RUTHFULLY YOURS

In its latest act of illicit intervention in Israeli public life, the foreign (mainly U.S.)-funded “New Israel Fund” (where their ‘New Israel” means Palestine) has filled the Israeli press and the country’s billboards with a McCarthyist anti-democratic vilification poster that essentially endorses all who seek to deny freedom of speech in Israel to non-leftists.

It is the NIF’s response to the campaign by the student Zionist movement Im Tirtzu against ‘Shtulim’ (plants) in Israel, meaning foreign-funded anti-Israel subversives. In the NIF ad, it shows Yitzhak Rabin with the slogan “THEY already took care of that plant,” meaning “THEY” collectively murdered Rabin. By THEY the NIF does not mean Yigal Amir and his brother. It means all Israeli critics of the left.

For decades, the mantra of Israel’s anti-democratic left has been that Rabin’s death was caused by the exercise of freedom of speech by non-leftists in Israel, especially when they criticized Rabin and called him names. Their conclusion is that criticism of the left by non-leftists is a clear and present danger that produces murder and so must be suppressed. Just how they know that assassin Yigal Amir’s behavior was not caused by his attending law school has never been explained. In any case, the catechism of the left, which includes most journalists, is that the Rabin murder was caused by “incitement.” Curiously, they are not reminding people what Rabin really thought of leftist NGO B’tselem!

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/01/19/islamophobia-is-how-islamic-law-comes-to-america-on-the-glazov-gang-2/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center who writes the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

His guest was Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know. The discussion focused on: “Islamophobia” is How Islamic Law Comes to America, unveiling how the accusation of “racism” is installing Sharia on our shores.

Don’t miss it!

Hear about the scholarly paper allegedly debunking the fact that there has been no pause in rising temperatures? Well it’s rubbish — and that verdict doesn’t come from climate sceptics but statisticians who really do believe the planet is overheating

It’s always undignified to get hit by ‘friendly fire’. That’s what’s happened to a group of Stanford University statistical experts and their late-2015 peer-reviewed paper “Debunking the climate hiatus” in the prestigious journal Climate Change.

Two statistician bloggers, Radford Neal and Grant Foster, have torn the paper apart, even though both agree – for other reasons – that the 15+ years pause or hiatus in warming is a statistical illusion. So, warmists, it’s no use making ad-hominem attacks on these bloggers because they’re on your side.

statisticianI am unqualified to comment on the statistical arguments, having barely passed Stats 101 at ANU in 1972, the era of the slide rule. So my point is about prima facie and uncorrected crud making its way into a prestigious peer-reviewed climate journal, which may now have to publish some soul-destroying corrections. And if that essay made it into “the science”, what other junk has also been elevated to scientific holy writ?

Critic Radford Neal (right) is Professor, Dept. of Statistics and Dept. of Computer Science, University of Toronto. He not only looks to me like a good statistician, but his papers have earned 22,600 citations, including 8,600 in the past half-decade. He sets out the status of the “Debunk” authors:

(Bala) Rajaratnam is an Assistant Professor of Statistics and of Environmental Earth System Science. (Joseph) Romano is a Professor of Statistics and of Economics. (Noah) Diffenbaugh is an Associate Professor of Earth System Science. (Michael) Tsiang is a PhD student. Climatic Change appears to be a reputable refereed journal, which is published by Springer, and which is cited in the latest IPCC report. The paper was touted in popular accounts as showing that the whole hiatus thing was mistaken — for instance, by Stanford University itself.

If Barack Obama is right, there is no Islamic terror wave today, just a few “incidents.”

Likewise, progressive politicians in Germany, Britain, Sweden and other parts of Europe say much the same thing: no need to worry — only isolated incidents.

The European progressives have been saying for years that reports of Muslim immigrants carrying out sexual assaults on non-Muslims, committing hate crimes against Jews, planning terror assaults on newspapers, cartoonists and authors are the products of “Islamophobia” — an unreasoning fear of Muslims.

The facts say that Obama and the European progressives are wrong. Indeed, the facts show that Obama and many European leaders — and leaders of public opinion such as newspaper editors and television directors — have been trying to hide the sad truth, by claiming that people who see the truth are suffering from a “phobia.”

The Soviet Union tried a similar tactic. For years, anyone who criticized Soviet policy was classified as a mental case, shipped off to a well-guarded mental asylum.

The recent New Year’s Eve rapes and assaults this year in in Cologne and other German towns by gangs of Muslim men were hidden by German politicians some of whom even tried to blame the women for bringing it on themselves.

In Britain, local authorities conspired for years to hide a wave of hundreds even thousands — of sexual abuse crimes committed by Muslim immigrants.

In France, police and media conspired to hide the rising tide of Muslim hate crimes against Jews, burying the stories or classifying them as property offenses. French newspapers began to take the terror a bit more seriously when the terrorists attacked a French magazine, Charlie Hebdo, a year ago.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Rabies vaccine is ready for US market. Following successful trials, Israeli biotech Kamada has launched its KamRAB anti-Rabies vaccine in 10 countries, including Israel. Kamada will now apply for a Biologics License Application (BLA) from the US FDA – the last step before offering a remedy for sale in the United States.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-firm-seeks-to-take-bite-out-of-rabies-vaccine-shortage/

Collagen wound treatment final trials success. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s CollPlant announced positive final trial results for Vergenix FG (Flowable Gel), designed for the treatment of chronic, hard to heal wounds and surgical wounds. 4 weeks after a single application, average wound closure was 80% with 45% fully closed.
http://www.collplant.com/userfiles/1a9b1870-e5f1-4d4c-bacc-9e18ea96183f.pdf

Blood test for Alzheimer’s. Israeli biotech NeuroQuest is to begin clinical trials of its blood test for early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Human trials in Israel have already proved 87% accurate – with blood tests, anything over 70% is considered medically significant.
http://www.israel21c.org/blood-test-for-alzheimers-begins-clinical-trials/

Non-implant heart valve treatment. Israel’s Pi-Cardia has developed the Leaflex Catheter System – a novel non-implant based technology for treating patients with aortic valve stenosis, rather than replacing the heart valve. Pi-Cardia has just raised $10 million to help complete development of a second-generation device.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-catheter-co-pi-cardia-raises-10m-1001094130

Faster diagnosis of a heart attack. Dr Amos Danielli, now of Israel’s Bar Ilan University, developed technology at Tel Aviv University to identify minute quantities of chemicals using magnetic particles attached to fluorescent molecules. One use is to detect the protein Troponin, an indicator of an imminent heart attack. Dr Danielli has founded the company MagBiosense which has won a NIS 900,000 grant from the BIRD foundation. http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-magbiosense-to-shorten-heart-patients-er-wait-time-1001093195

Israel hosts emergency response conference. Israel hosted hundreds of delegates from 30 countries, plus the World Health Organization, at the Fourth Israeli International Conference on Healthcare System, Preparedness and Response to Emergencies and Disasters in Tel Aviv and Beersheva.
http://www.israel21c.org/200-international-er-specialists-gather-in-israel/

Helping us get to 120. Israeli-born Technion graduate Dr Nir Barzilai is now director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. As he approaches his 60th birthday himself, he is working with the US FDA on treatments that could make everyone live a lot longer.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/want-to-live-till-120-this-professor-works-on-drugs-that-could-get-you-close/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK_1HKRnoe0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnMmtr2uAcM

President Obama enters his final year as President having given up on trying to resolve the Jewish-Arab conflict – following in the footsteps of so many other American Presidents whose similarly-shared lofty and noble aspirations ended in abject failure.

In Obama’s case his inability to fully comprehend Jewish history and the connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel was the catalyst for his inevitable failure – as tellingly illustrated in his landmark speech in Cairo on 4 June 2009:

“Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.”

Israel’s current Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dore Gold, has now revealed how Israel’s then leadership viewed Obama’s above remarks in this frank exchange published in Frontline on 6 January:

Like the vagaries of the weather itself, true believers in man-caused global warming twist with the wind as challenges to their beliefs blow by. For example, I recently pointed out to a graduate of a large, well-respected university that one of the highly credentialed, long-time professors in the university’s atmospheric sciences department was an outspoken skeptic of disastrous anthropogenic global climate change. The graduate promptly responded by informing me that it was well-known that this professor was off medication, literally “nuts,” and this is why the professor was outspoken (even to the point of maintaining a popular contrarian website) regarding their fantasy that humans are not likely to have much culpability for cataclysmic climate change.

So, doing some twisting myself, I suddenly realized how much sense this argument made. Professors who believe that they can confidently predict the global climate decades from now are on medication. When they go off their medication, they start to think differently. Other professors, still medicated, notice this independent thinking and become upset. (After all, settled science must not tolerate unsettled thinkers.) The flustered faculty, finding the uncomfortable situation a tough pill to swallow, cast aspersions on their antiseptic colleague, calling them nuts, off-their-medication, and the like, trying to shame the colleague back on sedation. Ultimately, the true-believer professors simply resort to shunning their loose-cannon colleague and go on with the palliative knowledge that climate will be calamitous as long as humans continue to live comfortably.

In classrooms across the country, high school students are taught the scientific method. It consists of constructing a doubtful hypothesis and designing a series of experiments to test the hypothesis with the observable facts. After a number of tests prove positive. The student can then take the facts and reach a conclusion. When a conclusion is constantly verified, it is enshrined in what might be called “established” science.

There is a second kind of science that uses methods very different from those of “established” science. In fact, this science, if indeed it might be called such, uses the exact opposite method. It consists of constructing a conclusion and then testing that conclusion with a hypothesis that is repeated over and over again using doubtful data to back it up.

The “logic” of this particular scientific method is that the truth of the conclusion is determined by the number of times the hypothesis is affirmed. With enough repetition, even the data starts to take on the appearance of the truth. The secret is to get as many people and media as possible to parrot the great discovery. At a certain point, the conclusion can be enshrined in a special pantheon that might be called “settled” science, and woe betide any “denier” who dare question it.

Like its cousin “settled” law, “settled” science can be useful even outside its field. It can be employed to silence opposition, impose laws and promote political agendas. It respects no rank or positions. August researchers and famous professors can be toppled from their positions if they express the slightest doubts about a “settled” position. Even the strongest evidence is ignored with disdain and disbelief. Meanwhile the hypothesis mantra is just repeated over and over again.

“Settled” science cases abound in today’s politically-correct times. The most obvious one is the dogma of “global warming.” Many old-school scientists have suffered persecution for calling into question the faulty computer models and fudged data associated with this doctrine. They have even shown that the globe is not warming. Flexible “settled” scientists immediately tweaked the hypothesis to speak of “climate change,” and thus cover both sides.

Language about Islamic history in school textbooks is spurring battles across the nation, with some parents’ groups and lawmakers objecting to what they see as an overly benign portrayal of the religion’s spread and its teachings.

Following recent attacks in the U.S. and abroad by terrorists who claim to espouse Islamic beliefs, more American parent groups have turned attention to what children are taught about the religion. Muslims and their supporters say the opposition to the textbooks amounts to fear-mongering and presents a distorted view of their faith.

Kristen Amundson, executive director of the National Association of State Boards of Education, which represents U.S. state and territorial education boards, said she expects to see more parents pushing to change textbooks and curriculum this year.

“We will see a raft of it,” she said. “It is going to be coming before local boards, state boards and legislatures.”

A bill in Tennessee, backed by a leading Republican legislator, is expected to be the focus of heated debate in that state’s legislative session, which started this past week. The bill, introduced by Rep. Sheila Butt, seeks to exclude any “religious doctrine,” not just Islam, from middle-school textbooks.

Ms. Butt, an author of Christian books, said in an email that she wrote the bill after complaints from “constituents who realized that some religions were more heavily weighted in the standards and that doctrine was being taught to Junior High students.” Republican Gov. Bill Haslam has said the bill is too broad, but Candice McQueen, the state’s education commissioner, has sped up reviews of social-studies standards following the criticism.

Similar battles have gone before state education boards in Texas and Alabama, and there were calls throughout 2015 to revise textbooks in school districts in states including California, Wisconsin and Massachusetts. A group called Truth in Texas Textbooks Coalition won substantial changes—many of them regarding descriptions of Islam—from that state’s board of education in 2014, according to the group’s chairman, Roy White.

Over the past several weeks, we have learned that the Obama administration believes it is at war with Israel. The war is not a shooting war, but a political war. Its goal is to bring the government to its knees to the point where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu loses power or begs Obama and his advisers to shepherd Israel through a “peace process” in which Israel will renounce its rights to Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

One component of this war is espionage. Last month The Wall Street Journal reported that Israel is a top target for American espionage.

The other component of the administration’s war against Israel is political subversion. Over the past week, the administration has campaigned against the NGO bill sponsored by Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked. If the bill, which was approved by the government, becomes law, it will require political NGOs that are principally financed by foreign governments to identify as foreign agents in their official communications and interactions.

Last week, State Department spokesman James Kirby lambasted the bill at an official briefing. Among other things, Kirby rejected Shaked’s claim that her bill is less restrictive than the US’s own Foreign Agents Registration Act. Kirby offered no substantiation of his claim.