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ISRAEL

Right from Wrong: A (Likud) party to remember A longtime champion of Likud Pride efforts on behalf of the party, he began his tribute to Cohen by lauding the country’s achievements. By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-from-Wrong-A-Likud-party-to-remember-600771

Just when I was beginning to wonder this week whether the wondrous paradoxes of Israeli society had been drowned to oblivion in pre-election sewage, I attended an event in Tel Aviv that restored my faith in the health of the country. It also reminded me of the reason I am a member of the Likud Party, headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and will be voting accordingly on September 17.

Netanyahu neither attended the event in question, however, nor was he even the focus of my attention on Tuesday evening. Of course, the fact that he has been keeping Iranian aggression at bay afforded me the luxury to take a short break from obsessing over and writing about the very real and present dangers along our borders.

No, this party was a tribute to Tel Aviv University linguist Dr. Evan Cohen, Netanyahu’s new foreign media adviser. It was a going-away gathering held by Likud Pride – the party’s LBGTQ faction that Cohen headed – to thank him for his years of devoted service to the group, and to welcome his successor, Oded Schwartzberg.

Originally slated for August 8, the party was canceled at the last minute due to the brutal murder that day of 19-year-old yeshiva student and IDF recruit Dvir Sorek, from the Judea and Samaria community of Ofra, at the hands of Palestinian terrorists. Like the rest of the country, Likud Pride was in mourning. It was clearly not an appropriate moment to celebrate new beginnings – no matter how starkly the stabbing attack manifested the need to keep a right-wing government in power.

After all, the Left still clings to the false premise that Palestinian terrorism is Israel’s fault. It thus continues to spread the lie that giving more land to the Palestinian Authority, which encourages and pays hefty stipends to terrorists, will make Israelis safe from stabbing, car-ramming, bombing and rocket attacks.

Israel’s Good and Bad New Realities By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/israel-new-alliances-dangerous-old-enemies/

New alliances with Arab nations are positive but unstable, and old enemies are most dangerous when in a weakened state.

One of the most radical changes in the labyrinth of the Middle East is the near cessation of the old formal hostility of the Arab nations to Israel. That does not mean that the destruction of the Jewish state is not still a commandment among hundreds of millions of Arab speakers throughout the Middle East in general and on the proverbial West Bank in particular.

Rather, a number of currents has convinced most of the Gulf monarchies, frontline Arab states such as Jordan and Egypt, and the other North African nations that of all the existential crises in the world threatening their regimes, Israel is no longer perceived as their font.

Instead, elemental dangers to Israel arise mostly from Iran, Iranian-backed Hezbollah in the badlands of Syria and Lebanon, and Turkey. Why this fundamental realignment?

One reason, of course, is Iran’s likely soon-to-be nuclear status. Iran detests Israel. But such hatred is relatively recent and dates from 1979 — unlike the ancient schisms between Shiite and Sunni, Persian and Arab, and the Straits of Hormuz versus the Persian Gulf.

Arab nations believe that a nuclear Iran will threaten them explicitly. They assume that a messianic Tehran is quite capable of carrying out what would be serial nuclear threats. And they are certain that such constant tensions would embolden Shiite minorities in their own states, much like millions of Eastern European Germans of the 1930s were suddenly deemed oppressed, and believed that they could be liberated only by eventual protection from and incorporation into Hitler’s ascendant Third Reich.

Voting against Israeli electoral apathy We Israelis are used to having our tax shekels spent on futile, top-down endeavors born of nanny-state committee meetings held to interpret and tackle societal phenomena. No wonder there’s a sense that voting won’t change anything. Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/voting-against-israeli-electoral-apathy/

An informal man-in-the-street survey broadcast on Monday evening on Israel’s Channel 12 revealed what everybody has been predicting: that voter turnout for the Sept. 17 Knesset elections is going to be low.

Israelis have been claiming for months that they “have nobody to vote for,” so the item wasn’t all that surprising. What was astonishing about it, however, was that—with a mere two weeks to go before the public heads to the polls to determine the makeup of the next government—not a single person interviewed in the short clip could remember when the elections are actually taking place. It is a level of apathy rarely seen in Israel—a country filled with news junkies and busybodies.

One might argue that such a small, on-the-fly sampling constitutes flimsy anecdotal evidence. It turns out, however, that research conducted by the Central Elections Committee backs it up with more reliable statistics. These indicate that voter turnout will be even less than the 68.46 percent that it was on April 9, the election that ended in a coalition impasse.

This is not the lowest Israeli voter turnout, by any means. The only election that has seen a higher turnout since 1999, when it was 78.7 percent, was in 2015, when it reached 72.36 percent. In 2003, it was 67.8 percent; in 2006, it was 63.5 percent; in 2009, it was 64.7 percent; and in 2013, it was 67.8 percent.

Exposing Physical and Intellectual Terrorism to Awaken the Oblivious The risks to free society are too high to remain timid or silent and let evil prevail. Dr. Shmuel Katz

Reprinted from IsraelNationalNews.com.

It is terrible that incidents like using cars to run over innocent children and other means of terror are still happening in Israel and around the world, and that so many oblivious individuals are not being informed about these events – and even if they get to know about them, they do not care.

They do not understand that once evil is unleashed, ALL people from ALL walks of life, will become its victims.

Unfortunately, terror today is taking two major forms. One is the physical attack, by all kinds of weapons which may include cars, knives, bullets, rockets, bombs, etc. The other one is the verbal attacks which intend to incite, malign, deceive, rewrite history and educate the oblivious to become the perpetrators of malicious action. These actions could be physical terrorism and/or no less aggressive non-violent terrorism, which includes Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.

Our fight against evil is relentless but there is too much uncontrolled evil to address with too few people fighting it. Therefore, it is imperative to educate as many people as possible with the correct information. This will help them join the effort to stand up against evil and expose the perpetrators of the deception, even if those perpetrators are members of Congress, University Professors, High School Teachers or any other person in important decision-making or educational positions.

The risks to free society are too high to remain timid or silent and let evil prevail.

Peace with Islam: The disquieting truth Victor Sharpe

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe

“Even if Israel shrank to one downtown city block in Tel Aviv, the Arab and Muslim world would still not truly recognize a Jewish state or agree to live with it in peace and harmony.”

“Much of the Islamic world now feels empowered, as perhaps never before, to seek global domination. This is the tangible and growing threat to the world; not man-made global warming.”

“What we have witnessed for far too long are Israeli and some world leaders constantly making endless concessions to the deceitful leaders of the terrorist crime family known as the Palestinian Authority.”

“Wherever the Muslim foot has once trod triumphal, that territory is forever regarded by them as Islamic. If such territory is lost to Muslims, then Allah has been diminished and the land must be retaken, however long it takes. Peace, then, is merely a mirage in the desert sands.”

In 2008 I wrote an article titled: “Forget Waiting for Peace.”

It is heartbreaking to look back now, in this year 2019, at what I feared would unfold for Israel those eleven long years ago.

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

Dear E-pals, I always post Michael Ordman’s good news from Israel separately. In spite of the libels and bashing this amazing democracy gets from the media and academia and the “ignoranti” of various boycott movements, Israel whose life is constantly endangered by well-armed enemies, works overtime to improve and save lives all over the world. What an accomplishment! rsk

 

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Preventing secondary brain tumors. (TY UWI) Up to 40% of cancer patients develop secondary brain tumors shortly after surgery to remove a primary tumor elsewhere in the body. Researchers at Tel Aviv University have shown that an intravenous injection of CpG-C (synthetic DNA material) can prevent these metastases forming.
https://www.israel21c.org/novel-immunotherapy-may-prevent-brain-metastases/
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2006859
 
New research into age-related immune failure. In lab tests on aging and the immune system, biologists at Israel’s Ben Gurion University have profiled over 24,000 T-Cells. They identified that 30% deteriorate during the aging process and could establish new areas of medical intervention to prevent age-related illnesses.
https://in.bgu.ac.il/en/pages/news/t_cells.aspx
 
Software to monitor cancer patients at home. I reported previously (see here) on Israeli startup Telesofia when it developed personalized medical videos. Now Israel’s Sheba Medical Center is to pilot Telesofia’s tele-medicine software for cancer patients at home to communicate with doctors about chemotherapy side effects.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/oncologist-startup-develop-software-that-monitors-cancer-patients-at-home/
 
Alzheimer’s treatment also benefits autistic children. Israeli researchers at Sheba Medical Center have found that a medication used to treat Alzheimer’s patients also has strong therapeutic effects on autistic children. 60 such children were given Donepezil and Cholin for six months and their language skills improved significantly.
https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/08/22/israeli-researchers-find-alzheimer-medications-may-help-treat-autistic-children/
 
US approval for blood pressure wristband monitor. Israel’s Biobeat develops wireless products (wristwatch and patch) to measure blood pressure, oxygenation, pulse, stroke volume and more. Both items sync data to the cloud, enabling remote monitoring. The US FDA has just given clearance to the combined products.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3769057,00.html   https://www.biobeat.cloud/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58_XlpvyfEs
 
A stable vaccine for malaria. Malaria kills half-a-million people annually. In this “Weizmann in Focus” video, Dave Doneson explains that current anti-malaria vaccines break down in hot climates. However, scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute redesigned the protein RH5 to enable the vaccine to be stored at room temperature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfcjyr94GM0
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/WeizmannCompass/sections/students/adi-goldenzweig
 
Hope for multiple myeloma patients. Thanks to Israeli discoveries and research, patients with the bone marrow cancer multiple myeloma are leading longer, better lives.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/267943
 

To European Leaders: Jewish Flesh Is Cheap by Guy Millière *****

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14786/europe-jewish-flesh-is-cheap

The Oslo Accords were based on the illusion that the PLO could totally change and suddenly become a “partner for peace”… It soon became clear that the Palestinian Authority was still the PLO: terrorist attacks quickly multiplied. The money received by the Palestinian Authority was used to continue incitement to murder and payments to incentivize it.

In 1967, a change of strategy took place. No one, the PLO decided, would speak of a “war for the destruction of Israel”. Instead, they would call it a “war of national liberation”. From then on, the PLO was presented as a “liberation movement”.

Arabs who had left Israel in 1948-49, many of whom remained in refugee camps, were defined as the “Palestinian people”; in this way were the Palestinian people invented. As PLO Executive Council member Zuheir Mohsen said in 1977: “The Palestinian people does not exist… Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people…”

The leaders of the Palestinian Authority have, in fact, never stopped resorting to “armed struggle”, the name they give to terrorism and murdering Jews. To “frustrate all the schemes of Zionism”, they invented the Palestinian people; their “struggle for national liberation” gave them international recognition. By renaming terrorism and murdering Jews “armed struggle”, they made their use of terrorism and murder acceptable. By signing the Oslo Accords, they could appear interested in peace without having to renounce terrorism. They could even demonize Israel and give it the image of a barbaric and cruel country while continuing to murder Jews.

“If you look at history… what ends conflicts is one side giving up…. and then it’s over…. in World War II, [the Germans] were forced to give up… and note how much they benefited by giving up.” — Daniel Pipes, historian, November 19, 2017.

August 7th. Israel. When Dvir Sorek, an 18-year-old student returned from Jerusalem to his school after having bought some books for his rabbis as an end-of-year gift, he was stabbed to death by two Arab terrorists.

As his funeral took place, while his father was delivering the eulogy, the inhabitants of the Arab village of Silwad, two miles North, to celebrate the murder, were setting off fireworks.

Sorek was apparently a peaceful teenager who had never hurt anyone. Among the books he brought was one by an Israeli left-wing writer, David Grossman, supporting the need to create a Palestinian state.

Sorek’s “fault” was to be a Jew.

Arab migration shaped Palestinian society  Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger

 “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative’

 https://bit.ly/2ZqxY8h

Mahmoud Abbas promotes an egregious historical fabrication, claiming that the Palestinians are descendants of the original Canaanite peoples.

Moreover, Mahmoud Abbas’ school curriculum – which glorifies suicide bombers – reiterates this falsified history.  It claims that the multitude of archeological findings of 3,000 year old Jewish roots in the Land of Israel “constitute an attempt to liquidate the Palestinian heritage…especially in Jerusalem… misrepresenting the city as a Zionist entity….” (6th grade Social Studies volume 1, page 24; 7th grade Social Studies volume 1, pages 61-62). 

However, the name “Palestine” is not related to Arab/Muslim culture.  It is a derivative of the Philistine people (Plishtim, Polshim – invaders – in Hebrew), who were expelled from the Greek Aegian Islands in 1300 BC and invaded the southern coast of Judea (Land of Israel) in 1200 BC. In 136 CE – upon crushing the Jewish Bar Kochba rebellion – the Roman Emperor Hadrian renamed Judea, calling it Palestina (a derivative of the Philistines, who were an aggressive enemy of the Jewish people), aiming to erase the Jewish Homeland, Judaism and the Jewish people from human memory.

Contrary to Mahmoud Abbas’ claim, most Arabs in British Mandate Palestine were migrant workers and descendants of the 1832-1947 wave of Arab/Muslim immigration from Egypt, the Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, North Africa, Bosnia, India, Afghanistan, etc.  While the British Mandate encouraged Arab immigration, it blocked Jewish immigration.

Polls, attempted putsches and ayatollahs By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-from-Wrong-Polls-attempted-putsches-and-ayatollahs-600127

With less than three weeks left before the September 17 Knesset elections, the only two issues on which the Right and Left seem to agree is that neither bloc will be able to form a coalition, and that voter turnout is going to be lower than ever. This sad consensus was born of, and continues to be bred by, polls.

The question of whether surveys reflect or shape public sentiment is not new. Nor is the discussion about their accuracy, particularly in the mass-communication age, when reaching voters can no longer be done by calling random numbers in what have become obsolete phone books. Furthermore, as post-election analysts around the world point out when faced with unexpected ballot-box outcomes, people lie to pollsters, or change their minds at the last minute.

The April 9 elections that ended in an impasse, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu ultimately unable to form a government, deserve to be relegated to a different category, however.

The surprise there was that Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman refused to join the right-wing camp to which he had previously belonged. Had he not pulled a stunt to thwart Netanyahu, his measly five mandates would have enabled the ruling Likud Party to lead a clear majority. This was not something that pollsters – whose pie charts had put Yisrael Beytenu on the same side as Likud – could have predicted.

At least this time around, they don’t need to guess. Liberman has made it clear since April 10 that he will only join a coalition that excludes the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties.

Israel Faces a Serious Escalation in its Proxy War with Iran by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14784/israel-proxy-war-iran

The fact that Israel has found it necessary to attack targets so far from its traditional area of military operations close to its immediate borders is indicative of the alarming escalation that has taken place in recent months in the threat Iran poses to Israeli security.

Earlier this week, in Lebanon, an Israeli drone was reported to have bombed a Palestinian base that is said to be funded by Iran. Israeli warplanes were also reported to have bombed Iranian military bases on the outskirts of the Syrian capital Damascus.

The very idea of Washington sitting down with the Iranians at a time when it is continuing to threaten the security of its closest Middle Eastern ally would be unconscionable.

The reality is that there can be no meaningful dialogue between Washington and Tehran on a future deal so long as Iran remains committed to its long-standing policy of seeking the wholesale destruction of the Jewish state.

The recent confirmation by US military officials that Israeli warplanes were responsible for the recent attack on an Iranian military base in Iraq demonstrates the alarming extent to which the so-called proxy war between Tehran and Jerusalem has escalated in recent weeks.

According to senior Israeli security sources, spoken to on an off-the-record basis, the base in the northern Iraqi province of Salaheddin was targeted because they believed it was being used to assemble Iranian-made medium-range missiles with the capability to hit targets in Israel.

The threat was deemed so important that senior Israeli officers decided to launch a daring bombing raid that required F-35 stealth warplanes to penetrate Saudi airspace to achieve their objective. It is unclear whether the Saudis, who oppose Iranian meddling in Iraq but do not have diplomatic relations with Israel, gave permission for the Israeli warplanes to enter their airspace.