RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sweden has had a new government for a week now.

So far the only public statement the new government has made has been its intention to recognise the fictitious State of Palestine. But not the very real (and beleaguered) State of Kurdistan.

Here are a few reflections on this new government, and what drives it:

It is a Leftist government, a coalition of Social Democrats and Sweden’s hard-line Green Party.
The Green Party in Sweden is not like the Greens in the real world. Here the Greens are not terribly concerned about the environment. Party leader and Environment Minister Åsa Romson paints her houseboat with a poisonous substance that is expressly banned by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency for its toxic properties, fending off criticism on the grounds that her boat is “too large” to be pro-environmentally washed clean instead of coated with poison to keep barnacles at bay. She heats this houseboat – which is moored in the heart of central Stockholm’s low-emission zone – with emission-spewing diesel fuel. In Sweden, the Green Party is concerned less with the environment and more with bucking the system. What system, you might ask? Answer: any system, just so long as there’s a system against which to revolt. Long live the revolution – any revolution. The Greens are simply here to be different.
Another Green Party minister – Minister for Culture, no less – is Alice Bah Kuhnke. She is known, not least, for baring her breasts in the media, and for threatening to cut off funding to organisations that work against honour killings if any of the funding for that noble purpose goes to men working against this crime. She justified her position on the grounds that she is a feminist. As a feminist, she said, support should only be given to women. No, seriously. She demanded that funding only be given to women, thus effectively barring male members of immigrant communities from daring to take a stance against this horrific crime. Interestingly, she joined the Green Party just last week, AFTER being nominated for a ministerial post on behalf of the Green Party…
Another Green Party government minister is Mehmet Kaplan, an ardent Islamist whose mission in public life is to “end the occupation of Jerusalem”. One might be tempted to ask if he is referring to Muslim occupation of the area overlooking Judaism’s holy Western Wall, from which boulders are routinely hurled by Muslims down onto Jews praying below. But he is of course referring to a “Jewish occupation” of Judaism’s holy sites in the Jewish capital of the Jewish state of Israel. Mehmet Kaplan is the new Housing and City Development Minister. Quite comical really – a Swedish Settlement Minister opposing what he regards as settlements in Israel… Mehmet Kaplan applauds young Western jihadists who travel to IS(IS)-controlled territory in Syria and Iraq for beheading tourism and says they are no different to other patriots fighting against invaders, such as the Finnish patriots who once struggled against the invading Soviet empire. No, really. And he is a key minister in the new Swedish government. Mehmet Kaplan was also a key agitator on board the infamous Turkish ship Mavi Marmara along with several dozen other terrorists who tried to break Israel’s weapons embargo on the Hamas regime in Gaza.

Dr. Richard Horton, the editor of the English medical journal The Lancet, was not transformed by his visit to Israel last week.

Horton came to Israel last week the guest of Rambam Medical Center in a bid to dig himself out of the hole he dug himself into. On August 19 Horton published a 1,600-word letter criminalizing Israel. In it, Israel was accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. The authors called for a boycott of Israel, including Israeli academia. Since its publication on Lancet’s website, the letter has garnered 20,000 signatures.

The letter made no mention of the fact that the war this summer was initiated by Hamas through its illegal missile, mortar and rocket offensive against Israeli population centers. The esteemed medical professionals who wrote the letter failed to mention that Hamas’s operational headquarters was located in Shifa hospital in Gaza. And of course, they ignored the underlying fact that Hamas’s entire campaign against Israel was a crime against humanity.

Immediately following its publication, Prof. Gerald Steinberg, the head of NGO Monitor, exposed that the letter’s principal authors are frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Semites. Dr. Paola Manduca and Dr. Swee Ang disseminated a video entitled, CNN, Goldman Sachs & the Zio Matrix. It was produced by the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke.

As Britain’s Telegraph reported, in disseminating the video, Ang exhorted her audience to understand that the Jewish threat outlined in the video is a threat to humanity. In her words, it “is not about Palestine – it is about all of us!” For her part, as the Telegraph reported, Manduca has accused Israel of responsibility for the Boston Marathon bombing. And she disseminated an article comparing Israel to a “strangler fig,” which as the Telegraph explained, “grows around other trees and takes their sunlight, often resulting in the deaths of the original trees.”

The FBI wants Americans to see whether they recognize an ISIS terrorist with a North American accent, so they have released a video of the man.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is asking for the public to help identifying a particular terrorist as well as other possible wannabe-terrorists.

On Tuesday, Oct. 7, the FBI released a video in which an ISIS terrorist is shown speaking Arabic, but then switches into perfect English, spoken with a North American accent. The terrorist points to Syrians, men he calls “soldiers of Assad.” The faces of the men are blurred out, but the masked terrorist informs the audience that the men are digging their own graves.

The video, which appears after this article, is part of a new effort by the FBI to elicit the public’s help through the use of social media. The FBI has also posted online a form for viewers to fill out if they believe they have information about the identity of the ISIS terrorist in the video.

The video ends showing the men who had been digging with shovels lined up, kneeling at the edge of the pit that was dug. The terrorist is holding a pistol.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

A new way to fight infection. The US Biomedical R&D Authority has awarded Israel’s Atox Bio $24 million to develop its treatments for severe infections. Atox Bio’s AB103 uniquely modulates the patient’s immune response rather than attacking the virus or bacteria. Pathogens cannot develop resistance to the treatment.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-atox-gets-24m-to-fight-zombie-bio-threats/
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-atox-bio-awarded-24m-to-fight-bio-threats-1000975287

Hepatitis treatment fast-tracked. The US FDA has awarded Fast Track Designation to Israeli biotech Galmed for its Aramchol treatment of Non-Alcoholic Steato-Hepatitis, or NASH. Galmed is to perform Phase IIb trials of Aramchol this year with 240 NASH patients who also suffer from obesity and insulin resistance.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-galmed-jumps-on-fda-hepatitis-drug-approval-1000974455

Robotic heart surgery in action. An Israeli Broadcasting Authority report about the groundbreaking robotic catheterization procedure that was broadcast live from Israel to 12,000 US doctors two weeks ago. Two Israelis founded Corindus, the company that developed the system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ErvOPeUTxo http://www.corindus.com/about-corindus/management
http://www.corindus.com/about-corpath/how-corpath-works

New non-dairy, no soy infant formula. Two Israeli baby-food executives have developed a new vegetable-based product called INDI (Innovative Non Dairy Infant formula). It provides a solution for babies who cannot tolerate cows milk. It also doesn’t contain soy, which can affect a baby’s hormones.
http://www.israel21c.org/headlines/new-baby-formula-has-no-dairy-or-soy/

“About Ebola” saves lives. Health workers in West Africa have used the Israeli app Snapp to build a website containing essential details about preventing the spread of Ebola. “About Ebola” is the first Android app written in the Jola / Diola language and around 5,000 copies have been downloaded.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/how-israeli-app-in technology-helps-beat-ebola/

Israel’s oldest hospital celebrates 120 years. An old Jewish blessing states, “You should live for 120 years.” Jerusalem’s Herzog Hospital, Israel’s oldest hospital, is celebrating its 120th birthday and is still expanding. Herzog is Israel’s foremost center for geriatric and mental health care, treatment and research.
http://www.cjnews.com/index.php?q=node/131167

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

The world’s largest dairy farm project. This video describes the work of Israel’s afimilk Vietnam – the largest dairy farm project in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3k2ktEouqHo

Design and print your own 3D product. Industrial designers Oded Marcus and Shaul Cohen welcome students and studios – and the general public – to come inside their new 3D Factory in Tel Aviv to check out the cutting-edge three-dimensional printers and what they can make.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoNAYfbxECk

Turn your saddle into a bike lock. Israel’s Seatylock is a neat way to carry around the lock for your bicycle, without you needing to take on any unnecessary extra weight.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/seatylock/seatylock-bicycle-saddle-and-lock-in-one-amazing-p
http://seatylock.com/default https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xifLMpRlXu4

$5 million donation for cyber security research. Carole and Marcus Weinstein have sponsored the building of a new Cyber Security center at Ben Gurion University – a key component of Israel’s CyberSpark initiative. The 1580 sq. m. building will house laboratories, classrooms, auditoriums, conference rooms, and offices.
http://in.bgu.ac.il/en/Pages/news/weinstein_donation.aspx

The next generation of microchips is Israeli. Intel is launching its new Israel-developed Core M computer processor chips and already planning the release of its successor – the SkyLake, also designed in Israel. Intel’s Israeli developments are astounding. http://www.haaretz.com/business/.premium-1.618097
http://www.legitreviews.com/intel-shows-first-skylake-processor-demo-and-announces-2h-2015-release-date_150157 http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/intel-israel-old-relationship-faces-new-criticism/

Growing coral in the desert. (Thanks to Charlie) Israel’s OkCoral in the Negev desert produces fast-growing corals for use by Israel’s Corebone (featured previously) in dental implants and bone regeneration. (CNN video)
http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/22301/growing-sea-coral-israels-desert-human-bones-video/#xOqKtPd3YiZZXzBw.97

Over the moon for Israeli space technology. Over 200 leaders in the “space business” gathered at the Israel exhibition at the International Astronautical Congress in Toronto. Israel is one of only seven countries to launch and maintain its own satellites and works closely with both NASA and the European Space Agency.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/world-beats-path-to-israels-door-for-better-space-tech/

WHY FDR ABANDONED THE JEWS by Rafael Medoff (Part 5 of 5)
(Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, www.WymanInstitute.org and author of 15 books about the Holocaust and Jewish history.)

The Jews were not the only minority group whose abandonment by President Franklin D. Roosevelt was misrepresented and minimized in “The Roosevelts,” the recent Ken Burns documentary. Japanese-Americans, too, received short shrift in the 7-part PBS series. And there is a crucial connection between FDR’s response to the Holocaust and his mass internment of the Japanese.

In episode #6, Burns referred briefly to President Roosevelt’s decision to place more than 110,000 Japanese –most of them U.S. citizens– in internment camps during World War Two. But instead of examining the reasons for FDR’s actions, “The Roosevelts” quickly turned its attention to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who sympathized with the internees and visited one of the detention centers.

Burns used the same device in episode #5, when referring to the Roosevelt administration closing America’s doors to Jewish refugees who were trying to flee the Nazis. Instead of exploring the reasons for FDR’s attitudes toward immigration, Burns described the First Lady’s sympathy for Jewish refugees.

In effect, Burns used Mrs. Roosevelt as a cover for the president’s troubling actions. In doing so, Burns missed –or ducked?– an important aspect of FDR’s worldview, which had a direct impact on U.S. policy.

While living in Warm Springs, Georgia, in the 1920s, Roosevelt authored a number of overheated articles about Asian immigration to the United States. He warned against granting citizenship to “non-assimilable immigrants,” and opposed Japanese immigration on the grounds that “mingling Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results.”

In another column, FDR said he favored the admission of some Europeans, so long as they had “blood of the right sort.” He argued that immigration should be restricted until the U.S. could thoroughly “digest” those foreigners who had already been admitted. He proposed limiting future immigration to those who could be most quickly and easily assimilated, including through dispersal around the country.

“RESCUE THROUGH VICTORY’ MEANT NO RESCUE by Rafael Medoff (Part 4 of 5)
(Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, www.WymanInstitute.org and author of 15 books about the Holocaust and Jewish history.)

“Europe’s Jews were Hitler’s prisoners,” according to the new Ken Burns documentary, “The Roosevelts,” which aired on PBS earlier this month. And since the Jews were prisoners, there was nothing the United States could do to help them “other than to obliterate that madman and his monstrous regime.”

The claim that there was nothing President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration could have done to rescue Jews is not new. FDR and his spokesmen themselves made that claim repeatedly during the Holocaust years. They even coined a sound byte to give their policy a positive spin: “Rescue through victory.”

To which Congressman Emanuel Celler replied: “Victory, the spokesmen say, is the only solution…After victory, the disembodied spirits will not present so difficult a problem; the dead no longer need food, drink and asylum.”

The truth is that Hitler’s Europe was not hermetically sealed. We know that many Jews could have been rescued prior to the Allied liberation, because many Jews DID escape or were rescued before the war ended, without the help of the Roosevelt administration.

More than 26,000 European Jewish refugees reached Palestine between 1941 and 1944 in transports organized by Zionist activists. An estimated 27,000 Jewish refugees escaped to Switzerland and were granted haven during the war years, though tens of thousands more reached the Swiss border but were turned back. More than 7,000 Danish Jews were smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Denmark to safety in Sweden in 1943. Thousands of French Jews escaped the 1942 deportations by fleeing to Spain. Thousands more reached Allied-liberated Italy.

There was a myriad of ways to save Jews within Europe.

GIVING FDR CREDIT WHERE CREDIT ISN’T DUE by Rafael Medoff (Part 3 of 5)
(Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, www.WymanInstitute.org and author of 15 books about the Holocaust and Jewish history.)

After President Franklin D. Roosevelt learned that Hitler was slaughtering the Jews, he created a government agency to try to rescue them–so said the new Ken Burns documentary, “The Roosevelts,” which aired on PBS earlier this month.

Burns’s depiction of FDR’s response to the Holocaust is an excellent example of something that is technically true–yet is, in fact, utterly misleading.

“When news began to reach [Roosevelt] at the end of 1942 that the Germans had moved on from mistreatment to mass murder,” the narrator of ‘The Roosevelts’ recounted in episode #6, “he joined Churchill and Stalin and ten Allied governments in exile in promising to prosecute and publish those responsible for what they called ‘this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination.’ ”

Technically true, but profoundly misleading.

The president did not exactly rush to acknowledge and condemn the mass murders. In fact, when information about the killings began reaching Washington in mid-1942, Roosevelt administration officials suppressed it. When that information reached American Jewish leaders from another source, U.S. officials pressed them to hold back the news until it could be investigated further. Finally, three months later, the administration grudgingly conceded that the information was correct.

Even at that point, the White House was in no hurry to speak out. It was the British government that suggested issuing a joint Allied statement about the killings. Roosevelt’s State Department at first resisted the proposal, fearing–as one official put it–that “the various Governments of the United Nations [as the Allies were informally known] would expose themselves to increased pressure from all sides to do something more specific in order to aid these people.”

The Roosevelt administration eventually went along with the joint Allied statement, but only after watering down some of the language. For example, the proposed phrase “reports from Europe which leave no doubt” (that mass murder was underway) was whittled down to just “numerous reports from Europe.”

FDR’S DISAPPOINTING RESPONSE TO KRISTALLNACHT by Rafael Medoff (Part 2 of 5)
(Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, www.WymanInstitute.org and author of 15 books about the Holocaust and Jewish history.)

According to the recent Ken Burns documentary, “The Roosevelts,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom more forcefully than any other world leader. But the truth is that FDR responded with superficial gestures rather than meaningful action.

On the night of November 9-10, 1938, mobs of Nazi stormtroopers unleashed a hurricane of violence and destruction upon the Jews of Germany. Hundreds of Jews were beaten in the streets, and more than 90 were murdered. About 30,000 more were dragged off to concentration camps. Several hundred synagogues were burned to the ground, while fire fighters stood by, under orders from the Hitler government to act only to keep fires from spreading to property owned by non-Jews. An estimated 7,000 Jewish business were ransacked. The violence became known as Kristallnacht, the “Night of the Glass,” a reference to the widespread smashing of windows of Jewish homes and shops.

Ken Burns’ “The Roosevelts” emphasized that FDR was “the only leader of a democratic nation to dare denounce” the pogrom. Six days after the violence ended, Roosevelt told a press conference that he “could scarcely believe such things could occur” in the 20th century.

FDR also took two steps. He extended the visas of the approximately 15,000 German Jewish refugees who were then in the United States as tourists–but he also announced that liberalization of America’s immigration policy was “not in contemplation.” Roosevelt alsorecalled the U.S. ambassador from Germany for “consultations”

–but he rejected suggestions by some members of Congress to break diplomatic ties with the Hitler regime.

The narrator on “The Roosevelts” pointed out that Roosevelt’s temporary recall of the ambassador was “something neither Britain nor France dared do.”

(Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, www.WymanInstitute.org and author of 15 books about the Holocaust and Jewish history.)

For seven consecutive nights in September, PBS aired the latest Ken Burns documentary, “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History.” Millions of Americans watched the latest compelling Burns production, which masterfully interspersed old film footage with the actual words of Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt, spoken, in character, by Edward Herrmann, Meryl Streep, and other outstanding actors. It was great entertainment. But when it came to the topic of FDR’s response to the Nazi persecution of Europe’s Jews, “The Roosevelts” was fatally flawed.

The fifth and sixth episodes, covering the 1930s, briefly referred to the question of German Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler and seeking to immigrate to the United States. A Gallup poll found more than 80% of Americans “opposed offering sanctuary to European refugees,” the narrator reported.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt “battled on behalf of admitting Jewish refugees to the United States for as long as the Nazis were willing to grant them exit visas,” the narrator asserted. “Restrictive immigration laws frustrated her.”

Missing from this discussion of America’s immigration policy was any mention of the man who was actually responsible for America’s immigration policy–the president.