of North America, which holds the largest number of Jews. In a development that would have been all but incomprehensible a century ago, the majority of Jews in the world speak English or Hebrew. Smaller numbers speak French and Spanish, but in a generation hardly any will speak Russian or Arabic.

The majority of Jews live in the American Hemisphere. If we subtract Israel, the Eastern Hemisphere would barely muster up ten percent of the Jewish population because its Jews have for the most part either moved to the Western Hemisphere or to Israel.

Israel is the last Jewish outpost in the Eastern Hemisphere. The last significant Jewish populations there are either in the far west, in the United Kingdom and France or legacy populations in Russia and the Ukraine. The latter have no future and the former are dwindling under pressure from the growing Muslim population in Europe.

http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/

A great controversy has erupted over a National Journal article by Michael Hirsh entitled, “The Post Al Qaida Era.” I think this is an important issue there is absolutely nothing new here that couldn’t have been seen—as I’ll show in a moment—five years ago.

The Obama Administration has long thought along the following lines:

Al-Qaida is an evil and terrible organization. It attacked America on September 11, 2001. It is a sworn enemy of the United States and it uses terrorism. Consequently, to protect the American homeland, al-Qaida must be destroyed. Our “war on terror” is then a war on al-Qaida.

Oh, yes, one more thing:

Al-Qaida is the only enemy and the only threat. So once al-Qaida is destroyed there is no more problem, no more conflict.

In this context, then, all other revolutionary Islamist groups—the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizballah, Hamas, and so on—are not enemies. They can be won over or at least neutralized as threats to U.S. interests. And perhaps even they can become allies because they also oppose al-Qaida or, as they are now called, really radical Salafist groups.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer has been continuing to focus on UNESCO and the issue of Palestinian statehood with an article, again via the antipodean J-Wire service, entitled “Palestine: Quartet and UNESCO in Head-On Collision,” in which, inter alia, he observes that “In going behind [the] Oslo [Accords] and the [Bush] Roadmap to unilaterally achieve statehood at UNESCO, Palestine has cut itself completely adrift from Oslo and the Roadmap.”

Writes David Singer:

UNESCO’S recognition that Palestine is a State has now been totally refuted by the Quartet – America, the Russian Federation, the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN).

The Quartet – in its latest statement – has now endorsed the view of the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (OTP) just a few days earlier – that Palestine is not a State.

“The Quartet reaffirmed its commitment, as expressed in its 23 September 2011 statement, to examine possible mechanisms it can actively support going forward, individually and together, to advance peace efforts and strengthen the Palestinian Authority’s ability to meet the full range of civil and security needs of the Palestinian people both now and in a future state.”

The Quartet’s use of the words – “both now and in a future state” – was clear and unambiguous .
If the Quartet and the OTP are correct – then Palestine’s admission to UNESCO as a State is indeed unlawful – since only States can be members of UNESCO under Article II paragraph 2 of UNESCO’S Constitution.

Yet the Russian Federation and many other member states of the UN and the EU – 107 to be precise – voted to recognize Palestine’s claim to be a State – thereby qualifying it to be granted admission to UNESCO.

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/4364

“In 2009 Obama said: “I’m always worried about using the word ‘victory,’ because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur.” Of course, it wasn’t Hirohito who surrendered on the Missouri’s stout deck, but the revelation of Obama’s mindset is telling. Conceptually, a world of no victories may warm the hearts of social democrats, but it is insufficient for the defence of America. Nonetheless, November may well tell us, in more ways than one, whether America will remain America, or whether it has become better suited to being a junior member of the European Union.”

Barack Obama’s Stakhanovite efforts to transform America’s economy and society into something akin to European-style social democracy are undergoing considerable analysis and debate, especially as the 2012 campaign steams towards November. Most presidential re-election contests are referenda on the incumbent, and this year will be no exception, despite Obama’s obvious strategy to focus on almost anything but his actual record. His “spread the wealth around” slogan, industrial policy that showers favourites with subsidies and loan guarantees, turning major car manufacturers over to union ownership, and taxing the rich as if they were miscreants, all resemble the paradigm of most current or aspiring European Union members.

But Obama’s driving ideology, whether he wins or loses on November 6, has already had enormous implications for the US role in the world and the very structure of the international order. By reducing not only the visibility of America’s global presence, but also its military capabilities, and by shifting the federal budget even further from national security to social welfare programmes, Obama has also sought to transform the United States into Europe. Of course, the obvious question is what happens once Washington’s protective shield is diminished to the point of feebleness. It was one thing for European and other industrial democracies to be free riders under the sheltering US nuclear umbrella, its strong naval forces, and its essentially global force projection capabilities. But when the only superpower doffs its cape and Lycra uniform, packs them up in the telephone booth, and becomes just another mild-mannered suit, who will then shield those free riders, not to mention a much weakened United States itself?

Obama sees American strength as provocative. He believes its nuclear arsenal is excessive, and hence worthy of reduction, without fearing in any way that shredding the nuclear deterrent might actually have profoundly deleterious consequences not only on US national security, but on security and stability in the world as a whole. He sees his presidency causing “the tide of war” to recede in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, just as his tenure will mark “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow”. Dramatic reductions in military budgets, and the consequent devastating reductions in force levels, capabilities and weapons systems, apparently do not trouble him even slightly.

Indeed, in purely political terms, Obama’s most amazing successes have come in his evisceration of the US defence budget, something no one predicted at his 2009 inauguration. His massive stimulus package, which funded spending wish lists that ambitious bureaucrats, special interests and members of Congress had long kept hidden in their desk drawers, contained essentially no net increase in defence funding. At a time when Obama was thundering about jobs and “shovel-ready projects”, precious little of either of which the stimulus actually delivered, national defence had ample prospects for both. Instead, the military was starved.

Then, even more remarkably, as increased federal spending on virtually all non-defence programmes remained the hallmark of Obama fiscal policy, defence budgets began suffering further enormous hits. If in the 2008 campaign Obama had openly proposed military spending reductions of the magnitude now being contemplated, Republican opposition would have been full-throated. Instead, after the Tea Party successes in the 2010 congressional elections, Obama used the cover of reducing expenditures, deficits and taxes generally to outwit and out-negotiate Republicans into military spending cuts that even his own Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, finds unacceptable.

Obama’s policies and debilitating budget cuts reflect the views of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates on the nature of the threats that America and its allies will face in the near future. Proving yet again that generals tend to fight the last war, Gates and his aides concluded from Afghanistan and Iraq that future wars would most likely be counter-insurgency or counter-terrorist scenarios. No more Cold War-era spectres of Soviet-armoured thrusts through the Fulda Gap and over the northern European plains, or World War II-style armadas clashing at sea.

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/

THE FIRST AFSI APATE AWARD FOR 2012 GOES TO PETER BEINART

In 2011 AFSI Instituted the Apate Award for the most egregious “Calumnists against Israel.”

Calumny is defined as a false and malicious statement designed to injure the reputation of someone or something. Its synonyms are slander, defamation, libel, misrepresentation, vituperation, smear.

With that in mind we call the professors, reporters, columnists and commentators who have vilified, libeled and slandered Israel “The Calumnists” and AFSI awards the worst of them. We have named the award the “Apate” after the goddess of calumny, guile and deception in Greek mythology.

Despite facing stiff competition, Peter Beinart receives the highest Platinum Apate for exemplifying calumny, guile and deception in his hatred for Israel.

MAY 2012 OUTPOST ONLINE

Outpost

Editor: Rael Jean Isaac Editorial Board: Ruth King and Rita Kramer

Outpost is distributed free to Members of Americans For a Safe Israel Annual membership: $50.

Americans For a Safe Israel 1751 Second Ave. (at 91st St.) New York, NY 10128 tel (212) 828-2424 / fax (212) 828-1717 E-mail: afsi @rcn.com web site: http://www.afsi.org

Outpost Editor: Rael Jean Isaac Editorial Board: Ruth King and Rita Kramer Outpost is distributed free to Members of Americans For a Safe Israel Annual membership: $50. Americans For a Safe Israel 1751 Second Ave. (at 91st St.) New York, NY 10128 tel (212) 828-2424 / fax (212) 828-1717 E-mail: afsi @rcn.com web site: http://www.afsi.org

THE YAMIT LEGACY BY WILLIAM MEHLMAN

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/the-yamit-legacy-by-william-mehlman.html

The ruins of the homes they were forced to abandon 30 years ago still lie stacked up in the desert near the Keren Shalom crossing into Gaza, withered memorials to “an idyllic dreamland of turquoise waters and white dunes, marching to its own tranquil rhythm,” as one observer put it, snuffed out in the April 1982 finale to Israel’s handover of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt.

They tell an unforgettable story, these bits and pieces of Yamit, the pearl in the diadem of 16 Jewish communities that once extended from northeast to central Sinai and their pioneering populace. First and foremost, it is a story of the missed opportunity for lasting regional security, cum hegemony, that began knocking on Israel’s door after June 1967. When in reply, 12 years later, it exchanged the territorial base on which that opportunity rested for a promissory note from the very nation that had twice employed it as a springboard for Israel’s intended annihilation, the Jewish State’s certainty that no regional power or combination of powers could ever again threaten its existence vanished. That act of self-imposed jeopardy became the template for an unbroken string of retreats stretching from south Lebanon to the Gaza Strip, with pit stops at Hebron, Bethlehem, Amona and Migron.

Yamit’s remnants also relate a signature Israeli morality tale, repeated all too often, of broken promises, broken hearts, broken homes and the lasting depression evoked by a sense of betrayal. Some of the most embittered of the young idealists sent off to the Sinai with the encouragement of three governments left Israel never to return after witnessing their investment in Zionism wiped off the books with a stroke of Menachem Begin’s pen at Camp David. Some soldiered on only to wind up as two-time losers when Ariel Sharon put the torch to their homes in Gush Katif 23 years later.

Full Story »

FROM THE EDITOR: RAEL JEAN ISAAC

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/from-the-editor-rael-jean-isaac-18.html

Mocking the Flytilla

It’s not often that Israel reacts well in response to those who hate her, so it was especially welcome when the Israeli government undercut an attempted publicity stunt by anti-Israel activists efficiently and, more surprising, wittily.

“We Have Gone Mad”

Unfortunately within days of this demonstration of feistiness, Israel was back in its all-too-customary mode of self-flagellation. The Israeli press repeated endlessly a brief video in which Lt. Col. Shalom Eisner pushed the magazine of his gun against the face of Andreas Ayas, a Danish anarchist from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). Ayas was attempting to close a road, along with a coterie of fellow, get this, “cyclists”, as the media described them. The legal analyst for the Israel Broadcasting Authority went on air to say the matter was “exceedingly grave” and Eisner should be put on criminal trial. IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz joined the chorus of indignation as did Prime Minister Netanyahu, who declared such conduct had “no place in the IDF and the State of Israel.” Eisner, a hero of the 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, was promptly suspended from the IDF. Never mind that these same peaceful “cyclists” had (in a segment not filmed by ISM or shown by the media) beaten him with sticks, broken his finger and damaged his wrist.

The Mount of Olives

The Mount of Olives is a mountain ridge in East Jerusalem that has been a Jewish cemetery for over three thousand years. Yet the Israel government is doing nothing to stop its desecration and physical attacks on those who visit it. In Frontpage, David Hornick writes that The Jerusalem Post has taken note of this scandal in a recent editorial. Last month a young bridegroom, who wanted to say a prayer at his mother’s tomb, was driven up by his friend Dror Klein. As they grew near to the tomb, 30 to 40 young Arabs crashed a bucket of white paint into the front windshield, hurled large rocks and cement blocks at the vehicle and dragged the bridegroom from the car, smashed his head with a boulder and beat him to the cry of Alahu Akhbar.

Hollywood Haters

It used to be that they were outliers–people like Vanessa Redgrave who have attacked Israel for decades. Now they are mainstream. Giulio Meotti reports that seven time Oscar nominee Mike Leigh and two time Oscar winner Emma Thompson are among three dozen actors and directors who signed a letter calling for the boycott of Israel’s national theater, Habima, which has been included in a Shakespeare festival in England. More than 150 American Hollywood filmmakers signed a letter in support of the boycott of Ariel’s culture center in Samaria. A number of prominent actors boycotted the Toronto International Film Festival to protest a week of screening of Israeli films. Oscar winner Jean-Luc Godard has called Israel “a cancer on the map of the Middle East.”

But the award for lowest of the low goes to “The Death of Klinghoffer” by composer John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman (and the English National Opera and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, both of which staged the opera). Meotti notes that the opera romanticizes the murderers of Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound Jewish passenger, shot in cold blood in the forehead and chest, and then dumped into the sea. Klinghoffer’s daughters, who attended anonymously, provided this understatement: “It’s a production that appears to us to be anti-Semitic.”

Full Story

AN UNSUNG HERO OF THE HOLOCAUST BY DR. YALE KRAMER

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/an-unsung-hero-of-the-holocaust.html

Professor Yale Kramer is a psychoanalyst, former Clinical Professor at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and author of Talking Back to Liberal Power.

1942 was one of the grimmest years of the war for America and its Allies. Only weeks before, this country had lost much of its naval power at Pearl Harbor and lost the Philippines as well as control of the western Pacific. Europe was dominated by the Nazi military machine–the most powerful army and air force existing at the time. Virtually all of the land mass from the Atlantic to the Volga was occupied by the Wehrmacht and had submitted to Nazi regulations governing the treatment of Jews and other targets of the Nazi culture.

At that time, as grim as the outlook was for the Allies, the Germans were at the zenith of their morale. It seemed to them they couldn’t lose. It was the moment of the greatest belief in the future of the Thousand Year Reich for Hitler and his followers.

It was in this context of military success and confidence that Reinhard Heydrich conveyed, in January 1942, his plans for the extermination of Europe’s Jews to a group of fourteen highly intelligent, conscientious officials of the Third Reich. Minutes of the meeting were kept by Heydrich’s assistant, SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Adolf Eichmann and copies were sent by Eichmann to all the participants after the meeting with the warning that they were to be destroyed after reading. And indeed they were. All but one copy, which was discovered in 1947 by Robert Kempner, prosecutor before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

The official meeting at Wannsee took less than two hours, after which the finest cognac and cigars were served by Heydrich and Eichmann and the conversation about Jews and extermination became more joke-ridden and less stilted and euphemistic.

A few months later, Auschwitz-Birkenau became operational as one of five extermination camps–including Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka– of which it was the largest and most efficient. There between one and two million people were murdered over a two-year period from the summer of 1942 until November of 1944.

At the beginning of this period, on June 30, 1942, a seventeen-year-old Czech Jew named Rudolf Vrba arrived at Auschwitz. He had been arrested while trying to escape from Czechoslovakia to join the Free Czech Army in England and wound up instead at Auschwitz as a slave laborer.

Full Story »

THE GERMAN ROBBED COSSACK BY SARAH HONIG

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/the-german-robbed-cossack.html

Sarah Honig is an Israeli journalist. This appeared on SarahHonig.com on April 12.

In 1903 Shalom Aleichem, the giant of Yiddish literature, wrote a letter to Leo Tolstoy, the giant of Russian literature. It was shortly after the gruesome Kishinev pogrom. Shalom Aleichem planned to publish a modest compilation about the atrocity, to which he asked Tolstoy to contribute a short message to “Russia’s millions of distraught and disoriented Jews, who more than anything need a word of comfort.” Tolstoy never so much as bothered to reply.

The famed novelist, feted as the conscience of Russia, received dozens such letters urging him to speak out against the slaughters – then a seminal trauma in Jewish annals. The Holocaust was decades away. Nobody 109 years ago could imagine anything more bloodcurdling than the horrors of Kishinev.

But not everyone was moved – not even a renowned humanitarian like Tolstoy.

Not only did he not speak out, but he resented the entreaties.

He replied to one Jewish correspondent only, Emanuel Grigorievich Linietzky, to whom he caustically complained about being pestered. Tolstoy then blamed the Czar’s government, absolving the masses who bashed the skulls of babies, gouged children’s eyes, raped their mothers and sisters, eviscerated them, beheaded men and boys, quartered and mutilated them and looted all they could carry.

We hear much the same throughout Europe at each memorial to the Holocaust.

The upgraded, systemized, gargantuan-scale German sequel to Kishinev was by all accounts committed by unidentified extraterrestrials called Nazis. All the others, Germans included, were their victims.

But Tolstoy foreshadowed an even more sinister inclination that would fully and hideously burst upon our scene a century and more after the Kishinev devastation. The great author and icon of compassion exhorted Russia’s shaken Jews to behave better.

The implication was that the Jews were somehow guilty, needed to improve themselves and achieve higher virtue in order to merit better treatment.

And so Tolstoy wrote to Emanuel Grigorievich: “The Jews must, for their own good, conduct themselves by the universal principle of ‘do onto others as you would have them do to you.’ They must resist the government nonviolently…by living lives of grace, which precludes not only violence against others, but also the partaking in acts of violence.”

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CHRISTIANS FOR PALESTINE BY LEE SMITH

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/christians-for-palestine-by-lee-smith.html

(Editor’s note: There has long been a segment of anti-Israel evangelical Christians, for example those centered around the “progressive” journal Sojourners. This article suggests such views are dangerously gaining in strength in the broader evangelical community.)

Lee Smith is a fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of The Strong Horse. This article appeared on tabletmag.com on April 18.

For most American Jews and Israelis, evangelical Christians are synonymous with zealous, biblically inspired support of the Jewish state—so zealous, in fact, that it makes some Jews uneasy. But the days when Israel could count on unconditional support from evangelicals may be coming to an end.

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PHILO-SEMITES AND ANTI-SEMITES….NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET BY RUTH KING

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/philo-semites-and-anti-semites-never-the-twain-shall-meet-bu-ruth-king.html

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is often quoted by Israel’s protagonists for his descriptions of Israel published in 1867 in Innocents Abroad.

His comments expose the faux history of Arab Palestine as the land of milk and halal:

“….. A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds… a silent mournful expanse…. a desolation…. we never saw a human being on the whole route…. hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.”

Less has been written about Twain’s affection and admiration for the Jewish people and the trajectory that took him from the stereotypical anti-Semitism of his early years to become an eloquent and impassioned defender of Jews.

It is hard to pinpoint the moment or event that changed his thinking. Twain was in Paris on Saturday, January 5, 1895, when Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish Army officer who had been falsely convicted of treason, was surrounded by 5,000 troops as his buttons were torn, his military tunic cut, the stripes of his trousers and the insignia on his cap and his sleeve removed, and his sword broken in two. He was marched off amid calls for his death and death to all Jews. Theodor Herzl, an Austrian journalist, watched the horrifying spectacle, and the rest is history.

Twain was stirred by the display of anti-Semitism and outraged that in spite of evidence pointing elsewhere, a Jew could not be absolved, because Jews were deemed evil and incapable of loyalty. Dreyfus’ most famous champion, the author of “J’Accuse,” French novelist Emile Zola only escaped arrest (for allegedly defaming the judges who had found Esterhazy, the real culprit, not guilty) by fleeing to England. The Dreyfus scandal heightened Twain’s esteem for Jews and he wrote letters and published columns on Zola and Dreyfus and his lingering disdain for the French.

In 1899, he wrote in “My First Lie and How I Got out of It”: “From the beginning of the Dreyfus case to the end of it all France, except a dozen moral paladins, lay under the smother of the silent assertion-lie that no wrong was being done to a persecuted and unoffending man.”

Full Story »

Long Live Israel!
Hooray for President Harry Truman who recognized your liberation in spite of threats and pleas from his advisers and State Department. My safety and that of my children and grandchildren and Jews everywhere in the world is contingent on your survival. May you be blessed as you approach 65 and may you be spared “Obamacare” in the coming year.

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2012/4/26/main-feature/1/independence-day/e

Every spring, within a single week, Israel commemorates Yom Hashoah, Yom Hazikaron, and Yom Ha’atzma’ut. These days revisit the core drama of the modern Jewish experience: the Holocaust, the losses suffered by Israel in its early wars, and the country’s present independence. These days are also among the most controversial in the Israeli calendar.

With adjustments for Shabbat, Independence Day is celebrated on May 14. Certain ultra-religious Jews have long protested the occasion. The Neturei Karta have declared it a “day of mourning for Torah-faithful Jews” and burn Israeli flags in protest. The next day, May 15, is commemorated by Palestinians as “Nakba Day,” the day of “catastrophe.” It is entirely negative: It mourns Palestinian dispossession at the hands of the Jews rather than celebrating any idea of Palestinian nationalism. Nakba Day speaks volumes about Palestinian political psychology.

There are also protests against Independence Day from within Israel, from Israeli Arabs—that is, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship—and leftist Israelis who want Israel to be a “state for all its citizens.” This critique parallels the criticism of Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah”: The state, say the critics, celebrates the experience of the majority and further alienates the minority.

Independence Day is especially vexing to non-Israeli leftist commentators, who see in it a means of repression. One journalist recently said, “If I was [sic] a Palestinian citizen of the state, I don’t think I would want to participate in the torch-lighting. I would also find the inclusion of Arabs to be dishonest, a way of whitewashing the reality of life here as a minority. . . . Independence and freedom here mean independence and freedom for Jews.”

The Left’s Jihad Denial — on The Glazov Gang
by Frontpagemag.com
Leftist film producer Tommi Trudeau joins Dwight Schultz and Evan Sayet on the gang — and the battle breaks out.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/26/the-lefts-jihad-denial-on-the-glazov-gang/

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/11551#.T5ac19maLTo
The 100% Sharia-Compliant Iranian EMP Nuclear Weapon From Mark Langfan
Much has been, and will be, said about the Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei’s February 2012 informal speech to a group of Iranian nuclear scientist’s wherein he is translated in English to have said:
“There is no doubt that the decision makers in the countries opposing us know well that Iran is not after nuclear weapons because the Islamic Republic, logically, religiously and theoretically, considers the possession of nuclear weapons a grave sin and believes the proliferation of such weapons is senseless, destructive and dangerous,” the Leader said.
(4/8/12 PressTV, “Iran never seeks to produce, maintain, use nuclear weapons: Lawmaker” http://www.presstv.ir/detail/235155.html)

Most importantly, the United States apparently gave great gravitas and optimistic meaning to Khamenei’s informal talk. I
n direct response, in the run-up to the latest round of P5+1 talks in Istanbul, the US Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton characterized the “grave sin” statement as the very basis of the P5+1 Talks by stating, “We are meeting with the Iranians to discuss how to translate what is stated belief into a plan of action.”
Consequently, in the follow-up it continues to appear that the recent Istanbul P5+1 Nuclear Talks and its progeny, if not the very P5+1-Iranian Nuclear “Plan of Action” itself, are elementally based on Khamenei’s “grave sin” informal comment.

Well, before one gets too rapt in the Iranian religious untouchable that “Nuclear weapons are a “grave sin”” , 1938 Munichesque euphoria, one should remember that back in 2006, Mullah Mohsen Gharavian, a disciple of the ultra-conservative Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, widely regarded as the cleric closest to Iran’s new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, issued an actual religious fatwa that it is “only natural” to have nuclear bombs as a “countermeasure” against other nuclear powers. (2/16/06 The Telegraph, “Iranian fatwa approves use of nuclear weapons” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/1510900/Iranian-fatwa-approves-use-of-nuclear-weapons.html)

Instead of killing people, the new nuclear bomb burns out all the electronic equipment and the modern defense systems that rely on electronics through the nuclear generation of Electromagnetic Pulse (“EMP Nuclear Weapon”).
So at a minimum, there seems to be some “religious” disagreement in Shiite theological circles over how many angels can dance on the head of a Uranium 235 nucleus.
However, even taking Ayatollah Khamenei’s words at full face value, and believing them to be the “final word of Iranian law” to mean that having a “destructive” nuclear weapon like the one dropped on Hiroshima is a “great sin,” a totally new type of game-changer modern nuclear bomb has been invented that doesn’t kill any human beings or animals or destroy buildings.
Instead of killing people, the new nuclear bomb burns out all the electronic equipment and the modern defense systems that rely on electronics through the nuclear generation of Electromagnetic Pulse (“EMP Nuclear Weapon”).

http://www.timesofisrael.com/remembering-the-man-who-battled-israels-most-formidable-enemy-the-mosquito/

ISRAEL TURNS 64

The man who battled Israel’s most formidable enemy — the mosquito. Israel Kligler is one of the reasons Israel exists. So why have you never heard of him?

Ninety-two years ago, a diminutive and determined young scientist stepped from a boat onto a “notoriously malarious” patch of Levantine land and into the middle of a losing war against a tiny, deadly enemy ravaging the population. Israel Kligler – university professor, Zionist and public health pioneer – played an outsize role in defeating malaria in Palestine beginning in the 1920s. Countering the mosquito-borne disease was not a minor medical success but a crucial victory that paved the way for the growth of Jewish settlement and the eventual establishment of the State of Israel.

Today, Kligler and his role in Israel’s history have been forgotten. April 25 is a fitting date to remember him: This year, it happens to be both the eve of Israel’s Independence Day and World Malaria Day, marked every year by the UN’s World Health Organization. Thanks in large part to Kligler’s efforts, malaria was eradicated in Israel, but the global battle against the disease has been remarkably unsuccessful: Every year, according to the WHO, malaria infects 216 million people and kills 655,000.

Kligler has a small number of vocal boosters, and they believe his success should both earn him a place in the Zionist pantheon and be studied anew as the world continues to grapple with the disease he confronted nearly a century ago.

Born in what is now Romania in 1888, Kligler moved with his parents to New York City when he was 9. In 1920, having completed a doctorate in public health in New York and research on malaria in South America, he gave up a promising academic career in the US and arrived instead in British-ruled Palestine, committed to putting his scientific knowledge at the service of the Zionist project.

He found a land devastated by malaria. The illness was, a British report said in 1921, “by far the most important disease in Palestine.” Much of the territory Jews had purchased for settlement was in lowlands infested with malaria — that was one of the main reasons it was available — and the disease was decimating the ranks of the Zionist pioneers and the country’s other inhabitants. Some settlements had been abandoned altogether as a result.

One visitor in 1902 remarked that the Turkish soldiers at one border garrison had to be replaced monthly because all would contract malaria in little over a week. A report from 1917, the year the British arrived, noted that Palestine was “notoriously malarious,” and an estimated 90 percent of British soldiers at the town of Beisan — today’s Beit She’an, in the Jordan Valley — were ill within 10 days.