RUTHFULLY YOURS

It was my great misfortune to be marooned in the vest-pocket nation before chronic electrical-supply problems were fixed. Now that an abundance of electricity has brought even indoor skiing to the sweltering kingdom, I look back on an experience that only a carbon-phobic Greens voter might envy
This short memoir is about the reality of life without electricity, that dream of the Dark Greens, which I lived in Dubai during the power outage of June 2005. The reports that followed made light of the reality as just a minor inconvenience. That is not what I experienced.

By 2005 Dubai had undergone a decade-long building frenzy and such an expansion of the population that they had outstripped the infrastructure’s electricity-generating capacity—but nobody stopped the developers.

I had been in Dubai for ten days and was due to fly out on a 2 a.m. flight for London. As I had a lazy day to kill, I woke at about 9 a.m. I had woken up, not because it was time to get up but because my hotel room was uncomfortably hot. My sweat was soaking the bed sheets. (I usually sleep with the air-conditioning set to “Igloo”—13°C—as I find that snuggling under a doona in the cold air leads to a better and deeper sleep, but that’s just me.) Clearly we had a problem, so I called reception and was told that the air-conditioner was off due to an electrical fault, but it should be OK in an hour or so.

“It’s the fashion in these circles to celebrate Mr. Trump’s rise in the polls as if rage and insult will defeat Hillary Clinton and implement conservative reforms”

The conservative blogger Erick Erickson caused a media stir this weekend by withdrawing an invitation to Donald Trump to address his RedState gathering. This comes as a revelation because Mr. Erickson is among the media conservatives who have trumpeted the businessman as a political tonic.
Mr. Erickson says he was offended by Mr. Trump’s crude comments about Fox News presidential debate moderator Megyn Kelly. The casino magnate has been insulting Ms. Kelly since she asked him about his history of demeaning the looks of certain women. The candidate really got going Friday on CNN and said Ms. Kelly was spewing blood “wherever.”

This was finally too much for Mr. Erickson, though it’s fair to ask what took him so long. This is what Donald Trump does. As recently as July 24, Mr. Erickson wrote approvingly that, “The number one thing you hear when you ask any Republican about Donald Trump is this—he fights.” On July 22 he wrote that while he wouldn’t vote for him unless Mr. Trump became the GOP nominee, “Donald Trump is a non-traditional candidate who is running a non-traditional campaign and kicking the asses of traditional campaign consultants.”

The idea that a collective memory of the Holocaust renders Jewish judgment defective is somehow acceptable these days.

Ah, Israel/Palestine, where thinking Westerners go to play! How many people with an advanced degree in the humanities can resist fiddling with competing national narratives of victimhood? The stakes—peace, no less—give the whole thing a frisson of importance lacking in so many other parts of intellectual life. How fortunate the world is to have the Holy Land, without which everyone might have to grapple with the baffling nature of the entire planet or the dreary failures of their own societies.

In “The Two-State Delusion,” Padraig O’Malley has given us an account of his own time in this familiar landscape. As the title suggests, the author believes the idea of two states is not realistic. He’s right, and in reaching this sad conclusion he joins most of us locals, Israelis and Palestinians alike. Since the collapse of peace talks 15 years ago and the violence of the Second Intifada, the idea of a two-state solution has existed mainly thanks to the Oz-like pyrotechnics of Western diplomats and journalists, aided by Israeli and Palestinian politicians trying to keep the foreigners happy and their money flowing. What little hope remained a few years ago has now been quashed by the Middle Eastern nightmare—carnage in Syria, chaos in Iraq, ISIS in Sinai—unfolding a short drive from our homes.

The nuclear deal lifts sanctions on men like Anis Naccache, who tried to assassinate my great uncle.

Congress is debating whether the nuclear agreement between Iran and the great powers goes far enough to curb Tehran’s illicit activities. But equally deserving of scrutiny are the nefarious characters whose names would be removed under the deal from Western sanctions lists.

Consider Anis Naccache, the Lebanese hitman who attempted to assassinate my great uncle Shapour Bakhtiar, Iran’s last prime minister under the shah. On a sweltering July day in 1980, a hit squad of five Lebanese, Iranian and Palestinian assassins led by Mr. Naccache approached a building in the Paris suburb of Neuilly. They posed as journalists, ostensibly to interview Bakhtiar, who had arrived in Paris a year earlier to launch a political campaign against the Islamic Republic before Ayatollah Khomeini’s nascent regime could entrench itself.

Bakhtiar was renowned in Iran. A genuine liberal, he fought as a young man with the republicans in the Spanish Civil War as well as with the French Resistance against Nazi Germany before returning to his native Iran, where he emerged as a leading man of letters and an outspoken advocate of constitutional monarchy. By appointing a critic like Bakhtiar premier in the heady days of 1979, the shah had attempted to stave off the revolution that would soon sweep him from power.

The War in the Pacific raged for fourteen years. It began when the Imperial Army of the Empire of Japan invaded Manchuria on September 18, 1931 and ended on September 2, 1945 when Japan accepted the Potsdam Conference terms of unconditional surrender. While the end had been in sight for several months, it came into focus on August 6, 1945 when ‘Little Boy,’ an American-produced uranium-based Atomic bomb was detonated over Hiroshima. With no response from Japanese authorities, ‘Fat Boy,’ a plutonium-based Atomic bomb was exploded over Nagasaki a little after 11:00AM, on Thursday August 9. That was enough for the Emperor. By War’s end millions were dead, including 1.6 million Japanese.

In his 1946 book Hiroshima, John Hersey wrote of the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima. His descriptions helped keep the Cold War “cold,” but the damage those bombs caused should be measured in relation to the carnage Japan’s Imperial Army inflicted on Asia, especially China. The 340,000 people who died as a consequence of those two bombs is a lot, but pales when compared to the 4,000,000 Chinese who died during the Japanese occupation and to the more than 400,000 Allied casualties (mostly Americans) in the Pacific and on its islands.

Jews who viciously condemn the Jews—the phenomenon has, lamentably, been with us for hundreds of years. In medieval and later times, famed apostates like Nicholas Donin, Abner of Burgos, Johannes Pfefferkorn, and others would convert to Christianity and then use their “inside” knowledge of Jews and Judaism to attack their former people mercilessly and ostensibly confirm all libels leveled against them.

But the Jewish “apostates” of today, as Edward Alexander points out in Jews Against Themselves [2], an acerbic critique of Jewish Jew-bashers in our time, typically remain nominally Jewish and flaunt their Jewishness as a badge of moral superiority to the target of their vilification—namely, Israel, that country smack in the Middle East that, seemingly, already has enough enmity to contend with.

Below is a speech I delivered at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue in New York City to commemorate the 75th annual memorial for Ze’ev Jabotinsky on August 4, 2015.

Close your eyes – and picture Ze’ev Jabotinsky urging the Jews in Europe to leave in the days before the Holocaust. Picture the days before the State of Israel, when the Irgun forced the British to leave the land. Picture the one-armed hero Joseph Trumpeldor, who fought at Tel Hai in 1920 – dying with the words on his lips “Never mind, it is good to die for our country.” Picture the boys of Betar who formed Plugat Hakotel and protected Jews who visited the Western Wall when Jews needed protection going there.

And now, open your eyes.

As a Betari, as the son of Penny Waga, a woman who revered Ze’ev Jabotinsky, I am here to tell you on the 75th anniversary of the death of this great man, the ideals of Jabotinsky are very much alive.

And now with your eyes wide open, picture the streets of France today where young Jewish members of Betar fight to protect the community there. In Israel, in the Prime Minister’s office is a picture of the great Ze’ev Jabotinsky (Bibi Netanyahu’s father was a long-time assistant to Jabotinsky). And all over the world, in the United States and elsewhere, those of us who follow Ze’ev Jabotinsky are often on the front lines of fighting for important issues affecting the Jewish people.

The media are trying to eject Donald Trump & his Border Wall from the presidential primaries before a single voter gets the chance to pull a lever.

And they say Donald Trump is a disgrace. Some thoughts while trying to keep pace.

1. “News” organizations should not run presidential debates.

As Michael Savage noted on his radio show, the first GOP debate this week was co-sponsored by Fox News and Facebook. Fox News is owned by pro-amnesty Rupert Murdoch and Facebook is owned by pro-amnesty-Mark Zuckerberg.

No wonder the fix seemed to be in. No wonder the Fox-Facebook debate demonstrated there is no mythological “balance” to be found between “conservative” and “mainstream” media; nor, I would add, is baiting candidates the best use of the public airwaves to inform the electorate. That said, they have to get used to it — and so should we, and *even* from Fox.

Fox News, a slick establishment machine with “conservative” branding, showed itself to be actively hostile to both “true conservative” Cruz and No. 1 Trump, who has connected with voters in an unprecedented way with his vigorous, unapologetic build-the-wall, stop-the-alien-invasion, and save America message.

For decades, the Left, including today’s Democrat party, has had one overarching goal – to secure enough Democrat voters to establish a permanent majority from which to unleash its full scale program to transform the nation. Essential to this strategy is letting in as many illegal immigrants (preferably the unskilled from impoverished backgrounds to whom government benefits will mean significantly more) while gaining favor from currently residing immigrants- legal and illegal. Securing our borders so that we as a nation can choose who enters is as intimately connected to our concept of “nationhood” as the ability to lock one’s doors is to the notion of “home.” Nonetheless, the Left has held border security hostage to some fantasized “comprehensive” solution aimed at addressing the status of existing illegals.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Discovery of the melanoma trigger. A team of researchers from Tel Aviv University, Israel’s Technion, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Sheba Medical Center have discovered what causes melanoma cells to turn into aggressive tumors. The scientists are convinced that it will soon lead to a breakthrough treatment.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/melanoma-cure-may-be-within-reach-tel-aviv-u-study-shows/

Diagnosing malaria in only 3 minutes. (TY Hazel) Israel’s Sight Diagnostics (SightDx) uses computer vision technology to scan “stained” blood samples under a fluorescent microscope and detect the presence of anomalies in blood cells due to malaria. The 3 minute test contrasts with current tests that take one or two days.
http://nocamels.com/2015/07/sightdx-detects-diseases-in-minutes/

Dancing can treat Parkinson’s. When Professor Rafi Eldor was told that he had Parkinson’s disease, seven years ago, he felt that the sky had fallen on him. Two years later he took up dancing and now watch him dance to the theme tune of the movie “Skyfall”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cBYGh2E6t4

Pluristem stem cells control the immune system. A new study on stem cells developed by Israeli biotech Pluristem shows they can be used to regulate the immune system, speeding it up or slowing it down as needed. They release a cocktail of therapeutic proteins in response to a host of inflammatory and ischemic diseases.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-placenta-derived-cells-get-nod-from-top-researchers/

Voice monitoring to diagnose brain disease. (TY Michelle) IBM Israel researchers are working on a project to detect brain diseases such as dementia, much earlier. It involves monitoring the patient’s voice remotely and detecting changes, so that activities and medication could slow down the advance of the disease.
http://www.research.ibm.com/articles/dementia-treatment-diagnosis.shtml

Protection against microbial infections. (TY Atid-EDI) Professor Ervin Weiss, founder of Israel’s NanoLock, has invented a nano-polymer additive that protects against microbial infections – one of the most urgent medical problems. NanoLock has just acquired licenses and patents for the technology.
http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/nanolock-enters-agreement-to-license-patented-additive-for-mitigating-antimicrobial-resistance-517561311.html