RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Rosenwald,” a documentary film about the early 20th-century philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, disappeared from theaters much too quickly after being released in August. An Academy Award nomination next month, when the honorees will be announced, may be a long shot for writer-director Aviva Kempner, but it would give the film the wider audience it deserves. It also would be a public service.

The Chicago-based Rosenwald, a son of German-Jewish immigrants, made his fortune in the early 1900s running Sears, Roebuck & Company when it was the nation’s largest retailer. The film’s main focus, however, is Rosenwald’s largely unsung philanthropic collaboration with Booker T. Washington, the former slave and black educator best known for his self-help philosophy and for training black teachers in the post-Civil War South. After Reconstruction ended, white backlash resulted in scarce funding for black public education in southern states, where nearly 90% of the black population lived. Washington therefore sought assistance from northern philanthropists like Rosenwald, who graciously obliged.

PARIS—Western security officials are struggling to respond to the threat that Islamic State can make authentic-looking Syrian and Iraqi passports, which could be used to hide operatives planning attacks in Europe or the U.S. among refugees.

Islamic State has likely obtained equipment and blank passport books needed to make Syrian passports when the group took control of the Syrian cities of Raqqa and Deir Ezzour, those officials said. It has also gained control of materials to make Iraqi passports when it occupied the Iraqi city of Mosul, a Belgian counterterrorism official disclosed for the first time.

But the near-absence of communication with the Syrian government means Western officials are lacking key information that could be used to identify the passports, according to a confidential analysis by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

If you believe Islam’s well-funded propaganda machine, as our latest PM professes to do, Arab scholars were advancing the frontiers of knowledge long before Newton emerged from his study. From flying machines to theoretical physics, the Koran inspired them all.
Islam is fighting a military and ideological battle that began some 300 years ago. The last decades of the 17th century mark the critical point of divergence of Western and Islamic civilizations, as one began its ascent and the other its decline. Central to this great shift in respective power was a pivotal military defeat and the Scientific Revolution. The implications of these events are still working themselves out in the realms of jihadi terrorism and propaganda about Islamic science, as Islam struggles to find a viable identity and role in the contemporary world.

In 1683 the Muslim Ottoman Empire besieged Vienna, in the very heartland of Europe. The Ottomans were a superpower that had long threatened to engulf the West. It had taken Constantinople, the ancient capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, in 1453, most of the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean, and had been seeking to capture Vienna for centuries, launching an earlier siege in 1529, during the height of the chaos in Europe caused by the Reformation. The city was of immense strategic value because of its control of the Danube basin and the trade routes throughout southern and central Europe. It had to be seized if the Ottomans were to fulfil their divine mission, conquer Europe, and bring the entire continent under the flag of Islam. Eventually, the combined forces of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Holy League marched out to face the invaders, and the two immense armies plunged into battle on the flanks of the Kahlenberg Mountain near the city. Amidst enormous carnage, the battle was won by the Christian forces, preserving Christendom, and signalling the slow but remorseless decline of the Ottoman Empire that culminated with its demise, along with the Caliphate, or spiritual leadership of Islam, in 1922.

Meanwhile, 1250 kilometres away at Cambridge, Isaac Newton had commenced work on what would become his Principia Mathematica, which appeared in 1687. There is no argument that this was one of the most important works in the history of science, and, indeed, human history as a whole. Certainly, it was the creation of an immense intelligence that has possibly never been excelled; as Alexander Pope said of his contemporary:

“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light”.

Along with pioneers like Galileo Galilei, William Harvey, Robert Boyle, and Francis Bacon, Newton established the principles of scientific method and penetrated through the misleading realm of everyday experience to identify and codify the underlying laws of nature and give them mathematical expression. Consequently, the Principia Mathematica and other work provided the theoretical basis for the Scientific Revolution and for the titanic technological and scientific advances that drove the Industrial Revolution, and the transformation of Western Civilization into a global power that would shape the modern world.

The Obama administration calls its national security strategy “Countering Violent Extremism.” In the benighted times before January 20, 2009, we used to call it counter-terrorism.

Why does Obama insist on the more fuzzy “extremism”? Because “terror” has its roots in Islamic scripture. This fact ought to be undeniable, but Obama denies it — and in Washington, he’s far from alone in that.

It is not just that the word terror appears several times in the Koran; it is that the word appears in a particular context: The duty of Muslims to act as Allah’s instrument to terrorize non-Muslims is a recurring scriptural theme. In Sura 3:151, to take one of several examples, Muslims are admonished:

Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers.

Omar Abdel Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh” I prosecuted in the mid-’90s after his cell bombed the World Trade Center and planned similar strikes against other New York City landmarks, was a renowned scholar of Islamic jurisprudence. Indeed — and this is worth pausing over — his mastery of our enemy’s ideology was the sole source of his authority to approve jihadist attacks. Think about that: his blindness, and various other maladies, render Abdel Rahman unable to do anything useful for a terrorist network. He can’t build bombs, command forces on the battlefield, execute assassinations, and so on. But his authority is unquestioned because of his scholarship and rhetorical power in the scripture-based doctrine our president pretends is non-Islamic and of marginal importance.

Sheikh Abdel Rahman was adamant that terror is fundamental to Islamic doctrine:

Why do we fear the word terrorist? If the terrorist is the person who defends his right, so we are terrorists. And if the terrorist is the one who struggles for the sake of God, then we are terrorists. We … have been ordered with terrorism because we must prepare what power we can to terrorize the enemy of Allah and your enemy. The Koran [said] “to strike terror.” Therefore, we don’t fear to be described with “terrorism.” … They may say, “He is a terrorist, he uses violence, he uses force.” Let them say that. We are ordered to prepare whatever we can of power to terrorize the enemies of Islam.

On December 2, 2015, two Muslim terrorists massacred fourteen Americans at a Christmas party in San Bernardino, California. On December 6, President Obama delivered an Oval Office address. In it, he said, “We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam … It is the responsibility of all Americans to reject discrimination.” Many listeners were disappointed that Obama focused so much passion on lecturing Americans.

Media reported that hostility against Muslims increased after the San Bernardino attack. Public figures including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, filmmaker Michael Moore, and Wheaton college professor Larycia Hawkins insisted that Muslims must be protected against the bigotry, stereotyping, and violence of non-Muslim Americans.

President Obama, Zuckerberg, Moore, and Hawkins are acting on their own bigotry. In hostility and ignorance, they stereotype all Americans (except Muslims, of course) as an inherently ignorant lynch mob. That’s not who we Americans are. If Americans had been hearing from their leaders what they need to hear – a passionate defense of Western Civilization and a ringing condemnation of jihad – average Americans would not feel that they themselves must take on both rhetorical tasks. Americans, as YouTube curmudgeon Pat Condell pointed out, are trying to fill a leadership vacuum and to speak and hear unspoken truths.

It is a demonstrable historical fact that Americans have traditionally not held hatred toward or stereotypes of Muslims. A hundred years ago, if Americans thought of Muslims at all, they associated Muslims with romance. Maud Hull’s 1919 softcore novel The Sheik was a blockbuster bestseller. Superstar Rudolph Valentino made two Sheik films, in 1921 and 1926. They were record-breaking international hits.

It is primarily terrorists and Islam-apologists, people like Obama, Zuckerberg, Moore and Hawkins, who are in fact responsible for the current tension. Politically Correct speech codes suppress and demonize necessary conversations about Islam. Priests and rabbis, presidents and judges, journalists and college professors – the very people whose job it is to wield words to address matters of public import – are complicit. These cultural leaders are all covering their own posteriors, timidly mincing words so that no stray syllable can be used against them. Americans are frustrated and outraged at this absence of frank speech.

https://www.nas.org/

Pushed back on APUSH.
NAS sparked a national controversy in summer 2014 when we challenged the College Board’s new AP U.S. History (APUSH) standards as politically biased and intellectually hollow. This year, we worked with a panel of historians who published on the NAS website an open letter that convinced the College Board to remove from the APUSH standards many of the faults we had pointed out. The fight, however, continues.

Sparked debate on sustainability and fossil fuel divestment.
We published two major studies this year. In March we released our book-length study, Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism. Launched at an event at the Millennium Hotel, across the street from the UN with Arthur Brooks as the keynote speaker, Sustainability quickly grabbed attention from the Wall Street Journal and from columnist George Will, to become the first widely publicized critique of the way colleges inject the idea of “sustainability” into their curricula and student life. Our sequel, Inside Divestment: The Illiberal Movement to Turn a Generation Against Fossil Fuels, released in November, portrays the growing national campaign to get colleges and universities to sell off investments in coal, oil, and gas companies.
Dug deep into the Common Core.
NAS president Peter Wood edited and wrote the introduction for a new book, Drilling through the Core: Why Common Core Is Bad for America. The book provides essays from nationally-recognized scholars who critique the Common Core K-12 State Standards.
Resisted racial preferences.
The case of Fisher v. University of Texas, which challenges the use of racial preferences in college admissions, came before the Supreme Court for the second time. NAS signed an amicus brief on behalf of Fisher, and NAS board member Gail Heriot, a professor of law at the University of San Diego, authored a major study that finds racial preferences often hurt the students they were intended to help. NAS mailed copies of Professor Heriot’s study to all our members.
Defended due process.

www.nas.org

NAS president Peter Wood edited and wrote the introduction for a new book, Drilling through the Core: Why Common Core Is Bad for America. The book provides essays from nationally-recognized scholars who critique the Common Core K-12 State Standards.

Drilling through the Core analyzes Common Core from the standpoint of its deleterious effects on curriculum-language arts, mathematics, history, and more-as well as its questionable legality, its roots in the aggressive spending of a few wealthy donors, its often-underestimated costs, and the untold damage it will wreak on American higher education.

At a time when more and more people are questioning the wisdom of federally-mandated one-size-fits-all solutions, Drilling through the Core offers well-considered arguments for stopping Common Core in its tracks.

Now in one volume, get the research on Common Core’s quality, legality and cost that laid the groundwork for the ongoing national debate about how best to achieve higher academic standards.

With polls showing declining public support for Common Core, with its presence on the presidential campaign trail, and with more states backing out of PARCC and SBAC, Pioneer Institute is pleased to announce publication of a timely new book, Drilling through the Core: Why Common Core is Bad for American Education, edited and with an introduction by Peter W. Wood, and contributions by some of the country’s top education scholars, including Sandra Stotsky, R. James Milgram, Williamson Evers, Ze’ev Wurman, and more…

Amid the media’s elation over the United Nations climate deal reached in Paris on Dec. 12, one significant outcome has been overlooked. The European Union failed to achieve its main objective, namely that the agreement adopt carbon-dioxide mitigation commitments that are “legally binding on all parties.”

While this may appear to be a major setback, it liberates Europe from the restrictions of the Kyoto Protocol—which runs out in 2020—and opens the way for more flexible and less damaging policies.

During the Paris negotiations, European Climate Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete warned that the EU “cannot make the mistake we made in Kyoto” where “all the big emitters were outside the legally binding agreement.” For Europe, the Kyoto Protocol has forced EU states to adopt unilateral, and disastrously costly, decarbonization policies. With their manufacturers rapidly losing ground to international competition, governments are increasingly concerned about the threat high energy prices pose to Europe’s industrial base.

The economic damage of unilateral climate policy is now widely acknowledged. In September 2014, then-EU Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger warned that “If there is no binding commitment from countries such as India, Russia, Brazil, the U.S., China, Japan and South Korea, whose governments are responsible for some 70% of global emissions,” it would be a mistake for EU states to bind only themselves. “If we are too ambitious and others do not follow us, we will have an export of production and more emissions outside the EU.”

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Success in trials of arthritis treatment. Israeli biotech Kitov has announced that its KIT-302 treatment for osteoarthritis successfully reduced arthritic pain in UK trials on 152 patients, without risk of heart problems. In fact KIT-302 is the only treatment for both osteoarthritis and hypertension (high blood pressure).
http://jewishbusinessnews.com/2015/12/16/kitov-pharmas-arthritis-drug-meets-main-goal-in-late-stage-study/

Functional human liver cells grown in the Lab. More news of the work of Hebrew University of Jerusalem Professor Yaakov Nahmias (see here, here, here and here). Now he has been able to use the chemical Oncostatin to double the speed of liver cell production outside the body. http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/28143

Japan turns to Israeli tech to treat radiation disease. Japan’s Fukushima Medical University and Israel’s Pluristem Therapeutics are to develop Pluristem’s PLX-R18 cells to treat acute radiation syndrome (ARS). Radiation continues to spread following the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/japan-turns-to-israeli-tech-to-treat-radiation-disease/

Prize-winning voice technology. Israel’s VoiceITT (see Mar 2014 newsletter) won the 2015 Medica medical app competition in Dusseldorf with its Talkitt platform that translates the speech of people with communication disabilities. Medica is the world’s largest medical trade fair, attracting nearly 5,000 exhibitors from 70 nations.
http://jewishbusinessnews.com/2015/12/10/4-israeli-startups-sweep-international-medical-app-contest/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwHYKmxwN4w

First implantation of groundbreaking heart device. Israel’s Enopace (see Mar 2013 newsletter) has seen the first operation to implant its new catheter-based neuro-stimulator to treat patients with congestive heart failure. The procedure was performed by Professor Davor Milicic, head of Cardiology at Zagreb Medical University.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/worlds-first-endovascular-neuromodulation-device-implanted-in-man-for-the-treatment-of-congestive-heart-failure-540696751.html

Breakthrough status for Tardive Dyskinesia treatment. (TY Atid-EDI) The US FDA has granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation status to Israel’s Teva for its SD-809 (deutetrabenazine) treatment of patients with tardive dyskinesia, a hyperkinetic movement disorder affecting about 500,000 people in the USA.
http://www.tevapharm.com/news/teva_announces_breakthrough_therapy_designation_for_sd_809_granted_by_fda_for_the_treatment_of_tardive_dyskinesia_11_15.aspx

Weizmann in joint research for brain therapies. Israel’s Weizmann Institute has entered into a research agreement with India’s Sun Pharma and Spain’s Health Research Institute of Santiago to develop products for treating neurological diseases such as brain stroke and brain cancer. (See also Apr 2015 newsletter)
http://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/sun-pharma-inks-pact-for-brain-therapies/article7971997.ece

Micro-pancreas can cure diabetes. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Betalin has significantly increased the lifetime of pancreatic beta cells transplanted into diabetics in order to produce insulin. This has been achieved by simultaneously transplanting an Engineered Micro Pancreas (EMP) to sustain the cells.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-startup-aims-to-end-insulin-injections-1001086686
http://www.betalintherapeutics.com/

Gustavus Swift once said about his meat-packing operations that they used “everything but the squeal.”

We have just seen the world’s politicians meet in Paris to sign a worthless piece of paper aimed at reducing global emissions of carbon dioxide in a questionable belief that man-made global warming threatens our existence. There was endless promotion of wind and solar renewable power, and there were promises to end the use of fossil fuels.

What if the global nemesis, carbon dioxide, can play a role in providing clean, reliable, efficient electric power? A consortium of companies is currently building a 50-MWt (megawatt thermal) demonstration power plant in Texas to find out.

The plant is due to begin operations in 2016. Here is the gist from Power Engineering:

CB&I (NYSE: CBI), Exelon Generation (NYSE: EXC) and 8 Rivers Capital have teamed to build a $140 million demonstration power plant that produces zero emissions from natural gas.

The plant will be built in Texas using a supercritical carbon dioxide (CO2) turbine from Toshiba. The plant will demonstrate NET Power’s Allam Cycle technology, which uses CO2 as a working fluid to drive a combustion turbine and produces pipeline-quality CO2 that can be sequestered or used in various industrial processes such as enhanced oil recovery.

The project includes technology development, plant design and construction, and a full testing and operations program. CB&I will provide engineering, procurement and construction services, 8 Rivers, which invented the Allam Cycle, will provide the technology development and intellectual property for the cycle, and Exelon will operate and maintain the plant. Design activities have been ongoing since 2010, and commissioning is expected by 2016.