RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israel has recently decided to allocate millions of dollars to the construction of settlements in Judea and Samaria. Of course, this has produced anger among those who believe in the “two-state fantasy” of an Arab state and a Jewish state peacefully and cooperatively living side by side. As the fantasists see it, those darned Israelis are always such a nuisance — building homes in their ancestral land, shattering the dreams of a people who are not a people, and throwing the Middle East into chaos once again. If the Israeli right wing that governs the country was not so closeminded and would just give peace a chance and the Jews and the Palestinians could be the best of friends.

However, in the real world, people know, or should know, that none of these things are true. The Palestinians have been offered their own state at least three times, in 2000, 2001, and 2008, and each time it was the Palestinians who refused to take the offer of most of the land they claimed they wanted, and live in peace with Israel. Further, it is not Israel that has thrown the Middle East into chaos, but Islamist extremism in the region, especially from the Shia Islamists in Iran. Also, the much-vilified Israeli settlements are not an impediment to peace in the region, but are a necessity for Israel to provide security and protect its Jewish heritage and identity.

The idea that building homes is the cause of this conflict is ridiculous, because there was conflict even before there was any Israeli construction in Judea and Samaria. When the Arabs refer to “occupation,” most often they mean Jewish “occupation” of the entire land of Israel. The evidence lies in not just their words and chants of “from the river to the sea,” but also in their actions, especially pre-1967, before Israel took Judea and Samaria from the invading Jordanians. History has demonstrated that the Palestinian Arab population has never been willing to agree to peace as long as there would be a Jewish state next to the Arab state. When Israel was first created and allotted a sliver of land, it was attacked by five Arab armies vowing to drive its residents into the Mediterranean. And since then, whenever Israel offered generous peace proposals, meeting almost all of the Palestinian Arab demands, the offers were still rejected because they required recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

Settlements in Judea and Samaria actually are vital to Israeli national security. If “Palestine” were created in Judea and Samaria, it would likely become another hotbed for terrorists, like in Gaza. This is incredibly dangerous, as there would be parts of Israel only nine miles wide but still containing the vast majority of the Israeli population which would be trapped between Arab terrorists and the sea. The settlements in Judea and Samaria were established to widen Israel’s narrowest width, which ensures Israel will have a route to the Jordan Valley if Israel is forced to fight a war to the east. Further, Judea and Samaria are positioned on a formidable mountain range, towering over central Israel. Without Israeli control or presence there the IDF would not be able to prevent Arab Katyusha rocket fire that has in range over 70% of Israel’s population and 80% of her industrial base.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Nanomedicine targets stomach cancer. (TY Dan) Researchers at Israel’s Technion Institute have developed a nanomedicine technology for the targeted treatment of gastric tumors. The platform combines anti-cancer and anti-resistance compounds, packaged orally in beta-casein – a constituent of mother’s milk.
http://www.technion.ac.il/en/2016/06/nanomedicine-targets-gastric-tumors/

Artificial Intelligence to aid patient care. Israeli startup MedyMatch is developing an artificial intelligence (AI) platform using proprietary algorithms to process CT image data in the Cloud. Fast analysis of data will help physicians make accurate critical clinical decisions – e.g. with stroke diagnosis.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/medymatch-aims-to-offer-second-opinion-in-stroke-diagnosis/

An app to beat acne. Israeli startup MDAlgorithms has built MDacne – the world’s first app to provide mobile acne analysis with customized treatment plans. Users complete a questionnaire and take a selfie. An algorithm then processes the data and offers food and hygiene tips and recommended medications.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/phone-app-seeks-to-bust-acne-using-selfies-and-algorithms/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo3joCLxfAw

ReWalk inventor can now stand up. Israel’s Amit Goffer invented the ReWalk for paraplegics, but as a quadriplegic he couldn’t use it. So he invented UPnRIDE (see Aug 2014) which allows wheelchair-bound quadriplegics to get vertical. Watch Amit use the latest version of UPnRIDE.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boSTQX2w1i8
http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2016/06/israeli-invention-allows-quadriplegics.html

Device to treat overactive bladder. (TY Dan) Israeli startup BlueWind Medical has won a CE mark for its miniature neuro-stimulation device to treat overactive bladder. The OAB-1000 system is wireless, has no battery, is 90% smaller than existing devices and is minimally invasive, being implanted in the leg.
http://www.fiercemedicaldevices.com/story/israeli-startup-bluewind-wins-ce-mark-tiny-batteryless-overactive-bladder-n/2016-06-15

Robotic surgery in New York. (TY Dan) Dr. Ronald Lehman is first in NYC to perform PROlat(TM) spinal surgery using technology from Israel’s Mazor Robotics. He praised the time saved (one hour), the absence of having to flip over the patient and the reduced radiation that the patient and operating staff were exposed to. In addition, Mazor’s platform has now been approved by the medical authorities in (South) Korea.
http://www.orthospinenews.com/dr-ronald-lehman-is-first-in-nyc-to-perform-prolattm-procedure-with-mazor-robotics-technology/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=650Yoyiw-6Y
http://www.mazorrobotics.com/korean-fda-clears-mazor-robotics-renaissance-robotic-platform/

Find an Israeli doctor. The Israel Medical Association has launched a database (in Hebrew) of Israeli public and private doctors. Currently containing 1500 doctors (and growing) one can search by name, specialty and subspecialty, location, gender, professional status, languages they speak and age group that they treat.
http://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/Find-a-doctor-easily-and-quickly-with-IMAs-new-app-and-website-457920 www.ima.org.il/doctorsindex

Israeli soldiers revive Palestinian Arab baby. A Palestinian Arab baby without a pulse was brought to where IDF soldiers were stationed and they immediately began emergency treatment. They were able to restore the baby’s breathing before the Red Crescent arrived to take him to hospital. The baby is now in stable condition.
http://unitedwithisrael.org/watch-idf-medics-revive-unconscious-palestinian-baby/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZPCOm3tMOQ

After supporters of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement failed to pressure rock superstar Carlos Santana into cancelling his upcoming concert in Tel Aivv, the guitarist said in a video message on Thursday that he is excited to return to Israel and promote a “musical message of peace, love and an end to conflict.”

“The band and I will bring our open hearts and musical energy that will resonate with your soul long after the last song has been played,” Santana, 68, said in the clip, which was re-posted onFacebook by Israel advocacy group StandWithUs. “We look forward to seeing you at Park HaYarkon. Shalom and salam alaykum. Peace.”

Santana’s concert in Tel Aviv, scheduled to take place on July 30, was first announced in March. Since then, BDS activists have attempted to bully the Grammy Award winner into cancelling the show. Anti-Israel campaigners took to social media and demanded the Mexico-born musician stop “supporting the oppressor” and “endorsing occupation.” Open letters were also published, such as one by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) which called on Santana “to respect our picket line.”

Garik Ruiz, the North America Advocacy Advisor for the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) National Committee, said earlier in June that his organization is “working very hard to be in communication with [Santana] about the international picket line and telling him not to cross it. We have had many campaigns targeting artists but Santana is the most high profile.”

On Tuesday, BDS supporters attempted to deliver a petition with 25,000 signatures to the headquarters of The Milagro Foundation, established by Santana and his family to help underprivileged children around the world. The petition delivery was live streamed by the anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace, but workers at the foundation “refused to open the door … and closed the blinds,” according to the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA).

Santana’s upcoming concert in Israel is part of the musician’s world Luminosity Tour and will mark 29 years since he last performed in the Jewish state. The guitarist was set to perform in 2010 in Jaffa but pulled out due to reported scheduling difficulties.

The musician promised that portions of the proceeds from the upcoming Israel concert will be donated to the Hand in Hand: Center for Jewish-Arab Education in Israel, an organization that unites Jews and Arabs in schools across Israel. The Milagro Foundation has provided funding to Hand in Hand since 2003.

Watch Carlos Santana’s message in the video below:

The argument that Israel is becoming increasingly isolated in the world took another blow this month when—for the first time in the history of the United Nations and of Israel—the Israeli ambassador was elected to head one of the U.N.’s permanent committees.

The General Assembly’s Legal Committee, also called the “Sixth Committee,” covers the United Nations’s international law operations, which include matters related to terrorism and to the Geneva Conventions.

There was a tough diplomatic fight over this, so it is worth handing out kudos.

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, addresses a Security Council meeting on the Middle East on January 26. Elliott Abrams writes that it has been reported in the Arab press, though impossible to prove because there was a secret ballot, that several Arab countries voted for the Israeli ambassador to head one of the U.N.’s permanent committees. Mike Segar/reuters

First, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, who was mocked by many on the Israeli left and in the Israeli media (and yes, there is a large overlap) when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed him, showed that he is a very competent diplomat.

He was a member of the Knesset and a minister when appointed but had no diplomatic experience. He has obviously learned the job, and fast.

Second, kudos to the United States Mission to the U.N., which fought very hard to get votes for Israel.

A major new novel features a Jewish activist organizing protests against the Roosevelt administration’s abandonment of European Jewry. A recent off-Broadway play (being made into a movie by an Academy Award-winning actor and director) depicted Jewish activists and leaders clashing over Holocaust rescue.

With his appearance in literature, theater, and film, the once-controversial Peter Bergson is finally entering the popular culture. And the U.S. Jewish community at long last seems to be coming to grips with one of the most painful chapters in its history.

Seventy-five years ago this summer, Bergson (real name: Hillel Kook) and a handful of colleagues launched what would become perhaps the most dramatic political action campaign in American Jewish history.

To advance their demands to rescue Europe’s Jews and create a Jewish state in Palestine, these activists placed hundreds of full-page ads in newspapers, lobbied in Congress, and organized a march by 400 rabbis to the White House. Such tactics were radical steps for Jews in the 1940s. Many immigrants and children of immigrants, still nervous about their place in American society, were uneasy about broadcasting Jewish concerns in the pages of the major newspapers.

Bergson liked to call himself a “nuisance diplomat,” and his group’s activities did prove to be quite a nuisance to the Roosevelt administration, which insisted the rescue of European Jews was impossible. The Bergsonites mobilized enough congressional and public pressure on President Roosevelt to help force him to create a U.S. government agency, the War Refugee Board, in early 1944. During the final fifteen months of World War II, the board played a central role in rescuing some 200,000 Jews from the Nazis.

Originally published under the title “Why Is A San Francisco University Secretly Partnering With An Arab College That Promotes Jihad?”

SFSU President Leslie Wong has come under criticism for failing to take sufficient action against anti-Israel hate groups on campus.

San Francisco State University (SFSU), which has a well-deserved reputation as a breeding ground for anti-Israel radicalism, became national news in April. That’s when campus police stood by as a hate-Israel group, the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS), shouted down and disrupted a lecture by Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, prompting much criticism of SFSU’s president, Leslie Wong.

But there’s worse. As revealed by an investigation into SFSU by Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, SFSU has partnered with a Palestinian university that’s a hotbed of radicalization.

What our investigation turned up:

SFSU signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with An-Najah University of Hebron in 2014 at the behest of Rabab Abdulhadi, director of SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED) and founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

Najah states on its website that the MOU was signed on September 10, 2014 and Abdulhadi sang its praises at an April 2015 reception:

The memorandum of understanding that President Wong signed with An-Najah National University in Palestine … is the first time that we have any agreement with any university in the Arab or Muslim world and we are very excited about that.

Wong also trumpeted the MOU at the 2015 reception, boasting of his role in helping bring it to fruition:

When I returned from Palestine two years ago, I said I want to be one of the first major universities to sign an agreement with An-Najah or any of the other Palestinian universities, or any of the universities in the Arab world.

An elementary school in New Jersey allegedly called the police on a third grader for talking about brownies — yes, as in the baked good — over concerns that the word “brownies” may have been a racial slur.

According to the student’s mother, her nine-year-old son was participating in a conversation about the bakery treat during his end-of-the-year class party at William P. Tatem Elementary School on June 16 when another student remarked that his comment was racist. Rather than explain to the accusing student that the name of the baked good is a generally accepted term and not racially charged whatsoever, the school actually called the police.

Yes — the police.

“He was intimidated, obviously,” the mother, Stacy dos Santos, said, according to Philly.com.

“There was a police officer with a gun in the holster talking to my son, saying, ‘Tell me what you said,’” she continued. “He didn’t have anybody on his side.”

According to Philly.com, the police department also contacted the boy’s father, and the incident was referred to the New Jersey Division of Child Protection and Permanency — because after all, hearing a nine-year-old talking about snacks definitely makes you wonder how he could possibly be safe living in a home with people who raised him to behave that way.

According to dos Santos, her son spent his last day of third grade at home because of the incident, and he feels so “traumatized” over it that they’re hoping to send him to a different public school in the fall.

Unfortunately, another school in the same district may just be more of the same. After all, according to both school officials and police, they were told during a May 25 meeting with representatives from the county prosecutor’s office that every little thing that could maybe potentially be considered criminal – even things that Police Chief Kevin Carey called “as minor as a simple name-calling incident” — should be reported to the cops. What’s more, Carey also said that “just about every incident” should be reported to the New Jersey Division of Child Protection and Permanency. According to Philly.com, Superintendent Scott Oswald estimated that the cops may have been called to as many as five incidents per day in the district of 1,875 students over the last month.

Not surprisingly, Philly.com reports that parents are not big fans of the policy — and that they have written letters and taken to social media to express this. Hopefully, it can make a difference. After all, what good can come from involving law enforcement anytime some kid talks about snacks is really not clear — but the potential for harm is.

— Katherine Timpf is a reporter for National Review Online.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/actress-helen-mirren-rejects-efforts-to-boycott-israel/Helen Mirren rejects efforts to boycott Israel | The Times of Israel

Oscar-winning actress Helen Mirren says she is a “believer” in Israel and rejects efforts to boycott it.

Mirren showered Israeli artists with praise Wednesday and said she opposed efforts by pro-Palestinian groups to boycott them.

Mirren is in Israel to host the Genesis Prize, an award known as “the Jewish Nobel.” The $1 million prize is being awarded to Israeli-American violinist Itzhak Perlman for his accomplishments as a musician, teacher and advocate for the disabled.

Mirren, who first visited as a volunteer in the 1960s, says she has a strong connection to Israel.

Mirren is one of the few actors to have won the so-called Triple Crown — an Oscar, Tony and Emmy. She received her Academy Award for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in the 2006 film “The Queen.”

The intellect of so many in Israel’s governments have led them along the dead end path of the peace process, forcing them to taste the bitter fruits of appeasement.

Sovereignty refers to the defined right of nations, the ‘ownership’ of their territories and national interests.

A nation is referred to as ‘sovereign’ in terms of its independent identity and rights. Sovereign rights are exercised within national territories.

A nation has the legal right to insist on its sovereign status and the right to protect its interests. As the Governor of Texas stated recently on the Sean Hannity program, “Sovereignty is a key component of a Nation.

The British people groaning under the increasingly onerous and tyrannical power of the European Union finally had had enough and in a national referendum voted to leave the EU and regain their borders and national sovereignty. Other nations, such as Holland, Hungary, Poland and even France, may in time follow Britain’s lead.

But will Israel assert its rights in its own sovereign, ancestral and biblical lands from the River to the Sea?

Will its leadership have the courage to withstand the burdensome and illegitimate pressures that the Obama regime, the United Nations and the European Union place upon it to abandon its heartland and give it away to the Jew hating Muslim barbarians who call themselves Palestinians?

For 49 long years, since the liberation of east Jerusalem and biblical Judea and Samaria from illegal Jordanian occupation – territory the world grotesquely prefers to call the ‘West Bank’ – the beloved Jewish heartland has remained in a political limbo and not fully annexed. Instead, too much has been sinfully abandoned.

Israel’s foolish failure to declare again and again its historical and ancestral patrimony in its own biblical, physical and spiritual homeland has allowed a hostile world to thus assume that Israel itself does not believe it has legal or indigenous sovereignty in its own territory or in its eternal capital, Jerusalem.

It is a sure sign of warmist desperation in the wake of the abject failure of global warming climate models to accurately predict the future. Michael Mann, one of the leading touts of warmism, yesterday told the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee:

“Fundamentally, I’m a climate scientist and have spent much of my career with my head buried in climate-model output and observational climate data trying to tease out the signal of human-caused climate change.

“What is disconcerting to me and so many of my colleagues is that these tools that we’ve spent years developing increasingly are unnecessary because we can see climate change, the impacts of climate change, now, playing out in real time, on our television screens, in the 24-hour news cycle….”

Please allow me to translate: The best tool we have to scare people into supporting carbon taxes and regulations that would empower the ruling elites to control every aspect of wealth generation is propaganda pretending that bad weather, like hurricanes and floods are caused by an increase in carbon dioxide, and essential atmospheric ingredient that promotes higher crop yields necessary to feed the earth’s burgeoning population. Most people do not realize that catastrophic weather events have been apart of human history forever, so we can fool them into believing that we can prevent them in the future by limiting the combustion of hydrocarbons.

Valerie Richardson of the Washington Times notes:

His comment drew hoots from climate skeptics, including the website Greenie Watch, which posted his comment under the headline, “‘Scientist’ Michael Mann says there is no need for statistics: You can just SEE global warming.”

“Unsurprising. The statistics are pretty doleful for Warmism,” the site said in a Monday post. (snip)

Skeptics have hotly challenged the link between rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and “extreme weather” events, noting, for example, that hurricane activity is on the decline.