RUTHFULLY YOURS

Obama’s clumsy attempts to interfere may have helped more than hurt Netanyahu.

Israeli voters on Tuesday sent Obama a two-word message, and it was not Shabbat shalom.​

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defied pollsters’ predictions of impending doom and surged to a stunning victory. His Likud party’s strength in the Knesset swelled from 20 seats today to 30 in the incoming parliament. He is expected easily to build a majority coalition of at least 61 center-Rightists in the 120-member chamber.

Netanyahu’s election-eve promise to block a Palestinian state drove Likud members and other conservatives to the polls. Also helpful: Obama’s petulant and unconcealed disgust with America’s closest ally in the Middle East.

Recall that a senior Obama aide last October called Netanyahu “a chickens**t.” Another, also quoted in The Atlantic, called him a “coward.”

The last thing the Middle East needs is still another genocidal, totalitarian, racist state, run by Islamic extremists such as Hamas.

“The BDS movement is immoral because it violates the core principle if human rights: namely, ‘the worst first.’ Israel is among the freest and most democratic nations in the world. It is certainly the freest and most democratic nation in the Middle East. Its Arab citizens enjoy more rights than Arabs anywhere else in the world. They serve in the Knesset, in the Judiciary, in the Foreign Service, in the academy and in business. They are free to criticize Israel and support its enemies.” — Alan M. Dershowitz, Professor Emeritus, Harvard Law School.

What these dictators and tyrants evidently calculate, is that if Israel can just be made to go away, their own people will no longer be able to compare the restrictions at home to the limitless opportunities they can see so temptingly in the oasis next door.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Electronic lenses that help you see straight. Israeli start-up DeepOptics has developed electronic multifocal lenses. Using sensors, they detect what the eye is focusing on as well as the viewing distance – adjusting the power of your spectacles to ensure that whatever is being looked at comes into focus, whether near or far.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-tech-promises-a-sharper-pair-of-glasses/

Safe robotic syringe. The robotic dispensing system from Israel’s RescueDose makes the preparation and administration of liquid medication safer by adding accurate doses automatically and minimizing human contact. RescueDose is already used to dispense radiation treatments for cancer patients.
http://www.israel21c.org/headlines/dont-touch-that-syringe/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii9F5kxlrDU

Sound analysis of sleep disorder. The term “sound asleep” is very appropriate to the discovery by Ben Gurion University researchers of a simple, cheap way to evaluate sleep disorders. Using their innovative breath sound analysis (BSA) algorithm, patients with sleep quality, snoring and sleep apnea problems can be analyzed easily.
http://aabgu.org/bgu-finds-new-ways-to-evaluate-sleep-disorders/

UK and Israel to tackle dementia. A delegation of senior British scientists and companies is in Israel, to work with Israel on dementia. They are following up on December’s joint meeting of the British Neuroscience Association and the Israel Society for Neuroscience in Eilat.
http://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/.premium-1.646203?trailingPath=2.169%2C2.223%2C
http://www.bna.org.uk/events/view.php?permalink=7G8RPFSPJT

Link between weaning and diabetes. Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have discovered that the pancreatic cells of some young mice fail to produce insulin in response to glucose during the transition from mother’s milk to calcium-enriched food. It may explain why some children develop Type 1 diabetes.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/25747 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1534580715000258

Israel has the brains to solve brain problems. Great praise from US congressman Chaka Fattah – the man in charge of appropriating federal money for science and medical research and development programs. Fattah, was a keynote speaker at BrainTech 2015 event in Tel Aviv. Per capita, Israel leads the world in neuroscience.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-has-the-brains-to-solve-brain-problems-says-us-congressman/

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Israeli university joins International energy consortium. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev will be part of an international academic, research and corporate consortium to create a Ph.D. program on thermal energy storage (TES) technologies. TES heats or cools a storage medium so that the stored energy can be used later.
http://aabgu.org/bgu-joins-thermal-energy-storage-consortium/

Altair extends battery life on 4G devices. Israel’s Altair Semiconductor has developed a new chipset that will help the LTE batteries that power 4G devices to run with 10 times less power and half the cost of using current LTE technology. Current 4G devices include smart meters and alarms and many more are in development.
http://www.jns.org/news-briefs/2015/3/3/israeli-companys-chipset-could-extend-battery-life-for-devices-using-4g-networks#.VPYL9vnF8z4=

Tech to repair the world. The first ever TOM (Tikkun Olam – repair the world) Maker event took place in Nazareth. It focused on helping people with special needs to integrate better in the community – find a job, to sit with friends in cafes, stroll the streets etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz7Jo V5hiNU http://www.tomtlv.org/?page_id=780

Australia receives Israeli research delegation. Assistant Minister for Defense, Stuart Robert met with a defense research delegation from Israel to discuss areas of mutual interest including science and technology.
http://www.minister.defence.gov.au/2015/03/11/assistant-minister-for-defence-israeli-defence-research-delegation-visits-australia/

Israelis get smarter phones. Israelis bought 2.85 million smartphones in 2014 – a rise of 19% on 2013.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-israelis-buy-285m-smartphones-in-2014-1001018031

Stop texting and start Gliding. Read more about the instant video messenger from Israel’s Glide and watch this demo of how easy and practical it is to use.
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/stop-texting-and-start-gliding-why-glide-is-my-new-fave-app-of-2015/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FjHg9sLoUI

Israeli technology for Norwegian desalination. (TY Michelle) Norwegian company, EnviroNor, is recruiting Israeli expertise to provide the water-processing technology necessary for its project to convert secondhand oil barges into floating desalination and wastewater treatment plants.
http://www.desalination.biz/news/news_story.asp?id=7960&title=Norwegian+desalination+barge+venture+seeks+Israeli+expertise+

Security for water. Jerusalem’s regional water & wastewater utility, Hagihon, has placed itself at the forefront of the cyber protection arena with a breakthrough project. Even if an employee does something unauthorized, like using an unrecognized USB flash drive, the system will send out an alert.
http://israelnewtech.com/2015/03/hagihon-launches-breakthrough-security-solution-for-protection-of-the-water-wastewater-utility/

Restoring Beer Sheva’s river. (TY Roberta) Untreated wastewater from Palestinian Arab towns has been polluting the Besor-Hebron-Be’er Sheva River for decades, thanks to international water laws. Now a 3-year project has been agreed between Israel, the PA and the Bedouin community to clean up the river.
http://arava.org/2015/03/restoration-of-the-besor-hebron-beer-sheva-river/

How Israel solved its water crisis. (TY Michelle) An excellent short article describing how, faced with severe drought and a full-blown water crisis, Israel made itself self-reliant by investing $4 billion between 2002 and 2010 to develop water technology that keeps its population and industries alive. And the innovations continue.
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/turning-air-to-water-how/1726940.html

Korea learns Israeli pest control. South Korea’s Minister of Agriculture, Lee Dong-Phil visited Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu’s “BioBee” factory to learn about natural solutions to the global decrease in the wild bee population. BioBee is one of the global leaders in biological pest management, natural pollination and Medfly control.
http://www.israel21c.org/news/south-korea-likes-israeli-natural-pest-control/

U.K.-Israel science partnership is booming. Sir Mark Walport – chief scientific adviser to the British Government – says that Israel and the UK are scientific superpowers, working together on neuroscience, stem cells, nanoscience and water science. In 2015, hundreds of Israeli researchers will work in U.K. universities.
http://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/.premium-1.646203?trailingPath=2.169%2C2.223%2C

Weeding with technology. Israeli biotech Evogene is using its PointHit platform to analyze molecules in weeds and identify key plant macro-molecules responsible for essential biological processes in weeds. By targeting those processes, herbicides can be developed that will be more effective in killing weeds.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-agri-tech-firm-weeds-out-food-insecurity/

There are crises, and there are what I am going to call “root crises.”

Crises are what we read about in the headlines: Obama’s latest post-Constitutional/dictatorial act; the most recent episode in population replacement; the next terrifying Supreme Court decision; the predictable disaster of Iranian nuclear negotiations, or continued American military presence in Afghanistan; the looming threat of the United Nations empowered by an “internationalist” US president.

“Root crises,” however, don’t make headlines, are never addressed, and are rarely articulated, especially by elected officials and others with lawful authority or even media platforms. For this reason, the crises that grow from root crises only multiply, and are never dispatched.

A recent, incipient exception — and ray of light — was Sen. Cotton’s website letter addressed to the theocratic rulers of Iran. Cotton exposed the root crisis from which the crisis of Iranian nuclear negotiations arises — the Constitutional crisis at home in which an administration (not the first) runs amok, unbounded by checks and balances.

From the April 6, 2015, issue of NR
Why on earth are you writing about Unity Mitford, I used to be asked in the course of researching her biography. All she ever did was to make an exhibition of herself as a Nazi and anti-Semite. Settling in Germany and learning German, she had picked Adolf Hitler up in February 1935 by the simple expedient of sitting day after day with a friend, Mary Wooddisse from Nottingham, in the Munich restaurant where he liked to spend time with his cronies. He sent Wilhelm Brückner, one of his adjutants, over with an invitation to join his table, and fantasy became reality. While peace lasted, these two ideological soulmates met frequently in Munich, Berlin, and the Eagle’s Nest retreat of Berchtesgaden. Eager to please and flatter him by word and deed in private and in public, she undoubtedly touched what passed as the heart of that emotionally handicapped freak.
Born in the opening week of World War I, she was christened Unity Valkyrie, both names loaded with premonition. Lord and Lady Redesdale, Farve and Muv to her, and their one son and six daughters were just in time to enjoy the privilege of the British upper classes to do as they pleased and plead eccentricity if they went off the rails. None of them ever had contact with the workaday lives of other people. Shifting alliances and enmities were the constant feature of a family so numerous and enclosed in itself; sister Nancy Mitford’s novels reduce this hothouse competition to an ongoing comedy of manners. One of Unity’s nicknames was Bobo, and photographs show her growing into a heavy blonde Valkyrie whose set expression conveys resolve to keep up with her more beautiful and more intelligent sisters. If she had any talent at all, it was for drawing. The sample of her letters and diaries that came into my hands did little or nothing to clarify how and why devotion to Hitler had come to fill her whole being or what she may have hoped would be its outcome. The language is embarrassingly childish, her writing unformed, with a line through the letter s that gives it the look of a dollar sign. She shows no powers of observation or description, and worse, no self-consciousness.

Democrats are suddenly acting as if we must either strike a bad deal or rush to war. What ever happened to the “box”? Remember what the Democrats said about Saddam Hussein? Wait . . . that’s a confusing question. One must clarify whether we’re talking about when a Democratic administration was bombing a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan because it was really a joint chemical-weapons venture between Iraq and al-Qaeda; or when that Democratic administration joined Congress in making regime change in Baghdad the national policy of the United States; or when congressional Democrats insisted on voting to show their support for the war to remove Saddam Hussein from power; or when Democrats decided Iraq had nothing to do with al-Qaeda after all; or, finally, when Democrats turned with a vengeance against the Iraq war they had enthusiastically supported.
I’m talking about that phase at the end. ​In obeisance to the hard-left, anti-war faction (now known as Obama’s base) that had come to dominate their party, leading Democrats scalded President Bush for his purportedly heedless rush to an unnecessary and ultimately disastrous war. In the new telling — the one that elides mention of the war drums beaten by Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Biden, et al. — there was no need to invade Iraq because President Bill Clinton, as he himself recalls it, had brilliantly maneuvered Saddam Hussein into a “box.” President Clinton, we’re to understand, had methodically isolated Saddam, arranging American policy with an eye toward steadily strangling the regime through a mix of punishing economic sanctions, a no-fly zone, the threat of fierce military retaliation in the event of Iraqi aggression, and pressure on other countries to treat Saddam as a pariah.
Sure, the Iraqi government was still a menace. Not only was Saddam concealing his weapons programs and stocks, and oppressing his own people; there remained the concern that he would provide safe haven for al-Qaeda if Afghanistan became too hot for the terror network — that Osama bin Laden would “boogie to Baghdad,” as Clinton counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke had memorably put it. Still, we are now assured, Clinton had Saddam contained: He was no longer an imminent threat to American interests, yet still a barrier to Iran’s regional ambitions. There was no need to go to war, this revisionist history teaches. The regime in Baghdad was in a box, unable to ratchet up its weapons development and beset by internal strife that would eventually be its undoing. Now, there are many problems with this history as history. The point here, though, is not to argue over whether this is a faithful rendition of events. It is to highlight the Democrats’ policy prescription.

Analytical individuals keep asking how Obama can engage in talks with Iran, a country that makes no secret of its contempt for the United States.

Discerning Americans of all stripes are horrified by Iran’s never-ending screeds about wiping Israel off the face of the earth and are puzzled by Obama’s staff patently answering these threats with euphemistic double talk — knowing all along that they are merely parroting their boss’s ideology.

On “Face the Nation,” Obama admitted that “a deal with Iran would only be of 10 years’ duration.” In fact, Obama maintained that:

If we cannot verify that they are not going to obtain a nuclear weapon, that there’s a breakout period so that even if they cheated we would be able to have enough time to take action, if we don’t have that kind of deal, then we are not going to take it.

Besides not making any sense, Obama is basically acting as if he is playing in a sandbox with other children. He is seemingly oblivious to the bully in the room.

To defeat the extremists for good, Muslims must reject those aspects of their tradition that prompt some believers to resort to oppression and holy war

“Islam’s borders are bloody,” wrote the late political scientist Samuel Huntington in 1996, “and so are its innards.” Nearly 20 years later, Huntington looks more right than ever before. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, at least 70% of all the fatalities in armed conflicts around the world last year were in wars involving Muslims. In 2013, there were nearly 12,000 terrorist attacks world-wide. The lion’s share were in Muslim-majority countries, and many of the others were carried out by Muslims. By far the most numerous victims of Muslim violence—including executions and lynchings not captured in these statistics—are Muslims themselves.

Not all of this violence is explicitly motivated by religion, but a great deal of it is. I believe that it is foolish to insist, as Western leaders habitually do, that the violent acts committed in the name of Islam can somehow be divorced from the religion itself. For more than a decade, my message has been simple: Islam is not a religion of peace.

Evidently, Sweden’s Foreign Minister was unaware that that by criticizing Islamic sharia customs, such as flogging a blogger a thousand times and the ill-treatment of women, she was, in fact, seen as turning against Islam itself.

There appears to be a genuine but concerning lack of knowledge in the Swedish government about Islam and Islamic affairs.

“It makes no difference what she says. In Islam, it is for Muslims to determine whether or not one has criticized their religion.” — Johannes J.G. Jansen, author and historian of Islam.

From a Muslim perspective, any criticism or infringement of sharia law and Muslims’ obligation to wage jihad [war in the service of Islam] is a violation of their freedom of religion.

In other words, it is incumbent on Muslims to “terrify” non-Muslims (referring to the Koran 8:60). But when they succeed, Muslim spokesmen accuse their frightened victims of suffering from “Islamophobia,” and demand that Western authorities denounce and persecute people beset by the psychiatric malady.

Israel’s March 17, 2015 general election shed light on the increasingly local – rather than national/regional – order of priorities of the 1.7 million Israeli Arabs; the intensifying Israelization/localization of their self-determination; the widening cultural/ideological gap between Israeli Arabs and the Arabs of Judea, Samaria and Gaza; the deep fragmentation within Israeli Arabs (despite the current Joint Arab Slate); their growing appreciation of Israel’s civil liberties and expanded trust in Israel’s political system; and the gap between the worldview of a growing number of Israeli Arabs on the one hand and most Arab Knesset Members on the other hand.

According to a February, 17, 2015 public opinion survey, conducted by Tel Aviv University’s researcher Arik Rudnitzky, a project manager at the Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation, the top priorities of Israeli Arabs are employment, education, healthcare, neighborhood crime and women’s rights (43%), ahead of enhancing the status of the Arab community in Israel (28.1%) and the Israel-Palestinian conflict/negotiation (19%).