RUTHFULLY YOURS

Since its independence, the Jewish state has been under siege by the Arab states. The secular, nationalist, Arab dictatorships waged three major wars on Israel in 1948, 1967, and 1973. Alongside the wars that meant to destroy the Jewish state and drive its inhabitants into the sea, was an Arab League economic boycott. Since the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, a terror war against Israel has ensued. The First Palestinian Intifada (uprising) occurred in 1987, the Second intifada, much bloodier, began in September, 2000. Both ran out of steam and failed to break the spirit of Jewish Israel, just as the Arab nationalist wars and the economic boycotts failed to dismantle the Jewish state. In 1979, Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel, and Jordan followed in 1994. The Palestinians continued to employ terror against Jews but added law-fare to the menu, and the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement, which seeks to delegitimize, demonize, and ultimately destroy the Jewish state.

In the last few months a far more insidious campaign was launched by the Palestinians, aided by Islamist elements in the Arab and Muslim world – to damage the Jewish state. It is a religious incitement campaign which seeks to awaken anti-Jewish religious grievances against the Jews of Israel, with worldwide implications for Jews everywhere.

The organic-products industry, which has been on a tear for the past decade, is running scared. Challenged by progress in modern genetic engineering and state-of-the-art pesticides — which are denied to organic farmers — the organic movement is ratcheting up its rhetoric and bolstering its anti-innovation agenda while trying to expand a consumer base that shows signs of hitting the wall.

Genetic-engineering-labeling referendums funded by the organic industry failed last year in Colorado and Oregon, following similar defeats in California and Washington. Even worse for the industry, a recent Supreme Court decision appears to proscribe on First Amendment grounds the kind of labeling they want. A June 2015 Supreme Court decision has cleared a judicial path to challenge the constitutionality of special labeling — “compelled commercial speech” — to identify foods that contain genetically engineered (sometimes called “genetically modified”) ingredients. The essence of the decision is the expansion of the range of regulations subject to “strict scrutiny,” the most rigorous standard of review for constitutionality, to include special labeling laws.

According to Lord Christopher Monckton, Thomas R. Karl’s much-feted paper refuting “the Pause,” the inexplicable 19-year standstill in the earth’s average global surface temperature, has a small problem: To disappear the warming hiatus as Karl and his co-authors purport to do, you have to repeal the laws of thermodynamics. (Not even the current president can do that.)

Karl and his colleagues, whose work appeared in the June issue of Science, “updated” previous data sets used to assess changes in surface temperatures, which supporters maintain is merely Science being self-critical and Scientific. Others — a lot of others — say different. E. Calvin Beisner rounds up criticisms at the website Watts Up With That, and quotes with approval the verdict of Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry:

This short paper in Science is not adequate to explain and explore the very large changes that have been made to the NOAA data set. . . . So while I’m sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don’t regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on.

During a recent speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appropriately decried [1] the “apologetics” which have minimized the role played by ex-Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin el-Husseini [2] (1895-1974) — founder of the modern Palestinian Muslim movement — in fomenting genocidal Islamic Jew-hatred. Netanyahu made these simple, irrefragable points, demonstrating [3] how from the 1920s through (in particular) the World War II era:

… the father of the Palestinians at that time, with no [Jewish] state and no so-called “occupation,” no territories and no settlements, already sought, through systematic incitement, to annihilate the Jews. Regrettably, Hajj Amin el-Husseini is still a venerated figure in Palestinian society, he appears in study books and is exalted as the father of the nation, and this incitement that began then, incitement to kill Jews, continues.

As I noted in what was the first full English translation and detailed analysis (here [2], here [4]) of Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s 1937 fatwa on the Jews — which re-affirms canonical Islam’s Jew-hating motifs used to foment murderous violence against them by Muhammad himself, since the advent of Islam, till now — this seminal proclamation of incitement by the “Godfather” of the Palestinian Muslim movement was pure Islamic dogma devoid of any themes from the writings of Nazi racial theorists, epitomized by Johan (aka, Johann, Johannes) von Leers. (See Foreword by Julian Huxley, History on a Racial Basis [5], an abridged translation of Geschichte auf Rassicher Grundlage [6], London, 1936.)

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

· An Israeli cancer treatment causes tumors to self-destruct.

Fooling cancer cells. Israel’s BioSight has developed the amino acid astrabine which acts as a “Trojan Horse” chemotherapy treatment that kills leukemia cells without harming healthy tissue. Astrabine closely resembles a protein called aspargine that leukemia cells depend on and the cancer cells are fooled into self-destruction.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-start-up-uses-trojan-horse-technology-to-kill-cancer-cells/
Muscular dystrophy treatment success. Israel’s BioBlast announced promising interim results from its Phase II study of its Cabaletta treatment for oculopharyngeal muscular dystrophy (OPMD). Due to the success BioBlast seeks to fast track a Phase III study in 2016, leading to a 2017 launch date.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-bioblast-orphan-drug-gives-hope-to-opmd-patients-1001076594

· Israel was elected to the membership of a UN Space Committee.
· Ethiopia is to install an Israeli solar power plant.
· An innovative all-terrain Israeli suitcase is successfully funded.
· A delegation of 50 Australian entrepreneurs is currently visiting Israel.
· Two Israelis won medals at a judo competition in Abu Dhabi.
· Thousands flock to pro-Israel rallies in New York, Rome, Paris, Madrid and Kiev.

Despite ever-growing educational spending and endless experimentation to discover magic bullets, the recent news from the education front is depressing. For example, scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (the NAEP) showed a lack of progress in reading and math proficiency — only a third of the nation’s eighth-graders were “proficient” (or above) in math while the figure was only slightly higher for fourth-graders. Even worst news comes from Washington DC and New York City. Both have made expensive efforts to uplift students and close the race-related academic achievement gap. In DC eighty-two percent of white students met the proficiency standard in English; the corresponding figure for Hispanics was 8%, for blacks it was 4%. Meanwhile, in New York City the school Chancellor tried to spin truly dreadful outcomes into a “success.” She hailed the substantial uptick in blacks and Hispanics taking the Advanced Placement (AP) tests but her celebration failed to mention that 95% of the Hispanic students and 97% of the African Americans students could not pass a single AP test (and this despite Hispanic students being able to take an AP test in the Spanish language and culture).

Needless to say, these disappointing outcomes (and there are many others) will only further energize professional educators to demand yet more “investing in our future” and countless budget busting panaceas and, I suspect, much of this clamor will be heeded. After all, who could deny that America requires an educated workforce in today’s cutthroat global economy?

The European Union is steeped in anti-Israeli leanings, but within some countries are obviously more impregnated than others. France is, it must be pointed out, first among those. After being the ally of Israel in 1950, she joined the ranks of the enemy, and then the more left. It all started with General de Gaulle, […]

Decades ago, Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir with her characteristic wit said, “Israelis have a secret weapon – we have nowhere else to go.”

The Druze, 140,000 members’ minority community in Israel, making them 2% of the entire population in Israel, deeply rooted in the land of Israel for centuries, living in villages on top of the Carmel mountain ridge and several villages in northern Israel, second Mrs. Meir.

The Druze people, originating in Southwestern Asia, are an Arabic speaking, ethno-religious group of approximately 1 million, residing primarily in Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan.

The Druze faith, with elements taken from Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is a monotheistic and Abrahamic religion that reveres the father-in-law of Moses, Jethro and believes in reincarnation. According to the biblical narrative, Jethro joined and assisted the Israelites in the desert during their Exodus, accepted monotheism, but ultimately rejoined his own people. The tomb of Jethro near Tiberias, Israel, is the most important religious site for the Druze community

The Paris climate conference is only about six weeks away, and evil Republican “climate deniers” are looking to slash federal funding of what passes nowadays for climate science. So what’s an agency like NASA to do?

Call in the New York Times for a junk science-fueled airstrike.

“Greenland Is Melting Away [1]” is certainly, as Times columnist Nick Kristof tweeted, “a visually amazing piece,” featuring impressive aerial and satellite imagery of the Greenland ice sheet. The underlying story, on the other hand, is much less amazing.

The article spotlights the efforts of a group of researchers who are collecting data on summertime melt of a river in Greenland. Readers are told:

[The] scientific data could yield groundbreaking information on the rate at which the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, one of the biggest and fastest-melting chunks of ice on Earth, will drive up sea levels in the coming decades.

This, the Times worries, could raise sea levels by … 20 feet.

I’ve seen how for-profit colleges can help students—many of them older and seeking better jobs—but the government and the media want to shut them down.
For the first time since I left the newspaper business, I feel I have some news. And it’s news that might shake up a stagnant Washington policy debate.

For-profit colleges have become a standard target of the progressive left (and not them alone). Their charges include: The students are recruited aggressively; the prices are too high; most of the students drop out and many incur high levels of debt and then default; for those who stick it out and graduate, the degrees aren’t worth much.

These charges have been so widely publicized and so often repeated that they have entered the realm of accepted truth. In some quarters, to defend any for-profit education company is to defend the indefensible. Hear me: There are huge differences among for-profit colleges, as among other colleges. Some for-profit colleges have behaved disgracefully to their students; I do not defend them.