RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.amazon.com/BDS-IDIOTS-BOYCOTT-ISRAEL-honestly/dp/152372157X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1456832008&sr=8-1&keywords=barry+shaw

Shaw humiliates the cretins who ignore all human rights violations, and all the carnage and savagery in the world to condemn the only democracy in the world…rsk

From Reviews:

“BDS (“Boycott, Sanctions, Divestment”) is the name of the umbrella organisation for all those people who want to shelter their antisemitism under the guise of ‘only seeking’ the destruction of the State of Israel. As the author says: “BDS is a three letter metaphor for negativity. In their practice their initials stand for Bias, Deception and Slander. We need to out them, to name them, and shame them. They need to be exposed for the fraudsters they are. It’s time to humiliate them. This book does that with facts, anecdotes and humor”. And indeed that is exactly what the book does. It contains a combination of the author’s own thoughts and anecdotes along with contributions from others who have been active in combating the wave of antisemitism dressed up as anti-Israel sentiments (Mitchell Bard, Pat Condell, Edgar Davidson, Alan Dershowitz, Bassem Eid, Matti Friedman, Caroline Glick, Howard Jacobson, and Denis Prager). There does not seem to be a kindle version available yet, but the book is well worth the £7.”

“An amazing book. Funny and fighting the right fight. It is time to expose BDS supporter for what they are. At best, a bunch of uneducated dreamers, but mostly, anti-Semites, pro-dictatorships, anti-West, anti-basic human values. BDS supporters are criminals and, certainly, the worst enemies to Palestinians, since their action affect Arabs living in Judea Samaria much more than it affect Israel’s economy.”

At a certain point, you just have to know when draw a line in the sand.

Sloan and Guy Rachmuth, Jewish parents in Durham, North Carolina, reached that point in 2014 when they opted to walk away from their local Jewish day school and home school their two children.

The Rachmuths pulled their children out of the Lerner School when they concluded the school would not abide by its commitment to assist “all students in developing a positive Jewish identity and pride in their Jewish heritage.”

As committed Zionists, the Rachmuths were dismayed to see that far from fulfilling its commitment, the Lerner school was cultivating a learning environment that questioned the legitimacy of the Jewish national liberation movement and of the State of Israel.

Perhaps the turning point was when the school took down all the maps of Israel from the classroom walls. Perhaps it was when their five-year-old son came home and asked them why the map of Israel hurt some people’s feelings.

Perhaps it was when they discovered that the school had employed a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activist as a Hebrew teacher. Perhaps it was when they discovered that the school’s development director and former president of the board was an anti-Israel activist whose group, Jews for a Just Peace, had joined forces with the anti-Semitic and rabidly anti-Israel BDS groups Students for Justice in Palestine and the Palestinian Solidarity Movement.

Perhaps it was when the school refused to back Israel during Operation Protective Edge during the summer of 2014.

Or perhaps the Rachmuths felt obliged to draw their line and walk away when they got the sense that the school rejected not only their Zionism, but vigorously opposed their right to defend their values.

According to Andrew Passin’s two-part report on the Rachmuth family’s ordeal published by JNS, in internal memos, the current school board president Tal Wittle referred to Sloan Rachmuth’s repeated complaints about the school’s diffident position on Israel, and the dominant role BDS supporters played at the school as “bigotry.”

The anti-Semitic hysteria on many elite American campuses (the veil of anti-Zionism now thrown off) is belatedly becoming the subject of major concern in the Jewish community. As well it should. The young people of this community, in what should be idyllic years, are being exposed, often for the first time in their lives, to unreasoning hatred. Moreover what starts on campus does not stay there. Those whose opinions are shaped in our colleges and universities move on to become the opinion shapers of the broader culture: the journalists, the academics, the professionals, the entertainers, the politicians.

While their children may not be subject to the intimidation and bullying Jews encounter, non-Jews should also be deeply worried. Most would be horrified to see our colleges descend into what Victor Davis Hanson calls places “as foreign to American traditions of tolerance and free expression as what followed the Weimar Republic.” Parents hope their children will be introduced to what Matthew Arnold called the best that has been thought and said, not mired in impenetrable thickets of verbiage, behind which lie ignorance, falsehoods and malice.

Take the lecture on Feb. 3 by Rutgers Associate Professor Jasbir Puar at Vassar College. Under the title “Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters,” the invitation declared: “This lecture theorizes oscillating relations between disciplinary, pre-emptive and increasingly prehensive forms of power that shape human and non-human materialities in Palestine….If Gaza, for example, is indeed the world’s largest ‘open air prison’ and experimental lab for Israeli military apparatuses, infrastructural chaos and metric manipulation, what kinds of fantasies (about power, about bodies, about resistance, about politics) are driving this project? ”

Ignoring for the moment the verbal sludge, what are Puar’s credentials to hold forth on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs? She teaches Women’s and Gender Studies and “has written widely” (so says the invitation) on such subjects as gay and lesbian tourism, bio and necropolitics, queer theory disability and debilitation, theories of intersectionality, affect and assemblage ; homonationalism etc. etc. Equally mysterious, why should American Studies, the Vassar department which invited Puar, find the Middle East a topic that fits into its bailiwick? The answer lies in a word the reader probably didn’t even notice in the mind-blowing flood of jargon: intersectionality. Richard L. Cravatts, author of Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel and Jews, explains that intersectionality conflates seemingly unrelated instances of oppression so that to know one victim group is to know any victim group. As a result, says Cravatts, “someone who is a gender studies professor, or queer theorist, or American studies expert can, with no actual knowledge or expertise about the Middle East, readily pontificate on the many social pathologies of Israel, based on its perceived role as a racist, colonial oppressor of an innocent indigenous population of Arab victims.”

“Anti-Semitism,” wrote Stephen Eric Bronner, author of the engaging book A Rumor About The Jews, “is the stupid answer to a serious question: How does history operate behind our backs?” For a wide range of ideological extremists, anti-Semitism is still the stupid answer for why what goes wrong with the world does go wrong. It is a philosophical world view and interpretation of history that creates conspiracies as a way of explaining the unfolding of historical events; it is a pessimistic and frantic outlook, characterized in 1964 by historian Richard Hofstadter as “the paranoid style” of politics, which shifts responsibility from the self to sinister, omnipotent others—typically and historically the Jews.

Long the thought product of cranks and fringe groups, Hofstadter’s paranoid style of politics has lately entered the mainstream of what would be considered serious, and respectable academic enterprise. Witness, for instance, the Facebook posts of Joy Karega, an assistant professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Oberlin College, who wildly claimed that Jewish bankers control the world economy and have financed every war since Napoleon, that Israelis and Zionists were not only behind the 9/11 attacks in New York but also orchestrated the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, and that Israeli fingerprints could be found in the downing over Ukraine of Malaysian Air Flight 17 and also in the rise of ISIS.

President Obama signed into law this week important measures opposing boycotts of Israel. While signing the law, he complained about its application to “Israeli-controlled territories.” He claimed the provisions were “contrary to longstanding bipartisan United States policy, including with regard to the treatment of settlements.”

In a previous post, I explained how the signing statement does not change, or purport to change, the binding legal force of the law. But it is more important as a political statement, and as such it is wrong on the facts. The law does not, as he complained, “conflat[e]” settlements with Israel proper. Indeed, it distinguishes sharply between them. The law speaks of two distinct areas: “Israel” and “Israeli-controlled territories.” That means that those “ territories” are something different from “Israel” — precisely the position of the administration. To be sure, the law opposes boycotts of both areas, but that is not conflating them, any more than opposing terrorism, or the use of foreign armed force, against both areas would be conflating them.

Rather, the law treats Israel and the settlements as distinct. However, in terms of certain foreign commerce issues, it applies the same legislative approach. Obama’s definition of conflation means that Congress is prohibited from enacting the same foreign commerce legislation for these two areas because the president does not like it on policy grounds — an absolutely unheard-of limitation on the foreign commerce power. Indeed, Congress has already given the same customs treatment to both, and otherwise applied identical rules to both, without any complaints about conflation.

The real conflation here is on the part of the White House — and J Street and Peace Now, which provided its talking points. They have conflated opposition to settlements with openness to using boycotts against them.

America’s affliction with climate alarmism is shaped by two facts:

First, the main instigators have crossed the Rubicon and have no choice but to fight. How has this happened? Nature was one cause: the short-term natural warming in 1978-1998 was mistaken for anthropogenic warming through the confirmation bias. Natural cooling from 1999 onward has canceled the expected anthropogenic warming (which is small, beneficial, and caused by a variety of factors — not just carbon dioxide release).

But other causes were entirely manmade. In hindsight, it is clear that for almost two decades (approximately 1988 — 2004) multiple groups of climate “scientists” have been fabricating results in parallel, unaware that others were doing the same. Mann with his hockey stick got the most fame, but he was just one among many. Computer models, descriptions of the carbon cycle, and even instrumental temperature records were forged to exaggerate climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide, to hide past climate variations, to argue that carbon dioxide release is irreversible, etc. The environmental movement, encouraging and encouraged by this perversion of science, made global warming its central theme. And so did many mainstream politicians. Al Gore was the towering figure among them. He used his two terms as vice president to gut American science, replacing scientists with environmentalists and lawyers (see the book Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking, which contains essays by William Happer, Bernard Cohen, Patrick Michaels, Fred Singer and other scientists who experienced or witnessed this process). A vicious spiral developed: alarmist politicians handpicked scientists supporting the alarm, then they believed their claims, and so it went. A hardened core of climate alarmism was formed from such politicians and their quasi-scientists. This core attracted multiple layers of followers, ranging from ordinary profiteers and leftist extremists to totally innocent duped believers.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Detecting the dangers in ICU. Israeli startup Intensix is trialing an Intensive Care Unit patient monitoring system at Tel Aviv Sourasky (Ichalov) hospital. Using data collected from 8,000 patients over the past 8 years, the system gives an early warning of impending sepsis and organ failure that kills 30% of ICU patients.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/has-an-israeli-start-up-solved-the-mystery-of-sepsis/

Control disease – deactivate genes. Scientists at Israel’s Technion have discovered how to use proteins to suppress unwanted gene activity. It could lead to a cure for cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia, as well as more common diseases that are caused by gene activity or mutations, such as many forms of cancer.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/a-new-way-to-keep-genes-down-could-lead-to-cancer-cure/

Protecting USA from radiation sickness. (TY The Tower) I previously reported (here) on the therapy from Israel’s Pluristem for treating patients exposed to lethal radiation doses. Pluristem is to join the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases program designed to protect people from catastrophic incidents.
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/US-government-to-stocking-Israeli-bio-tech-cure-to-lethal-radiation-in-2017-445620

Keeping hip and spinal surgeons on target. Another great invention from the students of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s BioDesign Medical Innovation program. Their BendGuide system monitors and detects minute changes in guide-wire trajectory during hip and spinal surgery. Surgeons can correct drilling trajectories, prevent guide-wire breakage and significantly reduce operation time while increasing safety.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/29354 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sco43bbo3Yk

Another test for Alzheimer’s. (TY Hazel) Researchers from Tel Aviv University, the Technion and Rambam Medical Center propose testing the blood biomarker ADNP for cognitive aging and Alzheimer’s disease. ADNP is essential for brain formation and cognitive function. I reported another blood test in January (here).
http://www.israel21c.org/alzheimers-could-be-diagnosed-with-common-blood-test/

Alzheimer’s therapy is available. (TY Hazel) I reported previously on the neuroAD transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and cognitive training from Israel’s Neuronix (see here). NeuroAD now has CE approval and is commercially available in Israel, Europe and Asia. US FDA approval is subject to results of latest trials.
http://www.israel21c.org/drug-free-alzheimers-treatment-to-seek-fda-approval/

Exercise and dance to reduce Parkinson’s symptoms. (TY Hazel) I reported previously (in August) that dancing can treat Parkinson’s. Now Israeli Alex Kerten has developed a mind-body therapy for Parkinson’s called Gyro-Kinetics. It includes breathing exercises, relaxation and dance.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/how-an-israeli-healer-treats-parkinsons-through-talk-and-dance/

An app to check your eyesight. Israeli startup 6over6’s GlassesOn smartphone app helps check your latest lens prescription without having to visit an optometrist. It can also help those buying spectacles on-line and in developing countries. The app won the startup contest at the mHealth Israel Conference in Tel Aviv.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-start-up-presents-the-optometrist-in-your-iphone/

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Huge Israeli presence at Mobile World Congress. The largest mobile expo in the world – the annual GSMA Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona – showcased 2,100 companies, including a delegation of over 100 Israeli high-tech companies in the field of mobile solutions and apps.
http://nocamels.com/2016/02/gsma-mobile-world-congress-israeli-technologies/

Best mobile innovation. Israel’s Anagog, developer of the world’s largest crowdsourced parking network, won the ‘Best Mobile Innovation in Automotive Award’ at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Anagog can detect if a smarphone user is at home or at work, walking, driving, riding a bus, where he parked and more.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/anagog-announced-winner-best-mobile-140000405.html

Laying the foundations for 5G networks. One of the companies showcasing at the Mobile World Congress is Israel’s Ceragon and its 5G wireless backhaul technologies. Commercial 5G services are expected to begin by 2020, bringing increased capacity, the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine to machine (M2M) solutions.
https://www.ceragon.com/about-us/media-center/news/item/1421-ceragon-showcases-5g-at-mwc-2016

A most innovative company. Fast Company magazine has included Glide – Israel’s mainstream video messaging app – in their Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Video list (#7). Glide was specifically recognized for its efforts to “provide a social communication tool for the deaf community.”
http://www.fastcompany.com/company/glide
http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/sectors/video

Those who believe no Israeli could possibly support the Boycott-Divestment-and Sanctions (BDS) movement, have not met Avraham Burg, a former Speaker of the Knesset and head of the Jewish Agency who was once considered a candidate for Prime Minister of Israel. Mr. Burg has made clear that he supports a world-wide boycott of Israeli goods and products manufactured across the so-called Green Line, the name given to the demarcation established in the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria after the Jewish State’s 1948 War of Independence.

Although Mr. Burg insists his position does not call for a total boycott of Israel, it is clear that this scion of a once-proud Zionist family (his late father, Yosef Burg, served in the Israeli cabinet for almost four decades) has thrown his lot in with those who no longer accept the idea of a Jewish State.

Now a member of the Israeli communist party, Hadash, Mr. Burg says “Zionism has been successfully completed,” and he no longer defines himself as a Zionist.

“Zionism was the scaffolding that facilitated the transition from the Diaspora to sovereignty. This scaffolding is superfluous now,” he told Yediot Ahronot, the Jewish state’s most widely circulated newspaper, last year.

Ending the Law of Return

He insists Israel would be better off getting rid of its own Law of Return, which allows all Jews throughout the world to come to Israel and claim citizenship, and concentrate more on implementing the so-called Palestinian Right of Return, a Palestinian demand that all Arabs who fled Israel in 1948 and 1967—and their descendants—be allowed to flood back into Israel proper, thus demographically destroying the Jewish state.

Peter Dreier is a leftist professor who confesses a colossal academic hoax…..rsk
Six years ago I submitted a paper for a panel, “On the Absence of Absences” that was to be part of an academic conference later that year—in August 2010. Then, and now, I had no idea what the phrase “absence of absences” meant. The description provided by the panel organizers, printed below, did not help. The summary, or abstract of the proposed paper—was pure gibberish, as you can see below. I tried, as best I could within the limits of my own vocabulary, to write something that had many big words but which made no sense whatsoever. I not only wanted to see if I could fool the panel organizers and get my paper accepted, I also wanted to pull the curtain on the absurd pretentions of some segments of academic life. To my astonishment, the two panel organizers—both American sociologists—accepted my proposal and invited me to join them at the annual international conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science to be held that year in Tokyo.

I am not the first academic to engage in this kind of hoax. In 1996, in a well-known incident, NYU physicist Alan Sokal pulled the wool over the eyes of the editors of Social Text, a postmodern cultural studies journal. He submitted an article filled with gobbledygook to see if they would, in his words, “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if it (a) sounded good and (b) flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” His article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” (published in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue), shorn of its intentionally outrageous jargon, essentially made the claim that gravity was in the mind of the beholder. Sokal’s intent was not simply to pull a fast-one on the editors, but to challenge the increasingly popular “post-modern” view that there are no real facts, just points-of-view. His paper made the bogus case that gravity, too, was a “social construction.” As soon as it was published, Sokal fessed up in another journal (Lingua Franca, May 1996), revealing that his article was a sham, describing it as “a pastiche of Left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense … structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics.”

Sokal’s ruse was more ambitious than mine. He wrote an entire article. I simply wrote a 368-word abstract. He submitted his for publication. I just submitted mine to a conference. Although his paper was filled with absurd statements, it actually reached a conclusion—however bogus—that gravity was still an idea open to serious debate. In doing so, Sokal actually had a serious point to make about the silliness of much “post-modern” thinking that viewed science as a version of the humanities where all views should be given equal weight.

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/

Remarks at the Israel Middle East Model United Nations Conference on “Building a More Model UN”POWER:

Before this speech, Power’s best line was “Hillary Clinton is a monster”and she has generally been perceived as hostile to Israel. Thanks to Tom Gross whose dispatches are essential reading we have this :….on a visit to Israel, she made very vocal remarks denouncing the UN for its anti-Israel bias. Power is, of course, now the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Remarks such as the ones below are rare not just from Power, but from any member of the Obama administration. –

“Thank you for the generous introduction, and for reading the book on Sergio. And a special thanks to all of the organizers who put this amazing conference together, particularly Aviva, who puts heart and soul and everything into this. [Applause.]

Before diving into the issues that have brought us here, let me start off by acknowledging the people without whom many of you would never have heard or thought about Model UN, much less known how to get a resolution through the Third Committee. And I’m speaking, of course, of your faculty advisors. One of the greatest diplomats my country has ever produced, Benjamin Franklin, once said: “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” Well, your faculty advisors have not only taught you, they have involved you in a way that will forever leave its mark on you and will make you engaged citizens of your communities and of the world. So please join me in giving those faculty advisors a huge round of applause. [Applause.]

Now, when I was your age, I never would have imagined that I would get to sit at the United Nations behind a placard that said “The United States of America”. I grew up in Ireland, and my mother brought me to the United States when I was nine years old. By the time I got to high school in Atlanta, Georgia, my dream was to play professional sports – preferably basketball. When it became abundantly clear that I was not going to play professional sports or break the gender barrier to the NBA, I decided to do the next best thing which was to try writing about sports.

That’s what I was doing the summer after my first year in college, when I took an internship at a local news station. And one day, I was sitting there at that news station taking notes on an Atlanta Braves game so I could help cut the sports highlights for the evening news, when footage from another screen caught my eye; and it was footage from Tiananmen Square, in China, where kids my age – and your age – were peacefully gathering to demand basic freedoms like the right to vote, and where they were being brutally beaten and mowed down as a result of having done so. It was raw and it was incredibly disturbing – and honestly, to this day I don’t know if I hadn’t been sitting where I was, when I was, that I would’ve seen it and focused on it in the way that I did. But once I did, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. And that was when it hit me that this was what I really wanted to be focused on. I wanted to focus on what was happening in the world to real people. I wanted to focus on those young people and the dreams that they had and the aspirations they had, even though I had huge doubts whether I could ever do anything that would be helpful or supportive. This propelled me first to become a war reporter, which I did in the Balkans in the 1990s. Then I became a human rights advocate, trying to raise my voice about atrocities like the ones I had witnessed in the former Yugoslavia. And ultimately, all of this led me to go and work for a young Senator from the city of Chicago named Barack Obama. Now if there is a lesson to be learned from the path that I took, I don’t think it is to go and work your first year in college at a sports station, necessarily. It is just to keep your eyes open. Whatever you do, just look up. Especially those of you who are on your gadgets and your smartphones the entire time – you have to look up, just to see what will catch your imagination – what will inspire you.