ISRAEL Comments turned off

POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

Posted By on May 12th, 2024

michael.goodnewsisrael@gmail.com

Israel’s 76th birthday is tomorrow May 13th, beginning at sundown and ending on sundown on Tuesday May 14th. 76 years of wars, terror, victim of libels, bias and outright anti-Semitism. But, Israel is also a democratic survivor and purveyor of outsize research and development of medicine and technology that enrich the life and aspirations of billions on every single continent in the world even during wartime.

To his enormous credit, Michael Ordman works prodigiously to catalog Israel’s positive contributions to the world. Happy Birthday Amazing Israel!!!!!rsk

POSITIVE NEWS DURING A WAR
 
Remarkable Resilience. This video describes how Israel’s Ben Gurion University responded after the devastating events of Oct 7.  BGU and its students are helping the Negev recover and rebuild. From finance to students in the reserves and evacuees, to medical gear, clinics, and many vital cutting-edge innovations.
https://americansforbgu.org/video/rr4-recording/
 
Picking fruit on Gaza border farms. Before Oct 7, farms near the Gaza border supplied 70 percent of Israel’s fresh produce as well as produce for export. Lack of staff threatens closure of the farms, but volunteers from Israel and overseas has ensured their survival. Grapefruit and clementines are two of the crops being harvested.
https://www.israel21c.org/volunteering-on-israeli-farms-devastated-on-october-7/
https://www.israel21c.org/how-you-can-volunteer-in-israel-during-the-war/
 
 
ISRAEL’S  MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
US approval for retinal imaging. The US FDA has approved the fully autonomous AI from Israel’s AEYE Health (see here previously) that diagnoses referable diabetic retinopathy from retinal images obtained by a handheld camera. Portable screening addresses the leading cause of blindness in the global working population.
https://www.ourcrowd.com/startup-news/fda-clears-first-fully-autonomous-ai-for-portable-diabetic-retinopathy-screening
 
How cancer manipulates the immune system. Researchers at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University are the first to analyze biopsies to discover how cancer cells prevent being destroyed by the immune system. As each patient is different, the results will help scientists develop personalized strategies for destroying tumors.
https://www.biu.ac.il/en/article/580703   https://www.newswise.com/articles/in-a-first-researchers-generate-a-direct-measurement-of-the-interaction-between-immune-cells-and-cancer-cells-from-a-patient-s-biopsy
 
The world’s 10th best healthcare. Israel was ranked tenth in the latest edition of the CEOWORLD magazine Health Care Index. 110 countries were surveyed for infrastructure; professionals (doctors, nursing staff, and others); competencies; cost per capita; quality medicine availability, and government readiness.
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/technology-science/artc-israel-ranks-10th-best-health-care-system-in-2024-review  https://ceoworld.biz/2024/04/02/countries-with-the-best-health-care-systems-2024/
 
Improving the use of Operating Rooms. Israel’s Opmed.ai has developed an AI optimization platform for healthcare, starting with Operating Rooms. An empty OR carries a cost of $1,000 for each unused hour. Opmed.ai is already used in the US and Israel and is working with leading Health Systems such as Mayo Clinic.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/r1s5ss8mc  https://www.opmed.ai/
 
Integrated cancer research center. The Technion’s Rappaport Cancer Research Center under construction (see here previously) will house interdisciplinary researchers, computer scientists, doctors, data analysts, biotechnologists, chemical engineers, and more, working to develop treatments via discovery and education.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq_AKCixxzw   https://rticc.net.technion.ac.il/
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-782519
 
A new hospital for Beersheva. The Israeli has approved the establishment of a second hospital in the Negev city of Beersheva, The Peres Medical Center is expected to open in 2028 with 600 beds. It will reduce the strain on Beershava’s Soroka Medical Center. It will be operated by the Sheba Medical Center.
https://www.jns.org/israeli-cabinet-green-lights-new-hospital-for-beersheva/
 
A new strategy for treating multiple myeloma. Israel’s UB-Therapeutics is developing a novel therapy for the treatment of multiple myeloma. Its proteasome degradation inhibitor is a cyclic peptide that directly targets the degradation pathway of the proteasome – overcoming cancer’s resistance to existing proteasome inhibitors.
https://ats.org/our-impact/fighting-cancer-drug-resistance/  https://ngt-healthcare2.com/ub-therapeutics/   https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hyx7duwi2
 
Using plant cells to improve health. (TYAIFL) Israel’s BioHarvest Sciences (see here previously) is building an 80,000 square foot campus in Yavne, Israel to house all R&D functions and manufacturing facilities. BioHarvest uses plants to transform the medical, cosmetic, and nutrition industries.
https://bioharvest.com/bioharvest-sciences-announces-new-campus-for-botanical-synthesis-cdmo-and-expansion-of-manufacturing-capacity/
 
Combining software and medicine. Israel’s Remepy is developing tailored therapeutic software for mobile applications. It aims to unlock and trigger brain functions that modulate the immune system and enhance traditional medication. The hybrid digital and physical therapy should optimize the effectiveness of treatments.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-startup-to-pioneer-hybrid-app-drug-combinations-for-tailored-treatment/
https://www.remepy.com/   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyZ-vCIKPIQ
 
Using AI & RNA to deliver therapies. Mana.bio (see here previously) presented to the delegates of Technion UK’s tour of Israel. CEO and co-founder Yogev Debbi explained Mana’s drug delivery development, exactly 7 months after moving to its new premises on Oct 8 when 25% of their staff started IDF reserve duty.
https://technionuk.org/trip-album/#manabio0524  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBbEzqwlIGY

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Open Letter from Retired U.S. Military Leaders in Support of Israel

Posted By on May 12th, 2024

https://jinsa.org/open-letter-from-retired-us-military-leaders-in-support-of-israel/

Given our experience as retired American military leaders, we are very concerned about the security impacts of increasingly strained U.S.-Israel ties as Israel becomes a growing source of domestic division. We therefore feel compelled to declare that a strong Israel is vital to the United States national security, and it is imperative that America
unequivocally stand by this indispensable ally.

Amid surging antisemitism in America and the world, following the largest one-day loss of innocent Jewish life since the Holocaust, U.S. support for the only Jewish state should be clear, unwavering, and not conditioned. The benefits of this partnership for the American people and this important region are many, and too valuable, to forsake.

America must support Israel as it restores its security, shattered on October 7, against Iran and its terrorist proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen that all seek to destroy the Jewish state. These forces are also enemies of the United States and everything we stand for. This Iranian-backed axis of terror, as well as other adversaries and
allies around the world, are watching closely to see whether the United States will stand by one of its closest allies fighting in self-defense, even when the going gets tough.

Against these barbaric enemies, Israel stands on the front lines of the fight for civilization, the lone stable, democratic American ally in a critical, yet tumultuous, region. Israel is a visceral part of the West with its liberal democracy, ethnically diverse population, and support for individual rights. Even in facing adversaries who respect neither the laws
of war nor human life, we believe Israel has fought in accordance with the laws of armed conflict.

Outside the United States, Israel arguably has the most innovative economy in the world. It is a leader in nearly all the key technologies that will determine whether the global balance of power in the 21st-century continues to favor U.S.-led forces of freedom and democracy.

Israel also has one of the most capable militaries and intelligence services in the world, to America’s benefit. Our militaries work hand in glove, sharing intelligence and military lessons, and co-developing cutting-edge defense technologies. More than any other American ally, Israel has always sought to defend itself by itself. Still,
U.S. forces recently helped defend Israel against an Iranian onslaught. Israel’s military and intelligence services have also often protected U.S. soldiers and citizens and provided critical intelligence.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

South African Jews Forcibly Removed While Protesting Minister’s Call to Intensify Pro-Hamas Campus Protests

Posted By on May 12th, 2024

https://www.algemeiner.com/2024/05/10/south-african-jews-forcibly-removed-while-protesting-ministers-call-intensify-pro-hamas-campus-protests/

South Africa’s Jewish community on Friday protested Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor’s recent call for students and university leaders to intensify the anti-Israel demonstrations that have engulfed college campuses across the US, chanting “no space for Jew hate” as they were forcibly removed despite demonstrating peacefully.

Members of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) and South African Union of Jewish Students (SAUJS) gathered at the entrance of the Sandton Convention Center, a major venue for hosting events in South Africa, to protest what they described as an incitement to violence and antisemitism by a senior government official.

The Jewish activists were met with verbal and even physical abuse, with some people attending a conference at the center pointing and shouting “Zionist” at them in an accusatory tone. In one case, someone physically pulled a poster out of a protester’s hands, spat in her face, and told her to “f—k off,” according to the SAJBD.

The police ended up physically relocating the protesters from outside the entrance of the convention center as they shouted, “No space for Jew hate.”

The SAJBD noted that the peaceful demonstration was solely meant to raise awareness about the threat to the safety of Jewish students on university campuses and was limited to 15 people, thereby within the legal parameters for a public gathering.

The protest was in response to comments that Pandor made while delivering a lecture at the University of Johannesburg on Wednesday.

Titling her lecture “The Responsibility of the Academy in a Time of Genocide,” Pandor urged greater university and student activism and boycotts against Israel for what she called its “scholasticide” and “systemic obliteration of education” in Gaza.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Condorcet Gets a Keffiyeh by Amir Taheri

Posted By on May 12th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20635/condorcet-gets-a-keffiyeh

T]he protest feeds on media attention. As soon as TV cameras are switched off, the shouting of slogans dies down.

[E]even if all the UN resolutions were implemented, they would not reassure Israel and won’t quench Hamas’ “from the river to the sea” thirst.

For seven decades, Israelis accepted the “advice” of the US and its European allies to accept a fish-tail end to its wars rather than the victory won on the battlefield. Beyond Hamas, which wants everything, Palestinians, too, have realized that listening to advice from “well-wishers” like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W Bush, the inventor of the “roadmap” to a two-state solution, will not provide even half a state for them.

Today’s protesters know little about what they are rebelling against and, at least in our experience of talking to some of them in Paris and reading and/or hearing what their counterparts say on American campuses, don’t even wish to know.

To those of us old enough to remember the good (or bad) old days of student revolt in Western universities in the 1960s, current disturbances in a number of European and American universities appear as a bad remake of a controversial original.

The current disturbances are on a much smaller scale.

In the US, they have affected a handful of universities and attracted a few thousand students out of a total college enrollment of over 15 million.

In France, the “uprising” is centered on the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po), which boasts between 12,000 and 15,000 students, a third of them foreign, from more than 100 countries.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

In 2021, they tried to destroy me for telling the truth This isn’t paranoia. Hard evidence shows the White House and media targeted my right to speak – and support my family. If not for all of you, they would have succeeded. Yeah, I’m still angry. Alex Berenson

Posted By on May 12th, 2024

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/in-2021-they-tried-to-destroy-me

I haven’t forgotten. Or forgiven.

Last week, a Congressional committee released a massive report detailing how the Biden Administration stampeded the First Amendment in 2021 during its doomed quest to force mRNA vaccines on every American adult.

By July, with the mRNAs failing and Covid deaths rising, the White House privately and publicly attacked Facebook, trying to make the world’s biggest social media company censor jab critics. Facebook executives were furious – and worried about the Constitutional implications of the pressure they faced.

Yes, a private company proved far more concerned about the First Amendment than the government officials sworn to uphold it.

At the heart of the pressure campaign: Andrew M. Slavitt, a Democratic operative and healthcare investor. Slavitt pushed Facebook for censorship both during his official stint as senior advisor to the Biden Covid response team, which ended in June 2021, and afterwards – when the documents show he secretly represented the White House in conversations with Nick Clegg, a senior Facebook executive.

As you know, I have sued Slavitt, along with other government officials and two Pfizer board members, in federal court in New York for their conspiracy to force Twitter to ban me in 2021.

The new documents may play a crucial role in my case, Berenson v Biden, because they show Slavitt was acting on behalf of the federal government, not merely as a private citizen, in July, even as he continued his campaign against me.

The Biden Administration began pressing social media companies for censorship soon after it took office.

But the campaign accelerated in July, as the White House realized the mRNAs were failing and it would quickly need to push a third “booster” shot, as well as vaccine mandates, which it had previously ruled out.

On July 16, 2021, President Biden said Facebook and other social media companies were “killing people” by allowing vaccine criticism. In response, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s then-second-highest-ranking executive, complained in a text chain with founder Mark Zuckerberg that the White House was blaming the company because of “a virus they can’t get control of.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Beyond Reason: How Shame and Disgust Shape Law and Society What implications do shame and disgust hold for the fairness and dignity of individuals within the legal system? By Roger Kimball

Posted By on May 12th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/12/beyond-reason-how-shame-and-disgust-shape-law-and-society/

Some time ago, I participated in a conference about “policing in an age of terror.” One big topic was the place of informed hunches in the armory of the police.  Was it okay, or was it culpably racist, for the police to act on educated hunches when going about their jobs? Should they “profile” certain groups of people and, in some circumstances and in some neighborhoods, “stop and frisk” people they thought looked suspicious? Well, the heart, as Pascal famously assured us, has its reasons that reason does not know. About this, as about most things, Pascal was right. But what does it tell us about “rational hunches” or “policing in the age of terror?”

Before I endeavor to answer those impossible questions, I should acquaint you with my qualifications for intervening on this large topic. My short-form disclosure is: I have none. I am not a lawyer, judge, or police officer. I am not even an academic. In terms of qualifications, I am like the man on the Manhattan omnibus or subway—a chap I shall revert to later. That is, I bring no specialized or professional knowledge to the table, merely the advantages—if they are advantages—of commonplace sentiment.

Let me begin by acknowledging the air of paradox that surrounds the topic of the conference. “Rational Hunches.” Doesn’t that phrase express a paradox, not to say an oxymoron? The relevant sense of “hunch,” the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, refers to “a premonition or intuitive feeling.” Curiously, that sense of “hunch” is of relatively recent vintage. It isn’t listed in the main part of my edition of the OED; you have to look in the supplement to find it. But what business does a “premonition” or an “intuitive feeling” have consorting with the adjective “rational”: that which is based on reason, argument, and logic? Do we not usually, and rightly, oppose what is rational to what is intuitive, silently supplying the adverb “merely” before so cognitively challenged a mental operation? And do we not always, and rightly, do so when dealing with subjects as serious as law enforcement?

The honest answer is, not really. “Life,” as Samuel Butler ob­served, “is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.”

We do not like to admit that. In many ways, modern Western culture is also a Cartesian culture. We are rationalists and empiricists. Like the state of Missouri, we negotiate our way through the traffic of life with the challenge “Show me” announcing our progress.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s Mullahs Desperate for Nuclear Weapons, Do Not Believe Anything Else by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on May 11th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20626/iran-desperate-nuclear-weapons

Ayatollah Khamenei’s initial issuance of a fatwa against nuclear weapons coincided with damning revelations in 2002: Iran was exposed clandestinely engaging in nuclear activities, including uranium enrichment, at covert facilities in Natanz and Arak.

These activities flamboyantly violated the principles outlined in the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which Iran was a signatory.

The timing of Khamenei’s fatwa should only raise questions about its authenticity and underlying motive: it likely an attempt to mitigate international backlash and deflect scrutiny away from Iran’s covert nuclear endeavors.

Iran’s constitution explicitly mandates that both the Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps are not only tasked with safeguarding the nation’s frontiers, but also with advancing the ideological mission of jihad in the name of Allah. This mission entails the propagation and imposition of Allah’s law worldwide and reflects the regime’s fervent commitment to spreading its Islamic revolutionary principles beyond its own confines.

Such a constitutionally mandated objective underscores the regime’s revolutionary zeal and underscores the potential significance of acquiring nuclear weapons as a means of furthering its ideological agenda on a global scale.

In spite recent claims by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi that Iran harbors no intentions of pursuing nuclear weapons, along with a repeated fatwa from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei supposedly banning nuclear weapons, it would be insane for Western powers naively to accept these assertions at face value.

While some leaders in the West may be inclined to regard such declarations lightly, the international community cannot afford to underestimate the potential threat posed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions, especially given the deceptive nature of the claims by the regime.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden’s unforgivable betrayal of Israel In warning Israel to hold off from Rafah, the White House has abandoned the fight against Hamas. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on May 11th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/09/bidens-unforgivable-betrayal-of-israel/

Imagine if, in 2017, the world told the Kurds to hold off from attacking Raqqa. Imagine if, following their valiant liberation of 2,000 square miles of Syrian territory from the barbaric diktat of the Islamic State, the Kurdish-led forces were told to down arms. To leave Raqqa be. To leave intact the capital of the cruellest pseudo-state the modern world has known. We would have looked upon such a request as lunacy. We might even have considered it an essentially pro-ISIS position. After all, the flipside of telling the enemies of ISIS to cease fire is that ISIS would gain the breathing space to regroup, rearm and revisit its apocalyptic sadism on the people of Syria and beyond.

Well, just such an unhinged demand is being made right now, though of Israel, not the Kurds. From the White House to those whiffy tents on campus lawns, from the leader pages of the liberal press to the Israelophobic pulpits of social media, the cry goes out: don’t attack Rafah. If Israeli forces launch an invasion of that southern Gazan city, in pursuit of Hamas, it will be a bloodbath, the posing peaceniks cry. It would be ‘genocide in action’, insists former Corbynite bigwig John McDonnell. If you do it, President Biden warns Israel, we will stop providing you with certain weapons. In short: leave Rafah be. Which means leave Hamas be. Leave in peace the army of anti-Semites that butchered a thousand of your people – this, fundamentally, is the request being made of the Jewish State by the self-righteous of the Earth.

We need to talk about the cravenness, the outright iniquity, of the Western world’s lofty insistence that Israel back off from Rafah. It is presented to us as a ‘pro-peace’ position, underpinned by a pure urge to save life. But it could just as easily be seen as the antithesis of peace, as a position likely to benefit and even fortify the army of violent bigots that started this war and who seem hell-bent on continuing it. We know that huge numbers of Hamas militants have decamped to Rafah. We know they’re firing rockets from Rafah. We know some of these deadly devices have killed IDF soldiers while others have fallen on Israeli towns, with the intent of slaughtering the Jews who live there. In such circumstances, the cry ‘Hands off Rafah!’ is really a demand that Israel throw its own hands in the air and submit to the violent persecutions of its medieval foe.

EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Campus Intifadas Are Not ‘Anti-War Protests’ What the protesters are really calling for. by Mark Tapson

Posted By on May 11th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-campus-intifadas-are-not-anti-war-protests/

In February I wrote about the seemingly strange bedfellows of the red-green alliance – red for progressivism and green for Islam – whose values on many issues seem so diametrically opposed and yet they are united in their determination to dismantle the Western civilization they both see as the obstacle to erecting their differing visions of utopian societies.

This alliance was perhaps never in quite such alarming evidence as in the worldwide, vociferous, and even violent demonstrations of left-wing and Muslim support for the Palestinian people in the wake of Israel’s military retaliation against the terror group Hamas for its barbaric massacre of over 1200 innocents in Israel on October 7, 2023.

The anti-Israel protests have only gathered momentum since February as what David Horowitz calls the “unholy alliance” has intensified its pro-Hamas activism. On April 15th anti-Israel protesters shut down San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, blocked the entrance to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, blocked Manhattan-bound traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, and blocked traffic on Oregon’s Interstate 5 and roads in Philadelphia on a day of coordinated protests and rallies.

Meanwhile, college campuses have become overrun with metastasizing encampments of anti-Israel radicals intent on forcing administrators to concede to demands ranging from university divestment from Israel to full scholarships for Palestinian students to dental dams for safe sex for the encamped protesters. These privileged militants – both students and faculty – bully Jewish students, clash with cops, vandalize school property, replace campus Stars-and-Stripes with Palestinian flags, and chant antisemitic slogans including the genocidal call for “Palestine” to be free “from the river to the sea.”

Anti-War Does Not Mean Anti-War

During the George Floyd-inspired rioting across America in 2020, the left-dominated news media coordinated to spread the narrative that the looting, burning, and vandalizing carried out by Black Lives Matter revolutionaries and their allies were “mostly peaceful.” Similarly, now the media are attempting to whitewash these Jew-hating, anti-colonialist revolutionaries waging campus intifadas across America as merely “anti-war.”

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Watchdog: UNRWA Staff Stealing and Selling Gaza Aid for Profit By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on May 11th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/10/watchdog-unrwa-staff-stealing-and-selling-gaza-aid-for-profit/

A watchdog group has claimed that employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) have been actively stealing and selling aid for profit that was meant for use in Gaza.

As Fox News reports, the claim was made on Wednesday by UN Watch, a non-governmental organization (NGO) operating out of Geneva, Switzerland. The group pointed to multiple reports by Palestinian witnesses in a UNRWA chatroom, all of whom claimed that the organization’s staff members are stealing aid meant for civilian use and have been selling it. The witnesses also claim that anyone who tries to report these crimes face retaliation from UNRWA.

UN Watch’s report also accuses UNRWA Commissioner-General Philipe Lazzarini of “turning a blind eye” to corruption in his ranks. Lazzarini had recently demanded that countries begin sending more direct cash payments to Gaza rather than aid, claiming that although “there is more food available, it still does not mean that the food is accessible.”

UNRWA has also been accused of anti-Israel sentiment and voicing support for Hamas, the Islamic terrorist organization which carried out the October 7th attack against Israel last year, which led to the deaths of over 1,400 Israeli citizens. The aforementioned UNRWA chatroom is run by former UNRWA employee Haitham al-Sayyed, who was fired in 2016 after he called out the UNRWA for hiding an agency-sponsored map that denied Israel’s existence.

“While Haitham al-Sayyed was supposedly fired from UNRWA, he is still considered by many in the chat rooms as an important figure in the organization who holds sway with the senior administration,” said UN Watch. The report went on to claim that some employees, “frustrated by inaction and even complicity of senior staff in these thefts,” have confessed to al-Sayyed “in the hope that he can get UNRWA’s top officials to listen.”

One UNRWA employee, Mohammed Musa al-Sawalhi, took to the chatroom on February 20th to give his account of several UNRWA employees stealing aid and stashing it in their own houses.

“Eighty percent of employees in the shelters have no morals or dignity,” said al-Sawalhi, who said that the family of one director was captured stealing aid on video.

In response to the bombshell accusations, a spokesman for UNRWA released a statement saying that the group saw this report and are looking at what are very serious claims. We will provide an update when and if we have more information.”