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ISRAEL

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Cells go into a huddle before fighting infection. Weizmann scientists have discovered that cells in the immune system cluster together to decide tactics, before being sent out to battle infections. These “helper T-cells” resemble American football and basketball teams that frequently go into a huddle during their games.
https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/life-sciences/game-clones-team-huddles-t-cells

Cats (no not Katz!) can help fight AIDS virus. Scientists at Israel’s Technion Institute are learning more about the human AIDS virus from discoveries made researching the feline equivalent (FIV). They have uncovered a protein that is resistant to treatment. Breaking this resistance will help fight human AIDS.
https://www.israel21c.org/discovery-in-feline-virus-could-help-better-fight-aids/

More accurate radiotherapy. Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center is the first hospital in the Middle East to install the state-of-the-art Spine SRS software from Germany’s Brainlab. It allows doctors to give a single dose of higher level radiation to patients suffering from spine cancer without damaging nearby healthy tissue.
http://www.hadassah.org/news-stories/first-in-israel-hadassah-uses-innovative-technology.html

Tailored rehabilitation solutions. Innovators at Pele, a tech-innovation program at the Jerusalem-based ALYN Hospital, develop personalized solutions for children with special needs. For 8-year-old Arab boy Yusuf, who cannot bend his joints, it is a structure that allows him to feed himself.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-8-year-old-who-can-now-eat-by-himself-and-other-rehab-tech-success-stories/ https://www.youtube.com/embed/kt1H0Rv-w8w?rel=0

Rambam trauma training. 22 participants from 16 nations attended the 19th “Developing and Organizing a Trauma System” and Mass Casualty Management Course at Haifa’s Rambam Health Care Campus. To date the center has trained more than 3,000 health care professionals and officials from 61 nations.
https://www.rambam.org.il/EnglishSite/AboutRambam/Publications/NewsandEvents/Pages/Local-Experience%E2%80%94International-Solution.aspx

Your medical questions answered. Israel’s Medint Medical Intelligence collects and analyzes information from medical websites, social platforms, blogs, and forums to help patients with cancer and chronic illnesses make informed medical decisions. E.g. find doctors treating similar conditions, or relevant clinical trials.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3740705,00.html https://www.medint.io/

Neurosurgery saves two children. It was a busy week at Israel’s Schneider children’s hospital. First 10-year-old Ilai had emergency minimally invasive surgery to remove a large colloid cyst in his brain. Then doctors performed a 13-hour operation to remove a huge brain tumor from 13-year-old Maxim. Both are now home.
https://www.schneider.org.il/?CategoryID=1011&ArticleID=3887
https://www.schneider.org.il/?CategoryID=1011&ArticleID=3886

Ex-NYC Mayor and terror victim reunited. In 2002, 13-year-old Dvir Musai was blown up by a terrorist’s mine. At Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital he was visited by then NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Now employed at Hadassah Herzstein Heritage Center, father-of-two, Dvir received another visit from Mr Giuliani.
http://www.hadassah.org/news-stories/rudy-giuliani-visits-hmo.html

READ THEM ALL….

Bishop Graham Tomlin and the Demonization of Israel by Denis MacEoin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12560/bishop-graham-tomlin-israel

If Israel plays a part in the persecution of Christians, it must be doing a very bad job indeed.
“Shortly after the [1967] war, [Israeli Defense Minister] Dayan met with officials of the Muslim Wakf, who governed the holy site, and formally returned the Mount to their control…. the Wakf would determine who prayed at the site, an arrangement that would effectively bar non-Muslim prayer.” — Yossi Klein Halevi, The Atlantic.
It should be clear from the above that Israel is one of the least likely countries in the world to persecute the followers of any religion. A well-educated and thinking man, Bishop Tomlin ought to have known this or have been able to check the facts for himself. None of the above is remotely secret.
“[A]re the world Christian bodies denouncing the Islamic forces for the ethnic cleansing, genocide and historic demographic-religious revolution their brethren are suffering? No. Christians these days are busy targeting the Israeli Jews.” — Giulio Meotti, Italian journalist.

Anglican Bishop Graham Tomlin, heads the diocese of Kensington in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which has many of London’s most expensive residential properties, is undoubtedly a man of brains and good works.[1]

On May 26, 2018, however, he published in The Times an article, entitled, “If this rich vein of wisdom disappears, a part of us dies”. The “rich vein of wisdom” to which he refers is the long tradition of Christian thought and experience in the region where the religion first appeared, and was handed down through centuries of Islamic rule. For the most part, the article is a well-argued defence of Christians in the Middle East:

The systematic persecution of Christians in the Middle East is a serious threat. The number of Christians in Middle Eastern countries has fallen from about 20 per cent to 4 per cent in recent years and regular bomb attacks on Christians in Egypt are becoming part of a deadly pattern.

So far so good. Tomlin’s heart is surely in the right place. But immediately after that he goes on:

Even in Jerusalem, new regulations are threatening to tax the Christian churches out of existence, prompting the recent unprecedented closure of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as an act of protest. The buildings from ancient times will still stand, but if Christians are hounded out of the Middle East, driven to emigrate by radical Islam, or, in the case of many Palestinian Christians, by the lack of opportunities to thrive in Israel, this rich source of wisdom will disappear just like the ruins of Palmyra.

THE MAIL: BBC SLAMS MARR OVER ‘ISRAEL KILLS KIDS’ SLUR-TOM GROSS

I attach an article below from today’s Mail on Sunday (the Sunday edition of the Daily Mail, one of Britain’s most popular papers).

It is a very rare forced admission by the BBC that their star presenter, Andrew Marr, breached editorial guidelines with a “misleading” claim (probably based on fake news elsewhere in the British media which Marr had wrongly believed and not fact checked) that Israel had killed “lots of Palestinian kids” in Gaza. Marr gratuitously made the claim in the middle of discussing a story about Russia on his influential Sunday morning BBC1 show.

It is an important story by the Mail but it is regrettable that the Mail story doesn’t mention that Hamas and Islamic Jihad took responsibility for most of the recent Gaza deaths – people may wrongly think Marr was right.

Anti-Semitism campaigner Jonathan Sacerdoti forced the BBC complaints board to actually carefully examine the deaths on the Gaza border over recent weeks, which they were legally bound to check carefully, and the BBC complaints board concluded that their own presenter had in fact mislead the BBC audience with his claims.

Of course, Marr is the just the tip of the iceberg. BBC correspondents, anchors and BBC chosen studio “experts” continually provide misleading information, smearing Israel, as do many other media outlets.

On the day Sacerdoti made his complaint to the BBC several weeks ago, he also notified me about this and I considered writing about it, and yet not a single British news outlet I then approached at the time said they would be interested in an article pointing out that Marr (and much of the rest of the media) had mislead.

Max Blumenthal Channels Leni Riefenstahl and Celebrates Hamas: Andrew Harrod

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/06/max-blumenthal-channels-leni-riefenstahl-the-triumph-of-hamas

“Can any parallels be made then to Nazism and Judaism?” asked a questioner in a conference room packed with about 100 people at the June 9 screening of Killing Gaza at Washington, DC’s rabidly anti-Israel Jerusalem Fund. This shockingly absurd query typified the atmosphere surrounding the latest screed against Israel produced by “gonzo journalist” Max Blumenthal and his equally deranged colleague Dan Cohen.

“Judeo-Nazi” analogies are nothing new for the Jerusalem Fund presenters Blumenthal and Cohen. Cohen has previously described how their film about Israel’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge military campaign against Hamas terrorists in Gaza “was inspired by” a past “bracing portrait of the Nazi death camps.” Blumenthal has similarly written that the film chronicles “Israel’s wholesale criminality” and “sadistic Israeli violence.”

Blumenthal and Cohen have discussed Killing Gaza on Christopher Hedges’ On Contact talk show on RT, the Russian state-funded television channel thatregistered in 2017 under America’s Foreign Agent Registration Act. Like many other American leftists, he has found a home at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda mouthpiece, where RT newscasters like the 9/11 TrutherAbby Martin go to extreme lengths to vilify Israel and its use of “Hitler’s methods.” RT’s Israel-hatred befits Hedges, who wrote in a review of Killing Gaza that “toxic racism and militarism infect Israeli society.”

Cohen told host Hedges that Gaza is a “man-made intentional hell for what Israel considers non-humans” and made false allegations about Israel depriving Gaza of water. In contrast, Israel has over the years almost doubled the amount of water supplied to the Palestinian territories under the 1993 Oslo Accords and hasworked to improve Gaza’s desalinization and water treatment capabilities. Hedges concurred that the film supposedly documented common canards about “one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters,” notwithstanding Gaza’scommercial development and obesity public health problems.

Palestinians: How to Achieve a Better Life by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12559/palestinians-protests-dictatorship

“It’s become safer to demonstrate against Israel than against Abbas or the Palestinian Authority. Israel is at least a country of law and order and they have human rights organizations and a powerful media and judicial system. We can only continue to dream of having something like what the Jews have.” — Palestinian activist.

At the end of the day, Palestinians know that the power struggle between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas is not between good guys and bad guys, but between bad guys and bad guys. These bad guys are no different from other Arab dictatorships that enslave and kill their people. Anyone who thinks that Mahmoud Abbas is eager to go back to the Gaza Strip is living in a dream world.

If the Palestinians ever wish to seek a better life, the first thing they need to do is rid themselves of the “leaders” who have destroyed their lives.

In the past two weeks, Palestinians received yet another reminder that they are living under undemocratic regimes that have less than no respect for public freedoms.

The regimes of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip never miss an opportunity to remind their people of the dire consequences that await anyone who speaks out against the leaders. The two Palestinian regimes have been forcing it down the throats of their people for many years.

Still, some Palestinians seem surprised each time the PA or Hamas send their police officers to break up (or, more precisely, to break bones in) a demonstration in Ramallah or the Gaza Strip.

Amy Schumer, Breaking the Wedding Glass, and Jerusalem by Moshe Phillips

https://www.algemeiner.com/2018/06/13/amy-schumer-breaking-the-wedding-glass-a

With the summer wedding season upon us, Jewish couples are preparing for marriage ceremonies that will conclude with the ancient ritual that many know simply as “the breaking of the glass.” Many a groom’s heel will crush a small glass under a handkerchief.

Unfortunately, for many assimilated Jews, the only Jewish aspect of the traditional wedding ceremony that they retain at all is the breaking of the glass.

What is this strange act? And what drives so many Jews, even those who are seemingly detached from the Jewish community and may even be marrying non-Jews, to nevertheless want to break the glass?

When Chris Fischer and actress Amy Schumer — not exactly a paragon of Jewish religious observance — married in a Malibu beach ceremony earlier this year, they too broke a glass.

Even some non-Jews have appropriated this aspect of Jewish wedding celebrations. At actress Cameron Diaz’s wedding in 2015, her groom stepped on a glass even though, as one newspaper account put it, “neither Diaz nor Madden are Jewish, so the reason for this elaborate traditional Jewish ceremony is best known to them.”

The sad truth is that an extremely high percentage of Jews break the glass because it is “traditional,” yet they have no idea what the deeper meaning really is.

Gaza Strip “Militants” Fire Rockets Into Israel Rockets from Gaza began after Israel first struck three targets in the strip By Felicia Schwartz

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gaza-strip-militants-fire-rockets-into-israel-1529474115

TEL AVIV—Militants early Wednesday fired a volley of rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip, puncturing a tacit three-week cease-fire, in the latest flare-up in tensions between the two sides.

The rockets from Gaza began after Israel first struck three targets in the strip in what the military said was a response to repeated launches of flaming kites and balloons with explosives, low-tech weapons that have damaged thousands of acres of Israeli farmland.

Over several hours, Gaza militants fired 45 rockets into Israel and the Iron Dome system intercepted seven of them, the Israeli army said. The fresh barrage triggered sirens in several Israeli towns near the border. There were no immediate official reports of deaths or injuries from the attacks.

As of 6 a.m. local time, the Israeli military said it had targeted 25 targets in the Gaza strip overnight in response to what it described as a “severe rocket attack” from the 25-mile-long enclave, which is densely populated.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said Wednesday in a statement on Twitter that the large number of rockets was meant to “set the rules of the engagement” after the Israeli airstrikes.

The escalating tensions show how Israel’s high-tech military is grappling to respond to the basic incendiary balloons that have burned thousands of acres of Israeli farmland and damaged nature reserves. Israel said it targeted Hamas military compounds with airstrikes—including an underground training site—to pressure the group to halt the arson attacks.

Egypt has quietly mediated between Israel and Hamas during the surge in violence that stems from clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli military forces at the border fence separating the Gaza Strip and Israel. Since March 30, more than 120 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces at the border. CONTINUE AT SITE

Iran, Syria, and Israel’s Red Line By Jacob Nagel

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2018/06/18/iran_syria_and_israels_red_line_113543.html

The recent skirmishes between Israel and Iranian forces in Syria raise important questions about the “rules of the game,” interests, and red lines of the primary players. Israel claims there can be no arrangement in Syria that allows Iran and Hezbollah forces to remain on Syrian soil, and that includes Shiite militias. The Israelis also insist Syria cannot be a transshipment point for advanced, game-changing weapons, especially Precision Guided Munitions (PMGs) en route to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Terrorist threats on Israel’s borders will not be tolerated.

Of course, Israel realizes the important role Russia plays in Syria and the country’s significant influence with the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. As such, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has invested considerable time and effort to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin and his advisors that it is in Russia’s national interest to ensure that the Iranian access abides by Israel’s red lines. After the latest meetings between Israelis and Russians (held at military, executive and working levels), Russian statements suggest these efforts are beginning to bear fruit. The Russians are apparently beginning to understand that Iran’s presence in Syria is a liability – particularly if Israel continues to keep its “red lines,” including (according to foreign sources) airstrikes against Iranian assets in the heart of this important Russian sphere of influence.

Gaza Media Coverage: Snipers and Lies by Ruthie Blum

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12516/gaza-media-israel

“We will take down the border [with Israel] and we will tear their hearts from their bodies.” — Yahya Sinwar, Hamas political leader.

“[W]hen we talk about ‘peaceful resistance,’ we are deceiving the public. This is a peaceful resistance bolstered by a military force and by security agencies, and enjoying tremendous popular support.” — Mahmoud Al-Zahar, senior Hamas official, on Al Jazeera.

When a doctor in Gaza announced that a congenital heart defect was likely the cause of her death, the Gaza health ministry removed her name from the list of those killed in clashes with Israel, pending an autopsy.

“Hamas’ goal is to have Israel kill as many Gazans as possible so that the headlines always begin, and often end, with the body count. Hamas deliberately sends women and children to the front line, while their own fighters hide behind these human shields.” — Alan Dershowitz, Esq.

On May 14, as United States officials ceremoniously relocated the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza — many of them members of Hamas and Iran-linked Islamic Jihad, along with other residents paid to participate — engaged in violent demonstrations along the Gaza-Israel border fence. Dubbed the “Great March of Return,” these protests were launched on March 30 and timed to crescendo six weeks later, on the day of the U.S. Embassy move, which coincided with the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel.

The UN’s Collusion With Terrorists One-sided condemnations of Israel give ammunition to Hamas. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270490/uns-collusion-terrorists-joseph-klein

At an emergency meeting held on June 13th, the United Nation General Assembly adopted another one-sided resolution against Israel. The resolution, proposed by Turkey and Algeria, deplored the use of allegedly excessive, disproportionate and indiscriminate force by Israeli forces against Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including the Gaza Strip, which the resolution pretends is still “occupied” by Israel. The anti-Israel resolution demanded that Israel refrain from such actions and fully abide by its legal obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention relating to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, of 12 August 1949. It also requested the UN Secretary General to submit a report in no later than 60 days, outlining proposals on ways and means for ensuring the safety of Palestinian civilians, including on an international protection mechanism. The General Assembly resolution is virtually identical to Kuwait’s draft UN Security Council resolution that was vetoed by the United States on June 1st.

The General Assembly resolution, which was adopted by a vote of 120 in favor to 8 against with 45 abstentions, ignored Hamas’s acts of terrorism and provocations, including using children as human shields and its attempts to invade Israel during the protests at the Israeli-Gaza border in recent weeks demanding a so-called “right of return.” It ignored the fact that Hamas controls the Gaza Strip, which it uses as a base for its attacks against Israeli civilians, and that there have been no Israeli soldiers “occupying” Gaza since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in 2005. The closest that the resolution came to acknowledge what Israeli civilians have had to put up with for years was deploring in general terms the firing of rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israeli civilian areas.