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ANTI-SEMITISM

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Elon Musk Is Right About George Soros—and Not Anti-Semitic The Hungarian-born billionaire has done more than anyone to turn Americans against Israel. By Alan M. Dershowitz

By on May 22nd, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-is-right-about-george-soros-and-not-anti-semitic-hrw-j-street-israel-b7db935b?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Elon Musk has been accused of anti-Semitism because of his criticism and mockery of George Soros. Mr. Soros is Jewish; Mr. Musk isn’t. But Mr. Musk stands falsely accused. Mr. Soros is an active participant in politics, and his Jewishness shouldn’t shield him from criticism.

Further, no single person has done more to damage Israel’s standing in the world, especially among so-called progressives, than George Soros. His financial support has multiplied the influence of the two major organizations that have done the most to shift the left-wing paradigm against Israel.

One of them is Human Rights Watch, which was founded by publisher and human-rights advocate Robert Bernstein (1923-2019). For years HRW critiqued the denial of human rights by all countries based on two criteria: the seriousness of the violations in any particular nation, and the inability of the nation’s citizens to protest and remedy such violations. But in 1993 Kenneth Roth became executive director and turned HRW into an organization that specialized in demonizing Israel.

By 2009 the Israel bashing had become so severe that Bernstein wrote: “As the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.”

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The Marvel, and the ‘Scandal,’ of Jerusalem Anti-Semitism is rooted in envy of the Jewish people’s eternal endurance. By Meir Soloveichik

By on May 19th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-marvel-and-the-scandal-of-jerusalem-day-anti-semitism-missiles-gaza-b01f4eda?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Thousands of religious Israelis are celebrating Jerusalem Day, which began Thursday at sundown. On Friday morning at the Western Wall, they will recite psalms of thanksgiving commemorating the moment in the Six Day War of 1967 that Israeli soldiers conquered the ancient city of Jerusalem, making it the heart of Israel’s capital. Those assembled won’t merely mark a military achievement 56 years ago. Their minds will travel back to the earliest origins of the sacred city, to its conquest by King David and to the empires that have destroyed it, only to have it rise again from the ashes. They will ponder how Jewish Jerusalem reflects the miracle of Jewish existence: one that allows us to understand why, for better or worse, the world’s attention remains riveted on Israel.

No city in the world has a history like Jerusalem, and no other people has a relationship to a location like the Jews do to it. To study Jerusalem is to study the story of the world: from Egyptian pharaohs to Mesopotamian kings, from Greek and Roman emperors to kaisers and sultans. They, and others, sought to end Jewish presence in the ancient city permanently. Yet Jerusalem is a Jewish city restored, while other ancient cities of biblical past—Babel, Pi-Rameses, Nineveh—are in ruin.

As Norman Podhoretz once put it, Jerusalem reflects “the scandal of Jewish particularity”: The uniqueness of one city in world history testifies to the enduring nature of one people on this earth. Established as Israel’s capital when now-extinct empires bestrode the world, it was toward Jerusalem that the Jews prayed in exile, binding themselves to it as empire after empire became the Ozymandias of its age. Jews celebrate the anniversary of the Jewish return to ancient Jerusalem not only because it is central to their spiritual lives but also because it is a reminder of God’s providence in the history of their people and of the world.

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Jewish Public Interest Law Firm Demands Transparency on Ethnic Studies Content from Hayward Unified School District We’ve asked the Superior Court in Alameda County to compel Hayward Unified School District to answer the Public Record requests we sent months ago—requests they’ve completely ignored. By Lori Lowenthal Marcus

By on May 15th, 2023

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/358713/jewish-public-interest-law-firm-demands-transparency-on-ethnic-studies-content-from-hayward-unified-school-district/

Why do so many California school districts ignore the explicit requirements of California law? That’s the question that our public interest law firm, The Deborah Project, is asking after filing requests for public documents from dozens of California school districts so we can learn what they teach their students about Ethnic Studies and in particular about Zionism, Israel and her neighbors. The California Public Records Act requires public agencies such as school districts to turn over responsive documents sought by the public.  But in too many cases, our requests have been either completely ignored or we’ve been told the district has no responsive documents when we know that’s not true.

We just put our question to someone very important: a California judge.  We’ve asked the Superior Court in Alameda County to compel Hayward Unified School District to answer the Public Record requests we sent months ago—requests they’ve completely ignored.

Hayward’s failure to answer us at all sure can’t be because they’re not teaching about this subject. We know they signed a “consulting” contract with an organization publicly committed to teaching wildly antisemitic and demonstrably false claims about Israel, her neighbors, and the ages-old Jewish commitment to the land of Israel. That content is not permitted in California public school curricula.

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High Anxiety: How Modernity Feeds Arab Anti-Semitism. Bruce Thornton February 2007*****

By on May 8th, 2023

https://afsi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Outpost_2007_02.pdf

Bruce S. Thornton, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution,  is an emeritus professor of classics and humanities at the California State University, Fresno. He is the author of several books on a variety of topics.

“This supremely bad idea—that the modern West and its defining cultural cargo of free market
capitalism, individualism, rationalism and liberal democracy are the engines of global evil, and that Jews
and Israel are the most dangerous embodiments of this evil—continues to fuel the jihadists rage and to
weaken the West’s resolve. The stakes are too high for this suicidal notion to arouse in us anything but disgust.”

There’s an Elvis Costello lyric that goes, “I used to be disgusted; now I try to be amused.” Before
9/11 that was pretty much my philosophy. Working in the university, I was daily treated to the postmodern mumbo-jumbo, multicultural noble-savage fantasies, and  left-over leftist delusions that are all so transparently incoherent and severed from reality that disgust seemed a waste of energy. The detached amusement of a Victorian explorer studying some bizarre cargo-cult seemed more appropriate and was less stressful.

Then came 9/11, and the bloody truth of Rich- and Weaver’s dictum that “ideas have consequences”
made amusement reprehensible. That disaster was the fruit of years of bad ideas, particularly the West’s
institutionalized self-loathing that demonizes its own ideals and values and culture while idealizing those of the “other” no matter how dysfunctional. Our intellectuals, academics, and artists for decades had been telling the world that the West, particularly America, is the villain of history, its crimes of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, resource depletion, and pollution responsible for all the world’s ills.

Was it any wonder, then, that one of the West’s fiercest historical enemies, Islam, should take our self-flagellation seriously and conclude that we deserved to die for the crimes which we our-selves keep admitting we are guilty of? And given that even after 9/11 those same bad ideas continue to addle our thinking and compromise our attempts to defend our civilization against a smart, committed enemy, disgust is the only legitimate reaction to the behavior generated by such stale received wisdom.

Evidence of this cultural disease crams the daily media, but the West’s response to Israel’s sixty-year struggle against annihilation remains exhibit number one. Israel has always been and remains the key to
understanding the war against Islamic jihad.

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How anti-Semitic tropes crept back into the mainstream The Guardian is just the latest outlet to publish dodgy cartoons of Jews. Frank Furedi

By on May 2nd, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/05/02/how-anti-semitic-tropes-crept-back-into-the-mainstream/

The Guardian has apologised for its cartoon of former BBC chairman Richard Sharp, which has been widely condemned for containing anti-Semitic tropes. Martin Rowson’s cartoon depicted Sharp with an impossibly large nose, clutching a box marked ‘Goldman Sachs’, containing a puppet of UK prime minister Rishi Sunak and what appears to be money. It essentially painted Sharp as a grasping Jewish puppet-master.

At the weekend, the Guardian removed the cartoon from its website and issued a mealy mouthed apology. It was the kind of apology that was clearly scripted by in-house legal advisers. The cartoon, the Guardian said, ‘did not meet our editorial standards’. The newspaper made clear it ‘apologises to Mr Sharp, to the Jewish community and to anyone offended’, but it has not explicitly acknowledged that the cartoon features anti-Semitic tropes. As for Martin Rowson, he tweeted to say that he ‘screwed up pretty badly’. He later published a lengthy apology / explanation on his website. ‘This is on me, even if accidentally or, more precisely, thoughtlessly’, he wrote.

What I find most disturbing about this affair is not so much the sight of yet another grotesque depiction of a Jewish person, or the use of classic anti-Semitic tropes. Rather, it is the casual manner in which such incidents are treated. You could easily get the impression that the cartoon is really no big deal. The Guardian seems to think that a perfunctory half-apology will be enough to put things right. Rowson, while effusive in his apology, has only really admitted to being careless.

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The Top Ten Jew-Hating Professors in America American universities: a breeding ground for Jew-hatred. by Sara Dogan

By on April 26th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-top-ten-jew-hating-professors-in-america/

A dire epidemic of Jew hatred is emanating from our college campuses, infecting our larger society and culture. Nearly every day brings a new report of anti-Semitic campus hate crimes. Jewish religious symbols such as menorahs and mezuzot are desecrated, swastikas and comments like “Hitler was right,” and “F—k Israel” are scrawled on residence hall doors and classroom buildings. Jewish fraternities and campus Hillel buildings are repeatedly targeted with anti-Jewish slurs.

A 2023 report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) found a 41% increase in antisemitic incidents on American campuses in 2022, as compared to the also horrendous 36% increase in the U.S. at large. Another joint study undertaken by the ADL and Hillel in 2021 found that nearly a third of college Jewish students reported having personally experienced anti-Semitism on campus. Of those who experienced anti-Semitism, 79% reported experiencing it repeatedly. “Their concern about antisemitism can impede their ability to participate in classes, join clubs, and display their Jewish identity proudly,” the study’s authors concluded.

As David Horowitz wrote recently, “Our premier universities have in their liberal arts programs become one-party states ruled by ignorance and bigotry, and thus breeding grounds for civic and racial hatreds and lawlessness.” Among the many insidious ways in which our universities have poisoned American society and public life, Jew hatred looms large among them.

Prestigious academic organizations including the American Studies Association and the Middle East Studies Association, among others, have passed measures endorsing an academic boycott of Israeli colleges and universities—a form of the genocidal Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that aims to isolate and annihilate the Jewish state.

Instead of using their positions to combat this Jew hatred, many faculty at prestigious universities across America instead deliberately fan its flames.

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‘Anti-racist’ Yale hosts a cheerleader for Jew-killing and racial hatred By Henry Kopel

By on April 16th, 2023

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/anti-racist-yale-hosts-a-cheerleader-for-jew-killing-and-racial-hatred

Yale University makes no secret that among its top institutional priorities are “anti-racism” and diversity, equity, and inclusion . It is also no secret that both Yale’s administration and students have been vigilant — some say too vigilant — in condemning campus speech that challenges Yale’s DEI perspective.

In 2015, mobs of students stalked, shouted, and cursed at a married team of professors for days, merely because the wife had questioned whether the campus DEI office needed to police students’ Halloween costumes. Both professors, Nicholas and Erika Christakis , were eventually driven to resign from their administrative leadership positions — and Erika Christakis to resign from Yale altogether.

In 2021, a Yale law student was summoned before a diversity dean and threatened with adverse references that would preclude his bar admission for having jokingly used the phrase “trap house” in an emailed party invitation. Though of Native American heritage, the student was labeled a racist.

In 2022, a mob of over 100 Yale law students disrupted and sought to shut down a campus debate between a liberal atheist attorney and a conservative Christian lawyer. Police had to escort the speakers from the building.

Amid such efforts to sanitize the Yale campus against “harmful” speech, it may come as a surprise that Yale hosted last week an antisemitic speaker whose writings express hatred of Jews, Israel, and white people and explicitly justifies the murders of Jews and Israelis. Even worse, this hate-promoter’s lecture was endorsed by an online posting from Yale’s flagship DEI program, known as “Belonging at Yale.”

Specifically, on Thursday, April 6, Yale sponsored a talk by Houria Bouteldja on “France and Whiteness.” This is the same Bouteldja who in March 2012, just after radical Islamist Mohammed Merah massacred a Rabbi and three children in Toulouse, France, publicly declared that “Mohammed Merah is me.”

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Contemplate the Rise in Religious Hatred, Then Confront It by Lawrence Kadish

By on April 10th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19573/confront-religious-hatred

As Jews around the world gather this week to observe the holiday of Passover and as Christians celebrate Easter, and Muslims, Ramadan, it comes at a time when violent acts of anti-Semitism and the slaughter of Christians have spiked as incidents have been reported around the world.

It is one of history’s oldest and most virulent of prejudices where Jews have cynically been used as scapegoats by empires and despots to ensure their own survival.

As early as 1899, following a year in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the iconic American author Mark Twain observed that the leaders of the Habsburg Empire directed scorn at the Jewish community to maintain unity within their precarious empire.

Twain would take stock of the Jewish will to survive throughout multiple epochs by writing, “He has made a marvellous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him.”

The Passover holiday that observes the Jewish exodus from Egypt is just one more chapter in the history of a people that have been singled out for persecution. While history, and today’s headlines, remind us there are others who have suffered violent religious bigotry, none were the victims of an organized genocide that enlisted the power of a modern state to commit murder on an industrialized scale.

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Why Is Europe Repressing Ritual Slaughter? Countries across Europe are cracking down on ritual slaughter, making the position of observant Jews and Muslims there more tenuous. Is concern for animals really the motivating factor?

By on April 3rd, 2023

https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/jewish-world/2023/04/why-is-europe-repressing-ritual-slaughter/?utm_source=Klaviyo&utm_medium=campaign&_kx=IxNycqF4MaUb7Z76cxkSoZoWZXWuvsEbectSn87eh

Over the last decade, there has been a growing debate in Europe, initiated primarily by animal-rights groups and environmentalists, about the desirability of banning religious ritual slaughter in the name of animal welfare. This debate has caused concern among Jews not only in Europe but also in Israel and North America, as the ban means for them—and many Muslims—the end of the production of the only meat they can eat.

It is difficult for Jews not to see, lurking behind the argument against animal suffering, the sly face of an anti-Semitism that has always been able to drape itself in the ideals of the moment. This fear is legitimate, but we must also keep in mind that it should not obscure the legal, political, and economic dimensions of the problem. For, when looked at from the right angle, the seemingly narrow controversy over ritual slaughter widens into a prism for better perceiving how a continent and culture are being torn between contradictory values.

I. The Carnivorous Challenge

To understand the sensitivity of Jewish communities toward the issue of ritual slaughter, it is helpful to discuss some basic notions about their relationship with animals in general and meat in particular. That relationship is strikingly close. According to Genesis, man was originally made by God to be a vegetarian, as in the Garden of Eden, where “every green plant shall be food.” (Later, however, the consumption of meat became an integral part of Jewish worship.)

Secondly, the Torah strictly prohibits the mistreatment of animals. It is forbidden for any human being to cut off a limb of a living animal and to eat it. Jews are also obliged to feed their animals before themselves, to relieve their suffering, and in general to cause them the least pain. They must make them rest on Shabbat and it is prohibited to muzzle animals to prevent them from feeding themselves during their work. One may not harness together an ox and a donkey.

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GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

By on March 19th, 2023

https://verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/

 

I missed the December 5th posting of Israel’s remarkable advances in medicine, assisting NASA on space projects, generating hydrogen, water projects in Argentina and heartening stories of Israelis doing good 24/7. But Michael Ordman never disappoints and here is another list of Israel’s dazzling contributions to science, technology, medical innovations and treatments and a host of social institutions that provide succor and hope to the rest of the world.

Remember that the acronym BDS cuts both ways. Instead of Boycott, Divest and Sanction think

Beneficial, Developments in Science. rsk

 

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

A vaccine against bacteria. For the first time worldwide, researchers from Tel Aviv University and the Israel Institute for Biological Research have developed an mRNA-based vaccine that is 100% effective against plague bacteria, lethal to humans. It also works against antibiotic resistant bacteria.

https://english.tau.ac.il/mrna_vaccine  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Fyhk_6GmsQ

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adg1036

Alzheimer’s ultrasound treatment in Florida. Delray Medical Center is the first hospital in Florida to treat an Alzheimer’s disease patient using non-invasive focused ultrasound technology from Israel’s Insightec. The FDA-approved clinical trial will test reducing excessive protein buildup to open the blood-brain barrier.

https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/alzheimers-focused-ultrasound-study

The best medicine. Israel’s Protai has built a proteomics AI-based platform that comprehensively maps the course of a disease on the protein level. It can identify which patients will respond to a given treatment, as well as identifying identify diseases that a therapy should be able to treat.

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hkp39nye2   https://www.protai.bio/

US approves pain-monitoring device. The US FDA has granted marketing authorization to the PMD-200 monitor developed by Israel’s Medasense Biometrics (see here previously). The device monitors pain in non-communicating (e.g., anaesthetized) patients and already has made an impact in multiple countries.

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hyfvzhsrs

Preventing migraines. The Nerivio device from Israeli startup Theranica (see here previously) already has US FDA approval to treat acute migraines. It has now been approved for preventing migraines. Recent trials of 248 participants showed a huge improvement for those using Nerivio compared to those on a placebo device.

https://nocamels.com/2023/03/vibrating-armband-approved-for-migraine-prevention/

https://headachejournal.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/head.14469

The right time to do a C-Section. A nationwide study led by Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital discovered that pregnant women brought into the Intensive Care Unit seriously ill with Covid-19, were more likely to improve if they gave birth (by Caesarian section) before their condition deteriorated. The data will save many lives.

https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-732866

Israeli radiation treatment – a first-hand review. Please read newsletter reader Lili Eylon’s personal account of Alpha DaRT radiation cancer therapy developed by Israel’s Alpha Tau (see here previously). Lili was one of 56 patients in DaRT’s human study at Hadassah Medical Center – its second skin cancer human study in Israel.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/revolutionary-new-weapon-developed-in-israel/

Dying of cancer in Russia; saved in Israel. (TY Hazel) 20-year-old Kalim was sent home from hospital to die in St Petersburg after doctors said they could not treat his acute lymphoblastic leukemia. He immigrated to Israel where five months of CAR-T treatment at Rambam Health Care Campus gave Kalim back his life.

https://www.ynetnews.com/health_science/article/b1ygx4fyn

What to do after retirement – save lives of course. 61-year-old EMT Joelle Cohen retired from the medical field and joined United Hatzalah as a volunteer EMT. When a man in his 70s suffered a sudden cardiac arrest at a diabetes clinic in Jerusalem, Joelle revived him, saying it gave her one of the most incredible feelings.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/367911

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