RUTHFULLY YOURS

Judi McLeod is the Editor of Canada Free Press
Ferguson, Missouri throws a new window wide open to the world. Hijacked by globe-trotting gangs of anarchists, socialists, communists and Islamists, Ferguson, MO proves in digitalized real time that anarchists, socialists, communists and Islamists not only share the same bed, but are the real racists.

The protesters burning down homes and businesses and rioting and looting today in Ferguson are in fact exploiting the death of Michael Brown by making it second to Palestine. The signage and banners hoisted high by masked millennials do not bear the name of the media-dubbed “gentle giant” killed by now resigned police officer Darren Wilson. They read: ‘Occupation is a Crime Ferguson to Palestine’; ‘Resist US Racism’. ‘Boycott Israel’.

It is not the death of Michael Brown that enrages the protesters but the ‘Occupation’ of Palestine. The irony is that Israel does not occupy Gaza. Hamas occupies Gaza.

How does Boycotting Israel bring Michael Brown back to his grieving mother?

How does the torching of stores and homes by arson boycott Israel?

What’s happening in Ferguson is proof positive that the anarchists, socialists, communists and Islamists were only waiting for the right moment—and the most convenient powder keg—to stage worldwide mass outrage.

Authorities should expose the hijackers for what they are, kick them out of town and send them back to the hide-y-holes from which they crawled.
Al Sharpton and the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) millennials organized by the Canadian-headquartered AdBusters magazine, are the commie-Islamo-Nazis’ most reliable useful idiots.

But even as the acrid smoke hangs over Ferguson on Thanksgiving weekend, the highjackers, who opened the door to anarchy, have also opened a window for the world masses who now clearly see how the Communists and radical Islamists operate in full sync.

The mainstream media and the Internet’s social networks are hyping it up in a way they never hyped ISIS.

The 6 years of Barack Obama’s foreign policy have seen American influence and power decline across the globe. Traditional rivals like China and Russia are emboldened and on the march in the South China Sea and Ukraine. Iran, branded as the world’s deadliest state sponsor of terrorism, is arrogantly negotiating its way to a nuclear bomb. Bloody autocrats and jihadist gangs in the Middle East scorn our president’s threats and behead our citizens. Countries in which Americans have shed their blood in service to our interests and ideals are in the process of being abandoned to our enemies. And allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia are bullied or ignored. All over the world, a vacuum of power has been created by a foreign policy sacrificed to domestic partisan advantage, and characterized by criminal incompetence.

How we have arrived at this point, the dangers to our security and interests if we don’t change course, and what must be done to recover our international prestige and effectiveness are the themes of Bret Stephens’ America in Retreat. The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder. Stephens is the Pulitzer-prize winning foreign affairs columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and in his new book he analyzes our current retreat from global responsibility with the same stylistic clarity and analytic rigor that make his weekly columns indispensible reading.

A clear sign of American retreat is the precipitous decline in military spending. “In the name of budgetary savings,” Stephens writes, “the Army is returning to its June 1940 size,” and “the Navy put fewer ships at sea at any time since 1916.” The Air Force is scheduled to retire 25,000 airmen and mothball 550 planes. Our nuclear forces are being cut to meet the terms of the 2010 New Start Treaty with Russia, even as its nuclear arsenal has been increasing. Meanwhile Obama––whom Stephens likens to Canute, the Danish king who in legend attempts to stop the tide––issues empty threats, blustering diktats, and sheer lies that convince world leaders he is a “self-infatuated weakling.”

Unfortunately, 52% of the American people agree that the U.S. “should mind its own business internationally,” and 65% want to “reduce overseas military commitments,” including a majority of Republicans. This broad consensus that America should retreat from global affairs reflects our age’s bipartisan isolationism, the centerpiece of Stephens’ analysis. This national mood is not a sign of decline, according to Stephens, who documents the enormous advantages America still enjoys globally, from its superiority in research and entrepreneurial vigor, to its healthy demographics and spirit of innovation. But it does bespeak a dangerous withdrawal from the policies that created the postwar Pax Americana––even though this global order policed by the U.S. defeated the murderous, nuclear-armed ideology of Soviet communism, and made possible the astonishing economic expansion that has lifted millions from poverty all over the world.

Stephens first traces the history and causes of America’s distrust of military engagement abroad. The left, of course, committed to a universalist ideology challenged by national sovereignty and self-interest, promoted isolationism once the threat of Nazism had been destroyed. Henry Wallace, FDR’s third-term vice president who was “willfully blind to the reality of Stalinist Russia,” vigorously opposed the Truman Doctrine, which saved Greece from a communist takeover in 1947, as a “disaster” and “reckless adventure.” Like progressives today, Wallace believed that America was a global “sinner,” as Stephens puts it. As such, the U.S. should meet aggression with appeasement, and consider those who protect our security to be a greater danger than foreign aggressors.

Charles C. Johnson is an investigative journalist with a knack for enraging progressives. His recent coverage of issues in Ferguson has made him such a gadfly that trolls in social media convinced Twitter to shut down his account – because, as Johnson put it, “Twitter apparently has a journalism problem.”

Johnson, who has worked with both the late, great Andrew Breitbart and Alan Dershowitz, is the founder and editor-in-chief of Gotnews.com, which seeks “to transform journalism by empowering everyday people, experts, and sources to break news” – very much a Breitbartian aim. A contributor to the Daily Caller and The Blaze, Johnson is also the author of Why Coolidge Matters: Leadership Lessons from America’s Most Underrated President and The Truth About the IRS Scandal. He has written for Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Los Angeles Times, American Spectator, and others.

“It’s no secret that I’ve been targeted by the Ferguson mob for publishing material that they don’t like,” Johnson wrote at Gotnews. For example, he reported that Michael Brown’s stepdad Louis Head, who incited a riot by telling protesters, “Let’s burn this b*tch down!” was a former Blood gangbanger. Johnson is also delving into information provided by Ferguson police that Brown himself had been charged with 2nd degree murder – but that was as a juvenile, so the records have been sealed. Now that Brown is dead, Johnson has sued for the release of those records. That investigation is still ongoing, Johnson told me.

Then, after the grand jury came back without an indictment for Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, The New York Times published the home address of Wilson and his wife. It was an unconscionable and reckless act, considering the target it put on the Wilsons’ backs, but not an unexpected one from the leftist news media, which have been known to willfully endanger people on the wrong side of the leftist narrative before (e.g., the gun owners whose addresses were mapped out in Journal News).

In response, Charles Johnson called the homes of the writers responsible for the article, Julie Bosman and Campbell Robertson, to ask them about it. Bosman later tweeted that she revised the piece by removing a photo that contained specific information which should not have been made public. But it had been made public and the potential damage was done. Charles Johnson felt that turnabout is fair play, so he posted Bosman’s and Robertson’s home addresses online as well. According to Johnson, Bosman has been phoning the police incessantly complaining of harassment and requesting protection.

Abdallah Bulgasem Zehaf-Bibeau, the crackhead turned Jihadist spawned by the mating of a Canadian immigration official and a Libyan Muslim Jihadist, just wanted peace.

Meanwhile in Israel a reporter interviewing Arab Muslim settlers in Jerusalem found that they too wanted peace. On their terms. “Yes we want peace,” one of them said, “but peace means no Jews.”

When negotiating peace with other cultures it’s a good idea to make sure that the words you are using mean the same thing. Most Muslims and Westerners want peace. But to Westerners peace means co-existence. To Muslims, peace means the end of your existence.

Ideas carry heavy cultural baggage. Peace in the West summons up images of Armistice Day, of the Christmas Truce of WW1 in which French, German and English soldiers could share meals and play soccer together. It carries with it the subversive idea that both sides realize the war isn’t worth fighting.

Such a subversive idea has no place in Islam. The Jihad is at the heart of Islam. To question the holy war is to also question the faith. When war is religion then peace through setting aside war is heresy.

The Western idea of peace is a wholly alien one to Islam. In Islam, peace does not come from men transcending their differences, but from destroying men who think and live differently. That is the function of the religious police of our allied “moderate Muslim” countries who seek out the practice of other religions and other ways of living in places like Saudi Arabia and suppress their practitioners.

Islamic peace does not come from diversity, from accepting the existence of other nations, religions and peoples, but from unity through Islam and eliminating as many differences as possible. If Islam is the source of peace, then all that which is “not Islam” is the cause of war.

Kill the Jews. Kill the Christians. Then there will be peace.

You will hear a lot between now and when Congress convenes in January about how urgent it is that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s replacement be confirmed by the Senate. The president will nominate someone and then shrug his shoulders at the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, noting that things aren’t going well, and asking, “What do you expect? The Republicans are to blame because they haven’t confirmed the new defense secretary.”

It will all be baloney, of course, because we know that the secretary of defense’s job has been neutered by Obama’s White House team and it will remain so as long as he’s president.

We know this from any number of factual emanations from the administration, not the least of which was former defense secretary Bob Gates’s memoir, Duty, in which he whinged at great length about how all national security decisions were made by the president himself or his White House National Security Council. There is no evidence to show that the White House gave Hagel any greater authority or leeway, and there is no reason to expect that his successor will find any change.

So when the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorialized that, “Given the importance of the issues handled by the secretary of defense, most Americans would probably prefer to hear that Mr. Hagel is leaving President Barack Obama’s Cabinet over policy differences and not some personal dispute,” we have to shake our heads and wonder if its editors have any idea of what is actually going on in Washington, or how America’s national defense decisions are being made.

If they had a clue, they’d know that it will always be easy for Obama — or any president — to find a willing patsy to take a cabinet post — any cabinet post — regardless of the White House’s denizens arrogating all the post’s authority and prerogatives to themselves. The prestige of a cabinet post will always be enough to attract precisely the kind of people you don’t want on those jobs. Which is how Hagel was chosen originally: he wasn’t picked because he possessed a towering intellect and knowledge of the world of defense.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Electrical field slows brain tumors. Israel’s Novocure has announced that its NovoTTF-100A portable scalp device extends the life of brain tumor patients. The device creates an alternating electric field and has had significant success in Phase 3 trials with patients receiving chemotherapy only.
http://www.haaretz.com/life/science-medicine/1.626964

Immunotherapy to fight cancer. Israeli biotech Efranat Ltd. is developing an immunotherapy treatment approach for cancer, based on a glycoprotein named GcMAF (Globulin component Macrophage Activating Factor). Efranat has just raised $4.5 million and is conducting trials at Tel Hashomer’s Sheba Medical Center.
http://jewishbusinessnews.com/2014/11/21/israels-efranat-raises-4-5-million-to-cure-cancer/

Wiping out parasitic worm infections. Ben Gurion University Professor Zvi Bentwich has received a Grand Challenges in Global Health grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for his project in Ethiopia to wipe out parasitic worm infections. Clean water and sanitation facilities and health education are being provided.
http://in.bgu.ac.il/en/Pages/news/bentwich_gates.aspx

Progress in treatment of Celiac disease. Back in Feb 2012 I reported good pre-clinical trials of Israeli biotech BioLineRX’s BL-7010 co-polymer for the treatment of celiac disease, for which there is currently no cure or formal treatment. BioLineRX has now announced successful final results from its Phase 1/2 study of BL-7010.
http://www.biolinerx.com/default.asp?pageid=16&itemid=306

3D printing of medical devices. (Thanks to Atid-EDI) Israeli 3D printer manufacturer Stratasys has joined with US-based Worrell to build medical devices using 3D printed injection molding. With 3D printing, device prototypes can be produced in 95% less time and at 70% less cost compared with traditional aluminum molds.
http://investors.stratasys.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=879379

Paralyzed Marine walks using Israeli exoskeleton to receive Bronze Star. (Thanks to Israellycool.com) A Marine who was left paralyzed by a sniper’s bullet in Afghanistan walked to collect his Bronze Star in a ceremony at Camp Pendleton, using robotic leg braces developed by Israel’s ReWalk Robotics.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/marine-with-robotic-leg-walks-to-receive-bronze-star/

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obama-and-the-ferguson-lynch-mob-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Ernie White, a Civil Rights Activist, Morgan Brittany, a Conservative TV and Movie Star, and Mell Flynn, the President of Hollywood Congress of Republicans.

The Gang gathered to discuss Obama and the Ferguson Lynch Mob, analyzing how a Radical-in-Chief fanned the flames of hate and racial discord. The guests also focused on The Ferguson Jihad, Bye Bye Hagel, The Mullahs Inch toward the Bomb, and much, much more.

Don’t miss it!

The news tells us less about Israel than about the people writing the news, a former AP reporter says.

During the Gaza war this summer, it became clear that one of the most important aspects of the media-saturated conflict between Jews and Arabs is also the least covered: the press itself. The Western press has become less an observer of this conflict than an actor in it, a role with consequences for the millions of people trying to comprehend current events, including policymakers who depend on journalistic accounts to understand a region where they consistently seek, and fail, to productively intervene.

An essay I wrote for Tablet on this topic in the aftermath of the war sparked intense interest. In the article, based on my experiences between 2006 and 2011 as a reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, one of the world’s largest news organizations, I pointed out the existence of a problem and discussed it in broad terms. Using staffing numbers, I illustrated the disproportionate media attention devoted to this conflict relative to other stories, and gave examples of editorial decisions that appeared to be driven by ideological considerations rather than journalistic ones. I suggested that the cumulative effect has been to create a grossly oversimplified story—a kind of modern morality play in which the Jews of Israel are displayed more than any other people on earth as examples of moral failure. This is a thought pattern with deep roots in Western civilization.

But how precisely does this thought pattern manifest itself in the day-to-day functioning, or malfunctioning, of the press corps? To answer this question, I want to explore the way Western press coverage is shaped by unique circumstances here in Israel and also by flaws affecting the media beyond the confines of this conflict. In doing so, I will draw on my own experiences and those of colleagues. These are obviously limited and yet, I believe, representative.I’ll begin with a simple illustration. The above photograph is of a student rally held last November at Al-Quds University, a mainstream Palestinian institution in East Jerusalem. The rally, in support of the armed fundamentalist group Islamic Jihad, featured actors playing dead Israeli soldiers and a row of masked men whose stiff-armed salute was returned by some of the hundreds of students in attendance. Similar rallies have been held periodically at the school.

I am not using this photograph to make the case that Palestinians are Nazis. Palestinians are not Nazis. They are, like Israelis, human beings dealing with a difficult present and past in ways that are occasionally ugly. I cite it now for a different reason.

Such an event at an institution like Al-Quds University, headed at the time by a well-known moderate professor, and with ties to sister institutions in America, indicates something about the winds now blowing in Palestinian society and across the Arab world. The rally is interesting for the visual connection it makes between radical Islam here and elsewhere in the region; a picture like this could help explain why many perfectly rational Israelis fear withdrawing their military from East Jerusalem or the West Bank, even if they loathe the occupation and wish to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbors. The images from the demonstration were, as photo editors like to say, “strong.” The rally had, in other words, all the necessary elements of a powerful news story.

Never mind the Islamic State and its boxes of heads. The consensus among politicians and the media is that the real crisis in the region is that the Jewish State is declaring itself a Jewish State.

Again.

Israel’s flag carries the six-pointed star that was the seal of the House of David. Its anthem speaks of the “Jewish spirit.” Israel’s Declaration of Independence declared “the establishment of a Jewish State.”

It couldn’t be any less unambiguous if Mel Brooks were made the President of Israel (which would also be a manifest improvement over the even more clownish President Rivlin.) Despite that the media and its politicians treated the Jewish State bill as a major development and the end of the world.

And that’s not an exaggeration.

The understated title of a Haaretz article was “The road from Jewish nation-state to the Gates of Hell.” It was only to be expected that the radicals of the leftist paper would lose their minds over a bill that reaffirms reality. Reality has always been the enemy of the left. But the level of hysteria and incitement was a bit much even by the standards of a paper that had called Israeli soldiers and officers “filth.”

The New York Times called the bill “heartbreaking.” This is the first time that the Gray Lady showed anything resembling a heart when it came to Israel.

The State Department, whose boss just decided to ignore the results of a democratic election and press on with his undemocratic agenda, warned Israel to maintain its “commitment to democratic principles.” The European Union, which rejects a democratic referendum, warned Israel to “protect its democratic standards.”

Obama, the EU and the Israeli left like talking about democracy. They just don’t like practicing it.

My e-pal David is so right about this role of language in the identity of Israel….The miracle is that at one time more people spoke Mongolian tha spoke Hebrew. It was the mettle and dedication of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (B.Vilna 1858-D. Jerusalem 1922) who was the architect of the renewal of Hebrew in the modern era. A miracle….rsk

“The main factor that redeemed the Jewish people in our time is the state of Israel. It made them an active, generative people again, not merely scattered minorities contending with the Scylla and Charybdis of antisemitism and assimilation.

But a close handmaiden of the Jewish state in effecting this transformation was the Hebrew language. Along with the magnetic pull of the Land of Israel itself, it was Hebrew that enabled the Zionist endeavor to coalesce and take on a distinctive, organic character.

Hebrew—that is, the revival of the Hebrew language in the context of the return to Zion—achieved that in four main ways.
1. It made unity possible for radically diverse immigrants.

From the onset of Zionist aliyah (immigration to Israel) in the early 1880s to today, when the phenomenon continues, Jews have come to Israel from all corners of the world speaking over a hundred different languages. They’ve come from Russia, Poland, Germany, Morocco, Iraq, Ethiopia, India, America—the list goes on. Although not a few of these immigrants had some degree of knowledge of Hebrew or other Jewish languages, the majority had a non-Jewish mother tongue. In other words, a Tower of Babel.

So the adoption of Hebrew as the dominant language of the prestate community, and eventually of Israel itself, was far from a fait accompli. Some championed Yiddish instead. In 1913 the “Language War” broke out over plans to make German the language of the Technion, a technical college in Haifa that thrives to this day. The Language War galvanized those most committed to making Hebrew the main official language of the emerging polity, and they eventually prevailed.

It was a strategic and wise choice; it not only made unity possible but also much else.
2. It connected the society as a whole to the Hebrew Bible and other sources.