RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sheikh Abdullah Tamimi and his colleagues do not believe in boycotts and divestment. They are convinced that real peace can be achieved through dialogue between Palestinians and all Israelis — not just those who are affiliated with the left-wing. The Israeli left-wing, they contend, does not have a monopoly over peace-making.

For Tamimi, real peace begins between the people and through economic cooperation and improving the living conditions of the Palestinians. This, he explains, is more important than the talk about the establishment of a Palestinian state, which he believes, under the current circumstances, is not a realistic option. This notion goes against the ideas of the advocates of “anti-normalization” and others in the West obviously acting against the true interests of the Palestinians by promoting boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel.

Venal leadership has always been the main tragedy of the Palestinians. But it has created a vacuum that provides an opportunity for Palestinians such as Tamimi to search for other alternatives. This, of course, comes as bad news for those who hate Israel and keep hoping to destroy it. Now the question is, who will triumph: Palestinians and their Jewish neighbors in the West Bank who wish to live in peace, or the anti-Palestinian, anti-Israel, “anti-normalization” activists who seek to derail a true peace at any cost?

By all accounts, Sheikh Abdullah Tamimi, who hails from an influential clan in Hebron, is an extraordinarily courageous and unique Palestinian. His bravery lies not in rescuing a child from a burning house, and his singularity lies not in donating his salary to an orphanage.

Tamimi’s courage and exceptionality showed up in a different sphere: he recently spoke at a seminar organized by Jewish residents of the settlement of Efrat, in Gush Etzion (south of Jerusalem). The seminar was held under the title, “Relations between Jews and Arabs in Gush Etzion.” The event was attended by another courageous Palestinian, Khaled Abu Awwad, General Manager of the Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Families Forum, a grassroots organization that promotes reconciliation as an alternative to hatred and revenge.

The United Nations’ effort to create a second Arab State in former Palestine – in addition to Jordan – has suffered another death blow following the Palestinian Supreme Court ordering the suspension of local elections in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and the Gaza Strip scheduled for October 8.

No parliamentary elections have been held since the 2006 – which Hamas won – but which the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) refused to accept.

A bitter internecine struggle saw Hamas end up governing the Gaza Strip and the PLO controlling areas “A” and “B” in Judea and Samaria.

No Palestinian presidential election has been held since PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was elected in 2005.

Hamas boycotted the last Palestinian municipal elections in 2012 – but was due to participate this year.

In the absence of a popularly elected Government exercising complete authoritative and legislative control over the Gazan and West Bank Arab populations – any prospects of reaching a binding agreement with Israel in relation to Gaza and Judea and Samaria remains an impossible pipedream.

Both the PLO and Hamas have used the slogan “End the Occupation” to demand that Israel totally withdraw from Area “C” in Judea and Samaria over which Israel exercises complete administrative and security control under the Oslo Accords.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Use your brain to control nanobots. (TY Nevet) Researchers at Israel’s Bar Ilan University and the IDC in Herzliya have used brainwaves of humans under strain, to control the release of medicine by tiny robots made from shells made of DNA. The technique could be used (for example) to treat schizophrenia or depression.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3759832/Mind-controlled-nanobots-release-drugs-inside-BRAIN-Tiny-machines-help-treat-depression-epilepsy.html

To diagnose genetic disorders. Israeli-based NRGene is the only company in the world to map the genome for bread, pasta and wild emmer wheat. Now it is turning its attention to the human genome in order to help diagnose genetic disorders at an early stage and strive to personalize medications.
www.timesofisrael.com/nrgene-eyes-human-genomes-with-game-changing-tech/

Pain-free bladder treatments. (TY Atid-EDI) Israeli startup Vensica Medical is developing the ‘VensiCare, a painless needle-free ultrasound catheter system to deliver treatments for overactive bladder, bladder cancer and interstitial cystitis. Vensica has just raised $500,000 for R&D and completion of device design.
http://vensica.com/bladder-treatment-co-vensica-raises-500000-2/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HH7078lg7EY
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-overactive-bladder-treatment-co-vensica-medical-raises-500000-1001140530

First US patients for Chameleon balloon catheter. (TY Atid-EDI) I reported previously (Jun 13) that Israel’s AV Medical had completed trials of its unique balloon catheter that allows simultaneous angioplasty and fluid injection. AV Medical has just commenced using Chameleon on patients in the US.
http://www.a-vmedical.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Chameleon-First-US-Cases-7-18-16-PDF.pdf

Tattoo removal laser gets US approval. (TY Atid-EDI) The US FDA has approved three wavelengths of the PicoWay picosecond laser from Israel’s Syneron Medical. The device successfully removes tattoos of various colors. Recent trials removed 22 tattoos from 15 patients with no side effects.
http://investors.syneron.com/releases?item=320

Monitoring insulin levels. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s DreaMed Diabetes is developing a decision support technology platform called the Advisor to determine optimal patient-specific insulin treatment plans leading to balanced glucose levels in people with diabetes. DreaMed has just raised $3.3 million for development.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dreamed-diabetes-raises-33-million-from-norma-investments-and-a-strategic-investor-300303138.html

Rejoining his family after 18 months as a vegetable. The amazing story of how Moti’s family realized that, despite the paralysis from his stroke, Moti was still there. Now he uses the Israeli device Click2Speak to take part in conversations. And he says that he’s happy! http://www.ezermizion.org/blog/is-he-still-there/

FROM SEPTEMBER MIDEAST OUTPOSThttp://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/a-sloppy-hit-on-israel-review-milton-viorst-zionism-the-birth-and-transformation-of-an-ideal-david-isaac.html

Go to a library and toss a coin at the Israel shelf. You’re almost certain to bounce it off a title critical of the Jewish state. The latest contribution to this death by a thousand books is by journalist Milton Viorst. At the heart of this book is the assumption that Israel is wholly to blame for the conflict between Jews and Arabs.

Though himself a Jew, Viorst veers into racist-sounding rhetoric when he asks whether “the Jewish DNA contains an immunity to peace.” Given Israel’s many attempts to achieve peace, the question isn’t whether Jews are immune to peace but whether they are immune to reality. Viorst clearly is. Otherwise he could not declare that Israel adheres to the “Begin doctrine,” a “diplomatic principle” that purportedly maintains that if a small state “offers concessions at a time of pressure, it only invites more pressure upon itself.”

The manifold problems with this theory begin with Menachem Begin himself, who gave up the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in 1978 in return for a peace treaty, few provisions of which Egypt honored. In 1993, Yitzhak Rabin handed over large swaths of the West Bank to Yasser Arafat, the man known as the “founder of modern terror,” who showed his gratitude by launching a wave of suicide attacks. In 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak didn’t even bother getting an agreement before pulling Israeli troops out of southern Lebanon, paving the way for Hezbollah to turn it into a launching pad for rockets into northern Israel. Similarly, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon uprooted over 8,000 Israelis from their homes in the Gaza Strip, declaring “I am convinced in the depths of my soul and with my entire intellect that this disengagement … will win the support and appreciation of countries near and far… and will advance us on the path of peace with the Palestinians and our other neighbors.” It did neither, as “the world community” became ever more hostile and Gaza became another launching pad for rockets.

In 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made Israel’s most far-reaching proposal, offering even to forgo sovereignty over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest site. Olmert proposed that Israel keep 6.3 percent of the West Bank (areas close to the pre-1967 armistice borders now densely occupied by Jews) but compensate by giving the Palestinians an equal amount of land that had been within the borders of pre-1967 Israel. Mahmoud Abbas was not interested.

Viorst examines the lives of eight Zionist leaders, from Herzl to Netanyahu, to answer his own question: “How did Zionism, over the course of a century, evolve from the idealism of providing refuge for beleaguered Jews to a rationalization for the army’s occupation of powerless Palestinians?” This question is based on a false premise. Israel’s purpose was and remains what Herzl set forth in The Jewish State: “We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes.” Zionism has not a glimmer of oppression in it, which explains the Jews’ many efforts to find a solution to the conflict. Those whom Viorst calls “powerless Palestinians” enjoy the support of all Muslim countries, as well as Europe, the U.N., and the world media. Many of them are determined to annihilate Israel, indoctrinating violence in their young people, who then go out and slaughter children in their sleep, gun down families on the road, and ax rabbis at prayer. Those who commit these crimes are hailed as martyrs, and their families are given stipends. When Palestinians hear of a successful attack against Israelis—or Americans for that matter, as on 9/11—they hand out candy to children. A far better question Viorst might have asked is: How is it that the Jews have managed to keep their humanity in the face of such inhumanity?

Matti Friedman, a journalist and writer who moved from Canada to Israel in his late teens in the late 1990s, has written a powerful little book, Pumpkin Flowers, that takes you deep into Israeli and Middle Eastern reality.

The Pumpkin was a hill in the southern-Lebanon security zone, which Israel set up in 1985 and withdrew from in 2000. “Flowers” was military code for casualties. In those years Hizballah was able to inflict a steady toll of “flowers” at the Pumpkin and other security-zone outposts. It was that—along with the 1997 helicopter disaster (a horrendous accident)—that swayed Israel into finally leaving the zone. As well as a hope—soon shattered—that doing so would lead to peace.

Pumpkin Flowers deals with the Pumpkin in three stages. The middle one is Friedman’s own service there. But first comes his account of Avi Ofner, a young Israeli who served at the Pumpkin before Friedman did. Friedman intensively “researched” Avi and succeeds to evoke him unforgettably.

Unconventional, deep-thinking, authority-mistrusting, and literarily talented, Avi—despite a veneer of disdain—served his full, difficult stint at the Pumpkin with devotion, even passing up possibilities of easier, safer jobs within Israel. As Friedman acutely observes, he and other young soldiers “wouldn’t have said it themselves because of a social code mandating self-deprecation and sarcasm and forbidding any credulous expression of ideals, so it needs to be said on their behalf: they believed they were doing the right thing.” On his last return to the Pumpkin, already planning his impending civilian life, Avi boarded an army helicopter—one of two involved in the midair collision that killed him and 72 others.

By the time Friedman, a raw Canadian-Israeli recruit, found himself at the Pumpkin, it had a legacy of bloody battles, including the 1996 Falcon Incident that killed five soldiers and wounded eight in one night. But as Friedman notes, it was most of all the helicopter disaster—caused by human error, not Hizballah—that fostered a growing, intense, bitter debate in Israel about leaving the security zone altogether. Today Israelis do not miss the security zone, but know that Hizballah’s real target—like its patron Iran’s—was and remains Israel itself.

And it was not only Israel that would be learning about Islamist terror:

Within a few years elements of the security zone war would, in turn, appear elsewhere and become familiar to everyone in the West: Muslim guerrillas operating in a failed and chaotic state; small clashes in which the key actor is not the general but the lieutenant or private; the use of a democracy’s sensitivities, public opinion, and free press as weapons against it.

But in those days, Friedman and his comrades—gazing through thermal sights at the surrounding landscape, including the mainly-Shiite, Hizballah-ruled town of Nabatieh where they could make out a gas station, a hospital, a monastery, and even a woman with dyed blond hair who left her house for work every morning—still talked jokingly, half-jokingly, of being able to visit these places once peace set in. They were—beyond the defensive irony—expressing deep Israeli wishes of the 1990s. CONTINUE AT SITE

One of the largest police force’s in the UK was today mocked after saying it would consider letting Muslim officers wear burkas in an attempt to boost diversity.

West Midlands Police said it will discuss allowing the traditional Islamic dress – which covers the entirety of a woman’s face and body – to become part of Muslim female officers’ uniform.

At a recent meeting, Chief Constable David Thompson, said he would consider employing staff who wear a burka as he looks to increase black and minority ethnic (BME) officers in the region to 30 per cent.

But today, even the Muslim Council of Britain said they would be against female officers wearing full-face burkas or niqabs.

The organisation said they would find it ‘very surprising’ if the force allowed full-face coverings to be used.

A spokesman said: ‘In the media the term burka is used to describe the full face covering but the veil with the slit for the eyes is actually the niqab.

‘The burka is actually the full gown which goes from shoulder to ankle with the face remaining clear.

‘It would be very surprising if West Midlands Police were in favour of full-face coverings.

‘The actual percentage of women wearing a niqab is very, very small and the women who do would probably not want to be in the police.’

And a source at West Midlands Police even criticised the idea of female officers wearing full-face veils, adding it would be ‘mad’.

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/09/08/honor-killing-your-own-sister-for-islam-anni-cyrus-unknown/

Channel 1’s report Wednesday that in 1983, current Palestinian Authority Chairman and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas served as a KGB agent is hardly the story of the year, but it does remind us of certain half-forgotten facts about the Cold War that are becoming ever more relevant today.

The PLO’s close and servile relationship with the KGB was first exposed in a systematic way in 1987, with the publication of Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, the exposé of Soviet and Romanian Cold War operations written by former Romanian intelligence chief Lt.-Gen. Ion Pacepa. Pacepa, who defected to the US in 1978 after serving as the head of the DIE – Romania’s KGB – was the highest ranking intelligence officer from the Soviet bloc to ever defect.

In his book, Pacepa revealed that “the PLO was dreamt up by the KGB.”

Pacepa explained how Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, at the direction of Moscow, convinced Yasser Arafat to employ political warfare, centered on phony protestations that he had abandoned terrorism, to weaken the West’s resolve to defend itself and to cause Israel to doubt its own legitimacy.

Wednesday’s Channel 1 report on Abbas was based on new revelations from the Mitrokhin Archive. Vasili Mitrokhin was a senior archivist in the KGB who surreptitiously copied KGB documents for many years and hid his copies in his home. In 1991 Mitrokhin defected to Britain and took his archive of 25,000 copies of documents with him.

In 2004, the second volume of his edited archive was published. The volume, titled, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, focused on the KGB’s efforts to use the Third World as a strategic weapon in its battle against the West. The volume devotes two chapters to the KGB’s campaign against Israel.

Former Head of Central Command General Gadi Shamni said last week that Israel is the most occupying force in the world and is on its way to becoming a pariah state. “Israel must achieve separation from the Palestinians,” Shamni added.

We can assume that Shamni’s words reflect his worldview. In the IDF 2016, it is impossible to be a General or even a Lieutenant Colonel if you believe in a diplomatic solution to Israel’s conflict with the Arabs other than what is dictated by the Left. The Oslo Peace Industry cloned the entire Israeli elite – built from all those who toed the Oslo line and who run the State today – in its own image.

First and foremost, it cloned the military elite. Every officer from Major and up must undergo a (re)education series, taught by the left-leaning Harman and Binah institutes. (Both are supported by the New Israel Fund). The only commanding officer who testified in favor of Elor Azariah, the soldier accused of killing a terrorist, was a low-ranking officer who left the army after the Azariah incident. The rest of the IDF command does not want to be accused of Nazism, as Deputy Chief of Staff General Golan intimated. So all of them think the same way and talk the same way. And in any future war, they will all be defeated in the same way, just as they were defeated in all the recent rounds of fighting. (That is fine, though. The media will praise them as great victors and only the bereaved families will bear their grief in silence.)

Back to General Shamni. Regardless of the worldview from which his words emanated, Shamni is simply right. The ‘Occupation’ in Judea and Samaria cannot go on forever and it must be ended.

Our Zehut party printed t-shirts that say, ‘End the Occupation’. Of course, this is where any agreement with General Shamni ends. While he advocates another glorious Israel retreat that will bring not only missiles to Tel Aviv, but mortar fire to Kfar Saba, as well, Zehut advocates the end of the Occupation by the declaration of Israeli sovereignty on every grain of sand under the control of the IDF. In other words, the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Zehut also has a detailed plan to achieve this goal. The plan also provides a solution for the Arabs living in Israel, for dealing with international pressure, the implications of the move in terms of international law, safeguarding human rights and more.

The idea of ending the Occupation by running away (Oslo/Disengagement) has already exploded in our faces. Even the Left has despaired of it.

“Climate change” is a controversial subject. Some people believe that humans have been doing just about everything wrong and are causing the Earth to heat up to such a degree that we will wipe out civilization. Other people actually examine the evidence and think for themselves.

But the first group includes three professors from the University of Colorado, who have declared that on the subject of climate change, their students aren’t allowed to dissent with their views:

Three professors co-teaching an online course called “Medical Humanities in the Digital Age” at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs recently told their students via email that man-made climate change is not open for debate, and those who think otherwise have no place in their course.

“The point of departure for this course is based on the scientific premise that human induced climate change is valid and occurring. We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change, nor will the ‘other side’ of the climate change debate be taught or discussed in this course,” states the email, a copy of which was provided to The College Fix by a student in the course.

Signed by the course’s professors Rebecca Laroche, Wendy Haggren and Eileen Skahill, it was sent after several students expressed concern for their success in the course after watching the first online lecture about the impacts of climate change.

“Opening up a debate that 98% of climate scientists unequivocally agree to be a non-debate would detract from the central concerns of environment and health addressed in this course,” the professors’ email continued.

The email also banned discussion on class message boards, and told students who have a problem with that to drop the class.

First, why is a Humanities course talking about climate change?

Oh, right: Everything must be used to advance the narrative, even if it has no place in the discussion.

While you might expect better from college professors, they either don’t know or don’t care that their “98 percent of climate scientists” argument has been debunked, junked, and ridiculed for a long time now, and not just by fly-by-night blogs no one has heard of, either.