RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Hospitals facing Obamacare penalties for high readmission rates should heed the results of a new study, says EarlySense

One of the tenets of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka Obamacare, is that hospitals must reduce costs, by reducing their 30-day readmission rate — the theory being that a hospital ought to be able to do a good-enough job on patients deemed well enough to be released to keep them out of the hospital for at least a month.

As a result, hospitals are scrambling to find ways to reduce their exposure to the problem. Otherwise, thanks to the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program component of the ACA, they could find their Medicare payments cut by up to 3%. While it doesn’t sound like a lot overall, hospital administrators, armed with spreadsheets and horror stories, would disagree, claiming they need every penny, and then some.

A new study by Israeli medical technology start-up EarlySense could help allay the concerns of administrators — as well as patients, most of whom presumably would want to avoid going back to the hospital as well. In the first-ever test of the EarlySense system that followed heart-failure patients after hospital discharge, the start-up, working with two top US health institutes, discovered that monitoring the respiratory activity of the patients was “the most important risk-adjusted associate of readmission for heart failure,” according to Dalia Argaman, VP of clinical and regulatory affairs at EarlySense.

With “wearables” all the rage now in health monitoring, EarlySense has done things a bit differently: The company has developed the first “sleepable” in a device which, when placed under a mattress, keeps track of how a person sleeps, including whether they toss or turn, the different stages of sleep (REM, etc.), their breathing, and other important sleep data.

One recent morning, a Palestinian teenager stabbed a security guard at the light rail station minutes from my home in Jerusalem. About an hour later, I drove past the station and was astonished to see—nothing. No increased police presence, not even police barricades. The guard had managed to shoot his attacker, and ambulances had taken both away. Commuters were waiting for the next train. As if nothing unusual had happened.

The ability to instantly resume the pretense of normalcy is one of the ways that Israelis are coping with the latest wave of Palestinian terrorism. For the last six months, Palestinians—some as young as 13—have attacked Jews with knives and hatchets and even scissors, or else driven their cars into Israeli crowds, killing over two dozen people. (About 90 Palestinians have been killed carrying out the attacks.) The violence was provoked by the unsubstantiated Palestinian claim—strongly denied by the government—that Israel intended to permit Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a place sacred to both Muslims and Jews.
The almost daily attacks tend to blur together, though several have become emblematic—like the stabbing murder of a mother of six in her home while her teenage daughter ran to protect her siblings. Still, by Israeli standards, the violence so far has been manageable. Israelis recall that in the early 2000s, when suicide bombers were targeting buses and cafes, almost as many victims would die in a single attack as have been murdered in the current wave of terror.

Israelis have been here before. In 1992, a monthslong stabbing spree by Palestinian terrorists in Israel’s streets helped to catalyze one of the great upsets in Israeli politics, the election of Labor Party leader Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister, ending over a decade of rule by the right-wing Likud Party. The stabbings were the culmination of a four-year Palestinian revolt against Israel’s occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. This first intifada (“uprising” in Arabic), as it came to be known, forced the Israeli public to come to terms with Palestinian nationalism. It also convinced many Israelis that the Likud’s policy of incremental annexation of the West Bank and Gaza was simply not worth the price.

Until the first intifada, Israelis had tended to regard control of the territories won by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War as benign, bringing prosperity to the occupied as well as to the occupiers. As the intifada took hold, Israeli anger turned not only against the Palestinians but against the ruling Likud. There were antigovernment riots, and Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was widely ridiculed for his passivity and lack of vision. READ MORE AT SITE

Even months after the meltdown at the University of Missouri, who can forget Melissa Click, the professor caught on video calling for “muscle” to eject a student journalist photographing a sit-in on the quad? The university fired Ms. Click this week, and suddenly due process and free speech are back in vogue on campus.

On Thursday the University of Missouri system’s Board of Curators announced a 4-2 decision to terminate Ms. Click, a communications professor. Board chairman Pamela Henrickson told the press that Ms. Click’s conduct “was not compatible with university policies,” including interfering “with the rights of others.”

The Columbia campus faculty council chairman Ben Trachtenberg denounced the dismissal in a statement as “terrible,” saying Ms. Click was entitled to “a fair process.” Faculty council member Angela Speck told the Missourian newspaper that it was “ridiculous” that Ms. Click could be fired “without due process.” Both said at a Thursday meeting that the decision violated Ms. Click’s First Amendment rights, according to the Missourian. READ MORE AT SITE

A disturbing trend in fostering American-Muslim “otherness” can be seen in Simon & Schuster’s decision to create a new imprint called Salaam Reads. Targeted at age groups from early readers to young adults, it will present Muslim characters, stressing their own customs and ways, presumably to highlight their integration into our culture, not to stress Islamic theology or doctrine. If that last disclaimer is to be believed, we have to wonder why there is a necessity for a separate imprint with a guaranteed minimum of nine books a year – does Simon & Schuster have one for Catholic , Jewish or Buddhist Americans? What happened to the idea of America as the place that welcomed immigrants from all over the world so that they would have the freedom to believe and achieve what they wished, no longer bound by the strictures of birth or class structure. Are we now reverting to the notion that a Muslim child growing up in America must see her exact counterpart represented in story-books before she can feel comfortable in her own skin? According to Zareen Jaffery, the hyphenated Pakistani-American who heads the new imprint and remembers her own childhood: “I didn’t see myself reflected in books back then.” (NYT 2/25/16). Lest we forget, we are now living in the age of social media and selfies.

But beyond this rather innocuous explanation lies a more telling motive expressed by Ms. Jaffery in an online interview with storyandchai.com: “while I am answering these questions from a business perspective, it would be remiss and naïve of me not to state the obvious: racism is real. As is Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia – the list goes on.” So the emphasis for this imprint is on correcting the supposedly inaccurate image of Muslim Americans and showing them in a more positive light. This sounds very much like an agenda that might have financial backing from sources other than the publisher who isn’t generally interested in righting wrongs perceived by special interest groups.

Two of the finest institutions of higher education in the United States, Columbia and Cornell, have been identified as leading the list of “most anti-Semitic,” as they continue to host Jew hatred events on campus. By the time our students enter this new phase in their education, they have been well primed for the venomous climate, having been molded into frustrated, resentful, disrespectful, demanding, angry young adults, ill prepared for anything, unable to accept responsibility, and ripe to lash out at others. These young people have already been activated and prepared to join any group that uses “social justice” language, whether warranted or not.

The K-12 classes provide the first toxic element. Education is being restructured according to a radical political ideology promoted by the White House, Bill and Melinda Gates, and other supporters of a federal takeover of education. The purpose is to produce workers for a Global Economy (aka Agenda 21). The major players are Valerie Jarrett’s mother, Barbara Taylor Bowman, a member of the Muslim Sisterhood; native-born terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn Ayers (Weather Underground) who support a radical network to defeat America; and Secretary of Education (ret.) Arne Duncan, who promoted the Common Core Standards, with its drastic, untried curriculum overhaul that has lowered school standards to ensure that no child is left behind or excels at the expense of others. This is accompanied by the disturbing data mining that profiles the children (into adulthood) and their families.

Late last year, during the ongoing frenzy of violence directed at Israelis known as the “stabbing intifada,” 20-year-old Maram Hassoneh was killed in her second attempted knife attack on IDF soldiers manning a checkpoint. Hassoneh, a devout Muslim, was a top English student at An-Najah University in the West Bank city of Nablus. Described by Hamas as “greenhouse for martyrs,” An-Najah may very well be San Francisco State University (SFSU)’s first academic partner in the Arab and Muslim world.

Under the leadership of Rabab Abdulhadi, director of SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED) and a founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, SFSU reportedly established a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with An-Najah in 2014. Though there is no official corroboration of the relationship other than a recommendation in the All-University Committee on International Programs annual report (which Abdulhadi touted on Facebook), An-Najah claimed in a statement at its website last year that the MOU was signed on September 10, 2014, while a 2015 Xpress Magazine interview with Abdulhadi presented it as a fait accompli.

At a November, 2015 AMED panel discussion on “Palestine, Iran, and Syria” for which Campus Watch obtained a recording, Abdulhadi—in introducing notorious Israel-bashers Hatem Bazian of UC Berkeley and As’ad Abu Khalil of Cal State Stanislaus—spoke proudly of the partnership:

We . . . have the first agreement between San Francisco State and any Arab or Muslim communities . . . a memorandum of understanding with An-Najah University in Nablus, Palestine.

She reiterated her longstanding intention to do the same with another West Bank university, the Hamas-dominated Bir Zeit, and to set up a student exchange program, before delivering this telling disclaimer:

We believe that we need to produce knowledge for justice. We do not want to produce knowledge and teach students how to grow up and build bombs and destroy other people.

A century before American soldiers fought Muslim terrorism in the Middle East, they fought it in the Philippines. Their attackers were Moro Muslims whose savage fanaticism appeared inexplicable. A formerly friendly Muslim might suddenly attack American soldiers, local Muslim rulers promised friendship while secretly aiding the terrorists and the yellow left-wing press at home seized on every report of an atrocity to denounce American soldiers as murderers whose honor was forever soiled.

Much of what went on in that conflict, including the sacrifices of our soldiers, has been forgotten. The erasure has been so thorough that the media casually claims that the American forces did not use pig corpses and pig’s blood to deter Muslim terrorists. Media fact checks have deemed it a “legend”.

It’s not a legend. It’s history.

The practice began in the Spanish period. A source as mainstream as the New Cambridge History of Islam informs us that, “To discourage Juramentados, the Spaniards buried their corpses with dead pigs.”

Juramentados was the Spanish term for the Muslim Jihadists who carried out suicide attacks against Christians while shouting about Allah. American forces, who had little experience with Muslim terrorists, adopted the term and the Spanish tactics of burying Muslim terrorists alongside dead pigs.

It was a less sensitive age and even the New York Times blithely observed that, “The Moros, though they still admire these frenzied exits from the world, have practically ceased to utilize them, since when a pig and a man occupy a single grave the future of the one and the other are in their opinions about equal.”

The New York Times conceded that the story “shocked a large number of sensitive people,” but concluded that, “while regretting the necessity of adopting a plan so repugnant to humane ideas, we also note that the Moros can stop its application as soon as they choose, and therefore we feel no impulse either to condemn its invention or to advise its abandonment. The scheme involves the waste of a certain amount of pork, but pork in hot climates is an unwholesome diet, anyhow, and the less of it our soldiers and other ‘infidels’ in the Philippines have to eat the better for them.”

Colonel Willis A. Wallace of the 15th Cavalry claimed credit for innovating the practice in March 1903 to dissuade the Muslim terrorist who believed that “every Christian he kills places him so much closer in contact with the Mohammedan heaven.”

“Conviction and punishment of these men seemed to have no effect,” Colonel Wallace related. After a “more than usually atrocious slaughter” in the marketplace, he had the bodies of the killers placed on display and encouraged “all the Moros in the vicinity who cared to do so to come and see the remains”.