The inspiring story of Avi Rosenblum: born to African-American parents, raised by Jewish adoptive parents and now a soldier in the IDF. http://www.israellycool.com/2016/10/21/watch-inspiring-african-american-lone-soldier-avi-rosenblum/
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTSwww.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
Controlled release innovation gets European patent. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Intec has received a European patent for its Accordion oral treatment delivery system. Designed to improve efficacy and safety of any oral treatment, Accordion utilizes an efficient gastric retention and specific release mechanism. Intec itself has incorporated Accordion into its Parkinson’s, insomnia and gastric ulcer treatments.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160906005739/en/Intec-Pharma-Granted-European-Patent-Accordion-Pill%E2%84%A2%E2%80%93Carbidopa http://israelactive.com/?s=Accordion
Rosacea treatment is safe and effective. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Foamix has reported good results from the Phase II trials of its FMX103 treatment for papulopustular rosacea. The condition, suffered by millions, is characterized by facial redness from inflamed lesions. http://www.foamixpharma.com/
500 aneurysms successfully treated. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Rapid Medical has announced its 500th successful operation to treat life-threatening aneurysms (swellings of arterial wall) using its Comaneci Adjustable Remodeling Mesh. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rapid-medicals-comaneci-adjustable-remodeling-mesh-exceeds-500-successful-aneurysm-treatments-592723241.html
An easier thyroid cancer test. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Rosetta Genomics thyroid cancer diagnostic test (“RosettaGX Reveal”) can now be performed from a sample on the ThinPrep slides popular with clinicians. Previously, the sample had to come from a thyroid Fine Needle Aspirate (FNA) biopsy.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160907005941/en/RosettaGX-Reveal%E2%84%A2-Thyroid-miRNA-Classifier-Utilized-ThinPrep%C2%AE
Dispelling myths about celiac disease. A team of Tel Aviv University researchers has analyzed the medical records of 10,000 Israeli teenagers with celiac disease. The findings show no evidence of clinicians’ belief that sufferers are likely to be underweight or below average height.
https://www.fromthegrapevine.com/health/new-research-long-held-belief-celiac-disease-dispelled#!
A decade of IDF bone marrow donations. It is now ten years since the Ezer Mizion bone marrow registration booth became an integral part of the IDF recruiting station. Since then, 1100 IDF soldiers have donated their stem cells to cancer patients worldwide. Many of those saved told their stories at an event honoring the donors.
http://www.ezermizion.org/blog/1100-thank-yous/
13 miles in an Israeli bio-suit. (TY Geoffrey) Paraplegic Claire Lomas completed the UK’s Great North run in an exoskeleton from Israel’s ReWalk. Claire, who is 16-weeks pregnant, took five days to complete the 13.1-mile race. (The BBC, of course, doesn’t mention that ReWalk is Israeli.)
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-37332178
http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/163142/israeli-invention-helps-paralysed-woman-finish-race
Combined PET/MRI scanner. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Aspect Imaging has launched a brand new integrated simultaneous PET-MRI that combines PET and MRI modalities. The system is based on Aspect’s compact MRI plus the SimPET system from Seoul National University’s Department of Nuclear Medicine.
http://www.aspectimaging.com/news/aspect-imaging-seoul-national-university-partner-launch-worlds-first-commercial-simultaneous-preclinical-petmri-complete-solution/
GSK markets Israeli growth formula for children. Multinational GlaxoSmithKline signed an agreement with Israel’s Nutritional Growth Solutions for GSK to produce and market Horlicks Growth+, developed by Schneider Children’s Medical Center for enhancing height and weight in underdeveloped children.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-israels-ng-solutions-signs-child-formula-deal-with-gsk-1001157015
Even with today’s safer and more targeted anti-cancer drugs, scientists have been unable to satisfactorily explain the phenomenon of why treated cancers so often recur. The common theory is that the cancer cell develops internal resistance to treatment, and overrides the toxic effects of the drug.
Now, a team of Israeli scientists provide the key for reducing recurrence, allowing anti-cancer drugs to do work as intended.
Led by Prof. Yuval Shaked of the Technion-Israel Institute, the study shows that tumor relapse occurs when the body, in effect, mobilizes itself in favor of the tumor, causing recurrence of the disease, increasing its aggressiveness and creating metastases (tumor spread). Even selective, highly focused treatments that almost exclusively harm cancer cells lead to a similar response.
“The administration of an anti-cancer drug is very aggressive intervention in the body,” Shaked said in a statement. “Therefore, the body responds to chemotherapy the way it responds to trauma. This creates the effect of a double-edged sword: although chemotherapy kills cancer cells, it also causes the secretion of substances that confer resistance to the tumor.”
The study, which was recently published in the scientific publication The Journal of Pathology, mice with multiple myeloma – a malignant disease of the plasma cells produced in bone marrow and spread throughout the body – were treated with the selective anti-cancer drug Velcade (bortezomib). Velcade is based on the discovery of ubiquitin, for which professors Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover of the Technion won the Nobel Prize (along with the late American biologist Irwin Rose) in 2004.
Shaked found that treatment with Velcade led to a physiological reaction that actually reinforced the intensity of the myeloma in the mice. According to Shaked, the drug caused inflammatory cells in the bone marrow to enhance the aggressiveness of the disease and provide the cancer cells with resistance to treatment. Still, “treatment with Velcade is essential and necessary,” says Shaked, “but its disadvantage is that along with the benefit there is damage.”
Next steps: Inhibiting the mechanism that enhances the tumor
Understanding the mechanisms that enhance the tumor and accelerate the spread of metastases “will enable us to develop methods to inhibit them,” he stresses. In fact, when the researchers inhibited the secreted factor related to the activity of inflammatory cells, they observed a decrease in the proliferation of cancer cells. Now, they are working on various ways to inhibit the body’s response to anti-cancer treatments.
Over the past two weeks, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has targeted chapters of the terrorist-funded organization Students for Justice in Palestine on ten campuses. On Tuesday night, posters exposing the links between Students for Justice in Palestine and the anti-Israel terror group Hamas went up around the campus of Tufts University in Boston.
Tufts University hosted the SJP National Conference in 2014 at which students were instructed how and when to take “direct action” against supporters of Israel. Tufts SJP has repeatedly supported anti-Israel terrorism in its published works and statements and holds an annual “Israeli Apartheid” hate week during which the Hamas-inspired BDS movement against Israel is promoted. Tufts SJP also attempted to delegitimize supporters of Israel by labeling the pro-Israel campus group Students Supporting Israel “literally a hate group.”
The Freedom Center’s poster operation distributed posters across the campus which exposed the organization Students for Justice in Palestine as a campus front for Hamas terrorists and the Hamas intermediary American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). AMP was revealed in recent congressional testimony to be funneling terrorist dollars to Students for Justice in Palestine to support the Hamas-sponsored, anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign in America. Images of the posters hung at Tufts and at other campuses across the nation may be viewed here.
The posters are part of a larger Freedom Center campaign titled Stop the Jew Hatred on Campus which seeks to confront the agents of campus anti-Semitism and expose the financial and organizational relationship between the terror group Hamas and Hamas support groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine. As part of the campaign, the Freedom Center has placed posters on nine other campuses including San Diego State University, Brooklyn College, San Francisco State University, and the University of California-Los Angeles. The campaign also recently released a report on the “Top Ten Schools Supporting Terrorists,” which may be found on the campaign website, www.StoptheJewHatredonCampus.org. Tufts University is among the campuses listed in the Top Ten report. The section of the report demonstrating Tufts University’s support of anti-Israel terrorists follows below.
Supporting Evidence:
June 02, 2016: Tufts SJP added its name to a letter from SJP National protesting a decision by the San Francisco State University administration to investigate the actions of a pro-Palestinian group known as the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) who disrupted a speech by the Mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, on April 6th by shouting exhortations to terrorist violence. SFSU students involved in the protest entered the auditorium carrying Palestinian flags and wearing checkered kaffiyehs which are associated with anti-Israel terrorism. The demonstrators then proceeded to shout “Intifada,” a call for terrorism against Israel, and chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” a slogan advocating for the destruction of Israel.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) executive board passed a resolution, entitled “Occupied Palestine,” which refers to Jerusalem’s holy sites only by their Islamic names. The resolution effectively denies the historical ties of the Jewish people to the Temple Mount, proving that this dysfunctional UN body is not grounded in any educational, scientific or cultural reality at all. UNESCO is being used by Islamists, who rammed through the admission of Palestine to UNESCO with full membership privileges in 2011, to wipe away Jewish history in Jerusalem with a stroke of the pen. The purpose is to delegitimize the Jewish state. This is no surprise, considering that Islamic states such as the holocaust-denying Islamic Republic of Iran, the ISIS-funding state of Qatar and the genocide committing state of Sudan sit on UNESCO’s Executive Board.
Even UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who has had his own issues with Israel, could not abide by UNESCO’s re-writing of history. “The Secretary-General reaffirms the importance of the Old City of Jerusalem and its Walls for the three monotheistic religions and stresses the importance of the religious and historical link of the Jewish, Muslim and Christian peoples to the holy site,” said a statement read by the UN Spokesperson on behalf of the Secretary General. “The Al Aqsa Mosque/Al-Haram al-Sharif, the sacred shrine of Muslims, is also the Har HaBayit—or Temple Mount—whose Western Wall is the holiest place in Judaism, a few steps away from the Saint Sepulcher church and the Mount of Olives, which is revered by Christians.”
A senior Obama administration official told the Jerusalem Post that the UNESCO resolution was “one-sided,” “unhelpful” and “highly politicized.” The U.S. did vote against the resolution, but President Obama still wants to restore American taxpayers’ funding of UNESCO, which had been cut off after UNESCO granted full membership to the so-called Palestinian “state.”
Palestinian leaders have been cynically attempting to re-write history to suit their false narrative for years. And UNESCO has aided and abetted the lies, even referring to the holiest site in Judaism, the Western Wall, as Al-Buraq Plaza “Western Wall Plaza.” UNESCO used the Arabic name rather than the Hebrew name, Hakotel Hama’arvi, “Kotel.”
Mahmoud Abbas’ advisor on Religious and Islamic Affairs, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, recently praised the UNESCO action on official Palestinian Authority TV:
“UNESCO’s resolution confirms what we think and believe in, that Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in particular, and the Al-Buraq Wall (i.e., Western Wall) and the Al-Buraq [Wall] plaza are all purely Islamic and Palestinian assets and no one has the right to be our partner in that. No one has the right. We are the owners and we have the right to it. Only the Muslims have the right to the Al-Aqsa [Mosque] and the Al-Buraq [Wall] and the Al-Buraq [Wall] plaza which is purely Islamic waqf property… This is a message to Israel from us (i.e., the Palestinians) that we have the right and from all of the international community.”
In the old days, Israelis displayed a charming if not always prudent insouciance about what the rest of the world thought of their country. But anti-Israel opinion, always high, has spiked in recent years, including in the United States. And so Israel and its supporters have been forced to step up their efforts to defend the Jewish state in the so-called battle of ideas. Pro-Israel philanthropists have sponsored trips to Israel, boosted advocacy efforts on college campuses and founded a plethora of research institutes, social media feeds and journals aimed at making Israel’s case.
Despite the billions that have been spent on pro-Israel programs, there’s a lack of approachable, popular histories that avoid polemics and actually teach you something. This is what Daniel Gordis aims to supply with “Israel,” which narrates the story of Israel from the origins of the Zionist movement in the late 19th century until today. Though written as a chronological narrative, Mr. Gordis’s purpose is more poetic than historical. The author does not revise previous accounts of Israeli history; the book has very limited original scholarship. He rather wishes to tell the story of the Jewish return to political sovereignty after two millennia of exile, and, despite its flaws, the stunning success of the enterprise so far.
Mr. Gordis, a Jerusalem-based commentator and academic born in New York, deserves credit for ignoring at least one fashion of the history profession: the view that identifying with one’s subject is the mark of a fool or a shill. The author loves his adopted homeland without ignoring its blemishes. He treats the most contested episodes in Israeli history, such as the plight of both Arab and Jewish refugees during the 1948 War of Independence, honestly and fairly.
ENLARGE
Israel
By Daniel Gordis
Ecco, 546 pages, $29.99
Yet the emotional writing has some pitfalls. Though he tries to move and inspire, Mr. Gordis’s prose is sometimes cloying. Yes, Bill Clinton did say “shalom chaver,” or “goodbye friend,” at the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. But to claim that these words have become “forever engraved on Israelis’ memory,” is the stuff of a National Jewish Democratic Council fundraising email. Discussing the return of the ancient Israelites from Egypt, Mr. Gordis turns Pharoah into a kitschy theorist of nationhood. Pharaoh, says Mr. Gordis, recognized “a magnetic attraction between a people and its land.” CONTINUE AT SITE
The David Horowitz Freedom Center continued its ongoing poster campaign at the University of Chicago last night, denouncing the Chicago chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine for their support of anti-Israel terrorism and their role in driving the campus’s widespread endorsement of the genocidal and Hamas-driven Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.
One of the posters distributed on the Chicago campus depicts U. Chicago Law student Osama Alkhawaja who is identified on the poster as “SJP Activist, BDS Activist, Supporter of Hamas Terrorists.” Osama Alkhawaja earned his Bachelor’s degree from San Diego State University where he served as president of Students for Justice in Palestine and as vice president of the Muslim Students Association.
In April 2016, Osama Alkhawaja was one of seven SDSU students whose names appeared on Freedom Center posters targeting the Hamas-sponsored BDS movement which stated that those students had “allied themselves with Palestinian terrorists to perpetrate BDS and Jew Hatred” on campus. When SDSU President Elliot Hirshman defended the posters as free speech, Osama Alkhawaja led the SDSU chapters of SJP and the MSA in an angry protest, holding Hirshman hostage in a police cruiser for two hours until he was forced to apologize to students for hurting their feelings by not condemning the posters more harshly, and later leading a call for his resignation.
The University of Chicago is home to a highly active BDS campus movement, U of C Divest, which has gained the support of over 20 student organizations on the campus and succeeded last spring in passing a BDS resolution in Chicago’s student government. During the debate over the measure, an amendment supporting the continued self-determination of the Jewish people and the existence of Israel was proposed and rejected.
U. Chicago’s SJP chapter has brought numerous anti-Israel speakers to campus including BDS movement founder Omar Barghouti who condoned anti-Israel terrorism in his address to students. Chicago SJP also interrupted an Israeli Independence Day celebration with a commemoration of the “Nakba,” an Arabic word used by Hamas to describe the creation of Israel as a “catastrophe,” and has held numerous other events attempting to delegitimize Israel and make the argument that “resistance” against the Jewish state (a euphemism for terrorism) is justified.
On October 13, 2016, the United Nations General Assembly appointed by acclamation António Guterres of Portugal as the next UN Secretary-General. Guterres was the top choice of the Security Council, which forwarded Guterres’s nomination to the General Assembly on October 6, 2016. Guteres will replace the current Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on January 1, 2017, and will serve for a 5-year term. Guterres was the Prime Minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002, and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees from June 2005 to December 2015.
Given the UN’s preoccupation with the demonization and destruction of the Jewish state, Guterres’ views on Israel would likely have factored into the enthusiasm of UN members for his appointment.
For instance, in a 2014 address to the Arab League meeting in Cairo, Guteress analogized the Arab refugee flow of 1948 – created by a failed effort to destroy the nascent Jewish state – with Palestinians fleeing ISIS and Assad’s killing machine in Syria. He condemned Israel’s counter-terrorism operations and claimed Palestinians were better off in Syria than Gaza. In his words:
“The refugee situations under UNHCR’s mandate pale in comparison to the desperate situation of the Palestinians, the largest protracted refugee situation in the world… It was devastating to me to see Palestinian refugees in Syria being forced to flee for the second time. But even worse, in addition to the terrible loss of life and the tens of thousands of people displaced, it was shocking that Gaza’s inhabitants could not even flee to seek safety from the recent conflict. No one wants to be a refugee. But for the people of Gaza, not even that was an option.”
The United Nations (UNESCO, to be specific) recently adopted an anti-Israel resolution that disregarded the Jewish connection to the faith’s two holiest sites, the Temple Mount and Western Wall. The motion was supported by 24 nations, including Russia and China. Only six countries opposed it.
Now, the UN is too impotent to make history, much less redraft it. Still, it’s never a waste of time to remind people of its long record of empowering cheerleaders and perpetrators of violence against Jews.
It’s not merely that UN organizations like the “human rights commission” or UNESCO are often led by Islamic supremacists, but that the majority of first-world nations have — with few exceptions, like the United States and the United Kingdom — been enablers of anti-Semitism for over 50 years.
This new motion, which claims freedom of worship has been curtailed by “escalating aggressions and illegal measures,” was submitted by the Palestinians and backed by various other twelfth-century strongholds like Morocco (where it’s illegal to possess a Bible written in Arabic), Algeria (where Muslim women cannot marry non-Muslim men and insulting Muhammad is punishable by death), Iran (with restrictions too long to list), Pakistan (where the death penalty or life in prison is mandated for apostasy), and Sudan (where converting to Christianity is punishable by death.)
Did I mention UNESCO is an organization that claims it encourages “international peace and universal respect for human rights”? Why would the United States lend its credibility to such a sham?
For those of you unfamiliar with the specifics of this effort: The UN has long fueled the false hope of Palestinians that they will rule an ethnically cleansed, Judenfrei West Bank (regrettably, a position embraced by United States, as well) with Jerusalem as its capital. Since the very case for a modern Palestinian state is built on a historical myth (read Benny Morris’s recent Haaretz piece debunking the biggest myth of Israel’s founding), historical fiction has been an enduring feature of anti-Israel doctrine.
When Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited his religion’s holiest site in September 2000, Arabs used it as a pretext to launch the Second Intifada. Anti-Israel activists still talk about this Sharon visit as if the man were leading the Crusaders towards Mecca. Most often, though, Israel does what it can to avoid irritating the prickly sensibilities of Arabs offended by the sight of Jews or Christians. The site itself is administrated by an Islamic trust, not Israel. Politicians are told not to go there. And so on.
“The PLO was dreamt up by the KGB, which had a penchant for ‘liberation’ organizations.” — Ion Mihai Pacepa, former chief of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Romania.
“First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat’s birth in Cairo, and replaced them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.” — Ion Mihai Pacepa.
“[T]he Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep… We had only to keep repeating our themes — that the United States and Israel were ‘fascist, imperial-Zionist countries’ bankrolled by rich Jews.” — Yuri Andropov, former KGB chairman.
As early as 1965, the USSR had formally proposed in the UN a resolution that would condemn Zionism as colonialism and racism. Although the Soviets did not succeed in their first attempt, the UN turned out to be an overwhelmingly grateful recipient of Soviet bigotry and propaganda; in November 1975, Resolution 3379 condemning Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination” was finally passed.
The recent discovery that Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), was a KGB spy in Damascus in 1983, was discarded by many in the mainstream media as a “historical curiosity” — except that the news inconveniently came out at the time that President Vladimir Putin was trying to organize new talks between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Predictably, the Palestinian Authority immediately dismissed the news. Fatah official Nabil Shaath denied that Abbas was ever a KGB operative, and called the claim a “smear campaign.”
The discovery, far from being a “historical curiosity,” is an aspect of one of many pieces in the puzzle of the origins of 20th and 21st century Islamic terrorism. Those origins are almost always obfuscated and obscured in ill-concealed attempts at presenting a particular narrative about the causes of contemporary terrorism, while decrying all and any evidence to the contrary as “conspiracy theories.”
There is nothing conspiratorial about the latest revelation. It comes from a document in the Mitrokhin archives at the Churchill Archives Center at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Vasily Mitrokhin was a former senior officer of the Soviet Foreign Intelligence service, who was later demoted to KGB archivist. At immense risk to his own life, he spent 12 years diligently copying secret KGB files that would not otherwise have become available to the public (the KGB foreign intelligence archives remain sealed from the public, despite the demise of the Soviet Union). When Mitrokhin defected from the Russia in 1992, he brought the copied files with him to the UK. The declassified parts of the Mitrokhin archives were brought to the public eye in the writings of Cambridge professor Christopher Andrew, who co-wrote The Mitrokhin Archive (published in two volumes) together with the Soviet defector. Mitrokhin’s archives led, among other things, to the discovery of many KGB spies in the West and elsewhere.
