RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s been an unusual week for Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old high-school freshman from suburban Dallas who aspires to be an engineer. On Monday, as the Dallas Morning News reports, he brought to school a digital clock he’d built himself:

He showed it to his engineering teacher first thing Monday morning and didn’t get quite the reaction he’d hoped for.

“He was like, ‘That’s really nice,’ ” Ahmed said. “‘I would advise you not to show any other teachers.’”

He kept the clock inside his school bag in English class, but the teacher complained when the alarm beeped in the middle of a lesson. Ahmed brought his invention up to show her afterward.

“She was like, it looks like a bomb,” he said.

“I told her, ‘It doesn’t look like a bomb to me.’ ”

The teacher kept the clock. When the principal and a police officer pulled Ahmed out of sixth period, he suspected he wouldn’t get it back.

They led Ahmed into a room where four other police officers waited. He said an officer he’d never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: “Yup. That’s who I thought it was.”

The cops interrogated him, handcuffed him, took him to a juvenile jail, fingerprinted him, and released him to his parents’ custody. The school suspended him for three days. Dan Cummings, the principal of MacArthur High, issued a statement to parents that “said Irving police had ‘responded to a suspicious-looking item on campus’ and had determined that ‘the item . . . did not pose a threat to your child’s safety.’ ”

By Wednesday, Ahmed was famous. The hashtag #IStandWithAhmed trended on Twitter, and the young man received invitations to visit the headquarters of Google, Facebook and the executive branch of the U.S. government. “Cool clock, Ahmed,” tweeted Barack Obama. “Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.”

Well, good for Ahmed. The teachers at MacArthur High and the Irving police certainly deserve criticism for overreaction and heavy-handedness. But the story has also been put into the service of a pernicious myth about “Islamophobia.” From the Morning News article:

While the Middle East remains a hotbed for terrorists, we’ve got our own jihad training compounds set up in rural areas across the United States. They are run by an organization called Muslims of America (MOA). Law enforcement describes these compounds as “classically structured terrorist cells.”

If you visit the MOA website, you’ll get a hefty dose of taqiyya. The home page has an image of a large American flag along with a banner advertising one of their offshoot organizations called the United Muslim Christian Forum. The goal of this bogus group is to find common ground between Muslims and Christians, including mutual hatred of Jews. The web site also features a slick 16-minute propaganda video.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from what the MOA is publically peddling is the non-taqiyya version of who they are. Otherwise known as the truth.

Let’s start with the founder: El Sheikh Gilani. Prior to MOA, he founded Jamaat ul-Fuqra, a Pakistani terror organization. MOA is the American version of ul-Fuqra.

Gilani is also the man Daniel Pearl had set out to interview on that fateful day when Pearl was kidnapped. (May Daniel’s soul rest in peace.)

There can be no doubt that Americans are fortunate enough to be governed by a brilliantly conceived Constitution drafted by remarkable, intelligent men. Unfortunately, too many Americans are utterly ignorant of what it contains and how it impacts on their lives. Voter ignorance on this and so much else contributes to the ease with which the media manipulates public opinion into believing things which are not so. In this they play into the hands of a childishly narcissistic president who despises the values upon which our country was based, a man who repeatedly pokes our allies and us in the eyes to show that he can deeply offend without penalty.

1) The appalling ignorance of American voters.

A recent survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania found that a majority of Americans are unaware of what is considered basic knowledge of the Constitution.

This information, which was released Wednesday, comes on the cusp of the 228th anniversary of Constitution Day (Sept. 17).

Here are some of the most surprising findings from the survey

• 1 in 3 Americans believe the Bill of Rights guarantees the right to home ownership.

• 1 in 4 Americans believe the Bill of Rights guarantees “equal pay for equal work.”

• 1 in 3 Americans (31 percent) could name all three branches of the U.S. government and 32 percent could not identify a single branch.

• 1 in 4 Americans (28 percent) believe a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling is sent back to either Congress for reconsideration or to the lower courts for another decision.

• 1 in 10 Americans (12 percent) believe the Bill of Rights guarantees the right to own a pet.

• 25 percent of respondents agreed that “it might be better to do away with the court altogether” if it started making a lot of rulings most Americans disagreed with.

• 26 percent said when Congress disagrees with the Supreme Court’s decisions, it should pass legislation saying the court can no longer rule on that issue.

• 26 percent favored requiring a person to testify against himself in court.

Renowned New York attorney Sandor (Sandy) Frankel, one of four trustees of the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, was in Israel earlier this month to look at additional philanthropic options and to observe the progress of those endeavors already funded – to the tune of multi-millions.

Frankel, who recently joined the prestigious Park Avenue law firm Otterbourg P.C., met with Israeli politicians and other bigwigs to get a sense from them about which projects in the country need the most attention.

Over the course of the last seven years or so, the Helmsley Trust has donated in the ballpark of $145 million in grants (out of overall assets of over $5 billion) to works in and related to the Jewish state. Among these are: a joint grant to the Technion and the Weizmann Institute for alternative-energy research ($15 million); multi-million-dollar grants to the Weizmann Institute for stem-cell research and a sophisticated MRI for Crohn’s disease diagnosis; a new blood bank for Magen David Adom ($8 million); a grant to Haifa University for a Mediterranean Sea research center ($7 million); funding for an underground facility that converts a parking garage at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa into a 2,000-bed, bomb-proof facility for war-time ($5 million); the Jerusalem Press Club facilities in Mishkenot Sha’ananim; Birthright trips; and a grant for a robotics project at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev ($6.3 million).

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Liver cancer treatment gets on the fast track. The FDA has granted fast track designation to the CF102 treatment from Israel’s Can-Fite BioPharma for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common form of liver cancer. A CF102 trial is about to start on 78 patients with Child-Pugh Class B cirrhosis, who failed the only FDA approved treatment on the market – Nexavar.
http://biotuesdays.com/2015/09/17/can-fite-gets-fda-fast-track-for-liver-cancer-drug/

A smarter bed. Israel’s EarlySense is launching its “smart bed” solution myEarlySense. The “under the mattress” sensors record data on how you are sleeping, such as tossing, turning, waking, sleeping, breathing and heart rates. It can also turn on heaters and make the coffee.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/smart-bed-lets-you-sleep-better-and-makes-coffee-too/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZPRv6BAeJs

South Africa buys Israeli virus testing system. Israel’s Ilex Medical has won a tender issued by the South African National Blood Service (SANBS) for its Panther blood testing systems to detect and identify viruses.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-ilex-medical-wins-huge-south-african-tender-1001068697

IBM and Teva team up to find chronic treatments. IBM Israel has granted Israel’s Teva access to its Watson supercomputing Health Cloud program. Teva plans to use the global technology platform to design treatments for millions of people who suffer from chronic conditions like asthma, migraine, and pain.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-teva-ibm-partnership-to-seek-big-data-health-solutions-1001068493

Opening up a new strategy for HIV. Technion scientists have discovered that when the HIV virus encounters resistance, it looks for detours. It then mutates and replicates itself, like a Trojan horse, exploiting redundancy in the DNA of host cells. http://www.technion.ac.il/en/2015/08/new-strategy-for-hiv/

Detecting cancer using nanopores. Further to a previous (15 Mar 2015) newsletter, scientists from Israel’s Technion are the only team working for European research consortium BeyondSeq on early diagnosis of cancer. They are using tiny silicon “nanopore” scanners to detect molecular DNA biomarkers in cancer cells.
http://pard.technion.ac.il/2015/09/09/researchers-use-nanopore-scanners-to-find-early-signs-of-cancer/
http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/193312_en.html

Genetic test for BRONJ. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Micromedic Technologies, has identified several new genetic markers for predicting BRONJ (necrosis of the jawbone). BRONJ is a side effect of intravenous treatments in cancer and osteoporosis patients.
http://www.bio-light.co.il/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/BRONJ-PR-clean-updated.pdf
http://biotuesdays.com/2015/08/31/biolight-unit-identifies-bronj-genetic-markers/

Microneedles deliver vital vaccines. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s NanoPass Technologies is supplying its MicronJet600 microneedle system to US-based Immune Design who will use the system to deliver vaccines to cancer immunotherapy patients.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nanopass-technologies-to-supply-micronjet600-device-to-immune-design-for-use-in-zvex-based-oncology-immunotherapy-products-525620521.html

Israel ranks 6th in Healthy Life Expectancy. (TY Atid-EDI) The World Health Organization (WHO) ranks Israel 6th in the world, with the average Israeli living without a terminal illness to age 71.5. Israeli men have the world’s fourth longest total life expectancy of 80.2 years. For women, Israel is ranked tenth with a total life expectancy of 84 years. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4696329,00.html

IBM Haifa’s diagnostic apps. More about the app developed by IBM Haifa to diagnose ADHD sufferers (see Sep 6 2015 newsletter). It won top prize at the Brain Inspired Technology for Education (BITE) Hackathon at Israel’s Technion Institute. Also describes IBM Haifa’s dementia early-detection app (Aug 9 2015 newsletter).
http://www.israel21c.org/diagnostic-apps-for-adhd-dementia/

SENATORS UP FOR RE-ELECTION IN 2016

DEMOCRATS

Michael Bennet (Colorado)
Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut)
Barbara Boxer (California) retiring in 2016
Patrick Leahy (Vermont)
Barbara Mikulski (Maryland) retiring in 2016
Patty Murray (Washington)
Harry Reid (Nevada) retiring in 2016
Brian Schatz (Hawaii)
Charles Schumer (New York)…..Voted against the Iran Nuke Deal, but against an amendment that would have required Iran to recognize Israel and release Americans held in Iran before getting sanctions relief from the United States.
Ron Wyden (Oregon)

We’re Turning Japanese Now

It’s an article of American faith that Japan is an incredibly strange place. The world has been mapped and GPS’ed to death ruining much of the thrill of discovery. There probably aren’t any hidden cities with remnants of lost civilizations lurking in the deserts of Africa or the jungles of South America. That just leaves the land of the rising sun as the X on the map, the strange place that suggests that the world that we know all too well, might still be odder than we can imagine.

But Japan isn’t really all that strange. We are.

Depressed post-industrial economy, low birth rate, social disintegration and a society obsessed with pop culture and useless tech toys? A country that has embraced pacifism to the extent that it can hardly defend its own borders? A nation where materialism has strangled spirituality leaving no sense of purpose?

We are Japan. And so is Europe. Or rather Japan is the place we all reach eventually.

Japan is strange because it aggressively hurled itself into a postmodern void without knowing what was on the other side. It did this with the same dedication that its soldiers once marched into machine gun fire.

Japan had been in a race with the West, as it had been ever since Commodore Perry showed up with a fleet to open up a closed nation. It wasn’t unique in that regard. A lot of countries tried to do the same thing. Most found that they couldn’t keep up with either our technology or our decline. Japan shot past us in both areas. It beat us technologically. And then it outpaced our decline.

Dear Reader (including Rand Paul, who has no place in this “news”letter because he’s so low in the polls),

I’m writing this sentence (who can say where I’ll be in an hour) at the Brooklyn Diner off Times Square (the pastrami frittata is fantastic!). I’m about a block away from the set of Good Morning America, where hundreds of decent, normal Americans are willingly turning themselves into meat props for a three-hour spectacle, two hours and forty-five minutes of which is dedicated to something someone named Kanyé said about someone else; the troubling rise in Pilates injuries; J-Lo’s ass; and breaking news of a puppy making friends with a stuffed toy — from someone’s Facebook page somewhere out in America. I don’t actually know that’s what’s on today’s show, but I’m pretty confident it’s not that far off either.

I don’t mean to single out Good Morning America — The Today Show is equally vapid. It’s just that Good Morning America is fresh in my mind because I happened to watch an hour or so of it earlier this week while waiting for my car at the shop. I would have blown my brains out, but the show depleted my IQ so rapidly I couldn’t manage even the most rudimentary tasks. I got so dumb, Debbie Wasserman Schultz could have beaten me at checkers. But I did learn how Victoria Beckham struggles to have it all as a working mom. I don’t know how she does it. She’s a trooper.

And then there was the long segment on Suzy Favor Hamilton, the courageous former Olympic runner who married her college sweetheart, won a bunch of medals, started a family and a business, and then, “after one night with a Vegas call girl,” decided to become a hooker herself.

Defying all common sense, President Obama remains desperate to rush a $150 billion bailout to al-Qaeda’s allies. Specifically, Obama’s nuclear “deal” would unfreeze Iranian assets and deliver them to the Ayatollah Khamenei and Tehran’s terror regime. Obama is, at best, holistically oblivious or metaphysically negligent about financing Islamo-butchers who cooperate closely with al-Qaeda.

Just as FDR and Stalin collaborated to defeat Hitler, al-Qaeda’s radical Sunnis and Iran’s militant Shiites have buried the scimitar and now conspire against their common enemy: America. As the 9/11 Commission concluded, “There is strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11 hijackers.”

According to former Defense Intelligence Agency chief General Michael Flynn, the reams of records captured during the Navy SEALs’ May 2011 raid that liquidated Osama bin Laden include “letters about Iran’s role, influence and acknowledgment of enabling al Qaeda operatives to pass through Iran as long as al Qaeda did its dirty work against the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

My Hoover Institution colleague Kori Schake wrote about last Wednesday’s GOP debate that, when it comes to foreign policy, the contenders still have a lot to learn. The same is true about vaccines and vaccination policy.

Donald Trump claimed that pediatric vaccines have caused an alarming increase in autism, and that the pediatric vaccination schedule should be attenuated — that is, spread out with smaller doses over a longer time period. Trump is wrong on both counts, which is not surprising for someone who has no expertise in this area and tends to shoot from the hip on all manner of subjects; but the unwillingness (or inability) of the two physicians among the candidates — ophthalmologist Rand Paul and pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson — to set the record straight was appalling.

This contretemps follows similar recent missteps about vaccination by Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie, and Rand Paul (again), all of whom have suggested that parents should have the right to withhold vaccines from their kids. That makes sense only if you think parents should be permitted to let toddlers play with double-edged razor blades and cigarette lighters.

The most important facts relevant to the debate’s misapprehensions are these:

• There is no evidence that vaccination is in any way related to autism, more accurately called “autism spectrum disorder,” or ASD. Although it has been known that ASD runs in families, the underlying genetic determinants have been elusive, but a 2010 study published in the journal Nature offers some new insights. Drawing on data from 60 research institutions in twelve countries, the researchers analyzed the genes of 996 children with ASD and 1,287 children without the condition. They found that each affected person carried his or her own individual assortment of mutations. This contrasts with the situation in sickle-cell anemia, for example, where the disease is caused by a unique mutation — a change in one specific nucleotide of DNA, which in turn causes a single amino-acid change in a gene that codes for the protein of hemoglobin. (Genes are made up of DNA, which is a template that, after an intermediate step, directs the ordering of building blocks — amino acids — into proteins.)