RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

https://unitedwithisrael.org/horrifying-antisemitic-campus-sponsored-display-featured-at-cuny-students-get-academic-credit-for-participating/?

‘Horrifying, Antisemitic, Campus-Sponsored’ Programs at CUNY; Students Get Academic Credit for Participating

Pro-Israel and Jewish students and faculty at the Borough of Manhattan Community College were appalled by a “horrifying, antisemitic, campus-sponsored display” featuring antisemitic, anti-Israel propaganda, including support for terrorism.

S.A.F.E. CUNY, a non-governmental and nonprofit organization that “advocates for Zionist Jews systemically discriminated against and excluded” at CUNY, announced Thursday morning on social media and in a press release that “yesterday, we were tipped off to a horrifying, antisemitic, campus-sponsored display at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC-CUNY).”

“In addition to sympathizing with Intifada (a call to murder Israeli Jews), among the falsehoods and tropes leveled at Jews and Israel are that Israel ‘targeted’ journalist Shireen Abu Akleh for murder, that Israel is guilty of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and that Israel is a settler-colonial state, and more,” the announcement read.

The display claims to document a “timeline of occupied Palestinian land” but is riddled with falsehoods and antisemitic tropes,” the organization said.

Dr. Jenna Hirsch, Associate Professor of Mathematics at CUNY- BMCC, told United with Israel that the exhibit was up Wednesday morning at 9 a.m., “located prominently next to the vice office of student affairs.”

“I went into the office and asked them if they were responsible for the exhibit. They said no, and when I asked them who was, they told me the women’s resource center.  I asked them if anyone else had complained, and they told me one student came in really distressed about it,” Hirsch said.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19475/china-war-warnings

The world needs to look at what the Chinese leadership is in fact doing. Xi Jinping appointed what is now known as his “war cabinet” in October, at the Communist Party’s 20th National Congress; he is implementing the largest military buildup since the Second World War; he has been trying to sanctions-proof his regime; and he is mobilizing the civilian population for war. Communist Party cadres, for example, are taking over privately owned factories and converting them from civilian to military production.

In the latest move, China’s regime is establishing National Defense Mobilization Offices across the country. The Reservists Law went into effect the first of this month.

Whatever China intends, its intended victims need to match its preparations. There has never been a time when it has been more important to deter the People’s Republic of China.

Even if all this is the biggest bluff in history, the Chinese military is provoking incidents that could lead to war, especially in the tense climate Xi Jinping has created. In December… a Chinese fighter jet dangerously intercepted a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance plane in international airspace over the South China Sea.

Moreover, beginning January 28, China’s large spy balloon intruded into American airspace, then proceeded to surveil nuclear weapons sites, including Malmstrom, F. E. Warren, and Minot Air Force Bases, which house all of America’s Minutemen III intercontinental ballistic missiles….. This path suggests China is gathering intelligence for a nuclear strike on America’s strategic weapons — and shows Beijing’s utter disrespect for the United States.

Whatever China’s intentions… this cannot end well. The problem is complacency. Xi Jinping and Qin Gang, whatever they are doing, are establishing a justification to strike America — and they are making preparations to do so.

“If the U.S. doesn’t hit the brakes and continues to barrel down the wrong track,” China’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang said on March 7, “no amount of guardrails can prevent the carriage from derailing and crashing, and there will surely be conflict and confrontation.” He also spoke of “catastrophic consequences.”

TEST

https://www.ajc.org/AntisemitismReport2022

American Jewish Committee’s annual State of Antisemitism in America report assesses and compares Jewish and general population perceptions of and experiences with antisemitism in the United States. Based on one of the largest-ever combined national surveys of American Jews and the U.S. general public, the report demonstrates the deeply disturbing impact that rising hatred of Jews has on America’s Jewish community.

The release of the data, from surveys done in Fall of 2022, comes two months after the White House announced the creation of a new federal interagency group that will develop a national strategy to combat antisemitism.

Use the links below to view the report results of each survey, a comparison between the two surveys, AJC’s analysis, and AJC resources to combat antisemitism.

For too many American Jews, being Jewish no longer feels as safe as it once did. And the younger those American Jews are, the more they experience that threat firsthand.

An American Jewish Committee (AJC) study released this week sheds light on that heartbreaking reality and more. How affected are American Jews by rising antisemitism? Does the general public understand the weight they carry?

Based on parallel surveys of American Jews and the U.S. general public on their perceptions and experiences of antisemitism in the U.S, AJC’s State of Antisemitism in America Report 2022 is the most comprehensive of its kind. 

Here are five key takeaways from the report.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/01/30/a-tale-of-two-massacres/

“So committed are some in the West to the narrative of Israeli evil and Palestinian good that they hold up Palestinians as the pitiable victims of massacres in the very week when it was Israelis, Jews in fact, who were the victims of a massacre. Their devotion to the ideology of Israel-hate clearly takes precedence over everything, even truth. That there has not been more moral and historical angst in the West over the massacre of praying Jews on Holocaust Memorial Day is abominable. It is a blot on the Western moral conscience. It tells us more about us than we would care to know.”

Truth is the first casualty of war, they say. It’s the first casualty of virtue-signalling, too. Over the past week we have seen just how estranged from truth the West’s fashionable anti-Israel set has become. Something extraordinary happened: woke commentators and activists expressed more fury over a massacre that didn’t happen than they did over one that did happen. They made more noise over a massacre that exists mostly in their imaginations than they did over a massacre that existed in the real world, that shattered people’s lives in the most violent, horrifying and bigoted fashion imaginable. This tale of two massacres, of the real and unreal, sheds a harsh and unforgiving light on anti-Israel sentiment today.

It starts with events in Jenin in the West Bank last Thursday. Following numerous clashes over the past month between Israeli security forces and Palestinian residents of the West Bank, the Israelis launched a raid in Jenin in which nine people were killed. It was a massacre, people say. Israeli security forces slaughtered Palestinians, we were told. Democratic US congresswoman and Squad member Rashida Tlaib led the charge: Israel is an ‘apartheid regime that is killing Palestinian children [and] families’, she said the day after the Jenin incident. We must ‘honour the victims of the Jenin massacre’, she said, ‘by telling the truth about the apartheid government’. The word ‘massacre’ was widely used in the left media. Electronic Intifada called it an ‘Israeli bloodbath’. ‘Jenin’ and ‘massacre’ trended online. British people were encouraged to write to their MPs to register their disgust with Israel’s ‘brutal’ behaviour.

What really happened in Jenin? For all the talk of hateful, racist Israel gunning down Palestinian families, in truth it was a fairly straightforward military clash between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants. Israel was pursuing militants that it believes are plotting attacks. Seven of the people killed were gunmen who had opened fire in response to Israel’s raid. You don’t have to take Israel’s word for it – Palestinian militants themselves have said it was mostly their people who died. Islamic Jihad said two of its members were killed while ‘battling’ the Israelis. Four of the slain gunmen were claimed by Hamas. And one was claimed by an armed wing of Fatah, the faction of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. Does this sound like a massacre, or like a bloody clash between opposing groups in a war-like situation?