http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2623/waiting_for_nobel When will Israel’s achievements be recognised? Insomniacs lull themselves to sleep by counting sheep. Not me. I count Nobel Prizes being handed out in austere Scandinavian ceremonies. Modestly, I confess, I am the sole recipient. There is, however, a problem: the category for my Nobel Prize does not yet exist. But I am optimistic […]
www.econwarfare.com The acceleration in Chinese hacking into U.S. government agencies, major financial institutions, businesses and media outlets seems to match China’s growing investments in this country. Both began to intensify since the economic crisis of 2008. The statements issued by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and the Washington Post, implied the […]
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-03/now-we-know-bush-did-not-lie-about-wmd-in-iraq.html
Remember the debate about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction? It’s back for an encore, thanks to Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, who remarked at a hearingrecently that whatever went wrong in the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi disaster, it wasn’t as bad as the Bush administration’s insistence that those weapons existed.
The blogosphere swiftly picked up the refrain, and so, once more, we have been treated to angry denunciation of the supposed cover-up of the true intelligence about Iraq’s weapons programs. A bracing challenge to this view is provided by “The Art of Betrayal,” Gordon Corera’s enthralling history of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as MI6.
Stephen L. Carter is a professor of law at Yale, where he teaches courses on contracts, professional responsibility, …MORE
Corera, a widely respected British Broadcasting Corp. journalist with impeccable sources in the clandestine world, devotes a good deal of his narrative to the question of what went wrong in Iraq. But the wider focus is on the shadowy, yet colorful, figures who have populated the agency since the dawn of the Cold War.
The book is worth reading for Corera’s detailed recounting of largely unexamined swaths of secret history, which I will discuss in a future column. For the present, let us consider only what he has to say about Iraq — and, in particular, about the notion that U.S. President George W. Bush and U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and their staffs fabricated the evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
Silly Theories
One of my favorite historians, Andrew Roberts, insists that Corera’s research “explodes that myth completely.” That seems to me too strong. Rather, Corera offers a nuanced perspective that should serve as corrective to some of the sillier conspiracy theories that still abound. His account is unlikely to convince all the doubters, but should be studied nonetheless for the lessons it carries — lessons to which President Barack Obamaand his administration should pay close attention.
Corera has combed available public sources, both official investigations and various memoirs, and added to it his own reporting, most of it from anonymous intelligence sources. His ironic conclusion: “Everyone, including the spies, was convinced by the intelligence that said Saddam had the weapons,” he writes. Yet “they were not sure it looked strong enough to win the argument.”
By everyone, Corera means everyone. As he reminds us, even Hans Blix, the chief United Nations arms inspector before the war, believed that Saddam Hussein had hidden weapons of mass destruction. David Kay, who led the postwar Iraq Survey Groupthat found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, went into his search expecting to find the opposite. In this sense, Bush and Blair were just along for the ride.
www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
Paraplegics can now walk even better. Version 2 of the ReWalk exoskeleton from Israel’s Argo Medical has just been released. Now one device can be resized to help train different users. New software programs also make the device easier to use.
http://www.embassyofisrael.co.uk/commercial/2013/01/24/argo-medical-technologies-unveils-advancement-of-its-exoskeleton-technology-with-launch-of-rewalk-rehabilitation-2-0/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Xd27c-pz4Y&feature=player_embedded
Israeli professor advises Euro medicines agency. Prof. Jonathan Rabinowitz, of Bar-Ilan University has been appointed to the Advisory Group on Promoting Good Analysis Practice in relation to European Medicines Agency (EMA) Clinical Trial Data and Transparency. He will also co-chair of the Program Committee for the Biennial Schizophrenia International Research Society Conference to take place in Florence, Italy.
http://www1.biu.ac.il/indexE.php?id=33&pt=20&pid=117&level=2&cPath=33&type=1&news=1815
The cause of face/heart abnormalities. One in 4000 babies is born with DiGeorge syndrome, a congenital condition that causes various abnormalities, most often in the face and heart. Weizmann researchers have solved a piece of this puzzle by investigating the genetic network underlying this syndrome.
http://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/when-the-network-is-defective
Putting bones on the flesh. Here is an update on the progress of Israel’s Bonus Biogroup and its founder Dr. Shai Meretzki who is generating bones from patients’ own fat cells. Hospitals in Tzrifin and Afula, have agreed to trial the implanting of engineered bones back into patients as soon as the Helsinki Committee approves.
http://www.jpost.com/Health/Article.aspx?id=301049
Random screening detected and cured 24 early cancer sufferers. When 1,000 apparently healthy Israelis of a median age of 48 were screened at Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center for 11 of the most common cancers, 2.4 percent (24) were diagnosed at an early stage with malignancies and treated successfully.
http://www.jpost.com/Health/Article.aspx?id=301997
Deep TMS helps smokers to quit. Of 115 smokers, 84% of those receiving Deep Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) stopped smoking permanently at the end of the 6-month trial. 36% were still not smoking after the six-month post-treatment monitoring period.
http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000816803&fid=1725
Eight massive Israeli brains. The European Commission has chosen the Human Brain Project as one of its flagship projects. Participating from Israel is a team of eight scientists from the Hebrew University, the Weizmann Institute of Science, and Tel Aviv University.
http://www.huji.ac.il/cgi-bin/dovrut/dovrut_search_eng.pl?mesge135936589605872560
Watch how you walk. Israeli start-up SensoGo has developed a device that, when strapped to a patient’s leg, performs medical gait analysis. It records and uploads data about factors such as the patient’s gait, speed, and style of walking. Doctors can diagnose a patient more quickly and efficiently than from current video methods.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/new-device-deciphers-the-secrets-of-your-step/
http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/the-un-bigotry-machine-2/
Quick quiz. An inquiry set up by the UN Human Rights Council has just released a draft report condemning:
A) Iran
B) China
C) Sri Lanka
D) Israel
The answer, of course, is D — Israel. This is yet another UN document that deserves to be filed in the same dustbin as the ugly and discredited Goldstone report [1]. Never mind Iran, China, Sri Lanka et al. As the Geneva-based monitoring group, UN Watch, points out, [2] since the UN set up its “reformed” Human Rights Council in 2006, “there have been seven one-sided inquiry missions on Israel, and only five on the rest of the world combined. Mass atrocities committed by Iran, China, or Sri Lanka, for example, have never been subjected to a single HRC inquiry.”
This latest report, due to be formally presented to the Council in March, is captioned “Advanced Unedited Version.” I assume they meant to say ”Advance,” since there is nothing advanced about this product. It’s the latest in a long series of exhibits that attest not to the realities of the Middle East, but to the unrelenting bigotry of what is supposed to be the UN’s leading human rights body. The full title – brace yourself, this is one of those UN doozies — is: “Report of the independent international fact-finding mission to investigate the implications of the Israeli settlements on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of the Palestinian people, throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”
The three “high-level experts” appointed by the president of the Human Rights Council to produce this document arrogate to themselves, in its introduction, a description of their work as “Guided by the principles of ‘do no harm,’ independence, impartiality, objectivity, transparency, confidentiality, integrity and professionalism…” Yes, and pigs can fly.
UN Watch gives an incisive summary of the contents [2] of this report, and makes the vital point that while the UN is supposed to foster peace, this kind of inquiry has the very opposite effect: “It has the perverse outcome of pushing the parties further apart, while also inappropriately pre-judging final status issues that can only be resolved through direct negotiations.” I’d add that in obsessively savaging Israel, while ignoring most of the genuine perpetrators of gross human rights violations, the UN Human Rights Council — and the UN generally — waste the considerable resources they are given, dishonor their charter mandate, and do a horrendous disservice to the truly downtrodden.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/muhammad-morsis-islamic-jew-hatred-bernard-lewis-islamic-negationism/?print=1
Why do the media’s Middle East pundits ignore the Jew-hatred intrinsic to Islamic doctrine?
A month has passed since the Middle East Media Research Institute posted a 2010 video interview [1] of Muslim Brotherhood leader, and now Egyptian President, Muhammad Morsi spewing Antisemitic vitriol. Morsi’s comments [2] included a characterization of today’s Zionists — plainly Jews in his parlance — as “descendants of apes and pigs” — a specific invocation of Koran 5:60 [3], which he had repeated, elsewhere, in print interviews [4], and commentaries [5].
That this dehumanizing Koranic [6] depiction was in reference to Jews has been validated by the most authoritative classical and modern exegeses [6]* (“tafsir,” or commentaries) on the Koran [7], the words [8] of Muhammad himself (as recorded in the sira, or pious Muslim biographies of Islam’s prophet), as well as a large corpus of Islamic theological writings [6] which demonstrate the motif’s application [6] by Muslims over a nearly 1400-year continuum.
Yet to this day, thousands of reports and opinion pieces later (search “Morsi” + “apes and pigs” using Google.com to estimate the vast output [9]), only a handful have noted this irrefragable [6] link to a Koranic verse [7] (i.e., 5:60 [3]) declaring the Jews to be apes and pigs. The apotheosis of this negationist trend was captured in a January 27, 2013 Times of Israel interview [10] of Charles Small, head of the itinerant Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). Small piously proclaimed that ISGAP was uniquely committed to addressing what was framed as “Islamic” Antisemitism, because,
There’s a reluctance among scholars to open up this subject [i.e., “Islamic” Antisemitism]. This subject is dangerous, embarrassing. It touches on various political interests in international relations that people don’t really want to engage with.
However, also ignoring Morsi’s repetition of the Koran 5:60 [3] “apes and pigs” reference, Small made this pathognomonic assertion [10], “The danger does not come from Islam itself.”
What explains the almost uniform, egregious omission of Morsi’s Koranic reference, and Small’s [10] broader see-no-Islam in “Islamic” Antisemitism mindset, displayed even by politically centrist [11] or conservative [12] Western media outlets, and the centrist or conservative “Middle East experts [11]” opining for them? I argue that such willful blindness is rooted in the misrepresentation of Islamic Jew-hatred — indeed its frank denial as a coherent doctrine — by one of the leading contemporary scholars of Islam, turned late-blooming, ubiquitous public intellectual, whose limited, dogmatic investigation of the subject, has smothered all such desperately required discussion. That scholar is Bernard Lewis.
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/02/book_review_the_long_road_to_freedom.html The Long Road to Freedom — Cubanos in Wisconsin by Silvio Canto, Jr. and Gabriel Canto With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the fall of the iron curtain more than 20 years ago, most Americans do not think any more about the threat from Communist regimes or how people lived in these […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/02/girls_just_wanna_have_guns.html
“Net-net, our now-disemboweled military, with the addition of albatross soldiers in duties for which they are unfit and unsuited, will be rendered a laughingstock and present a continuing danger.This is not “equal rights” for women. It is unacceptable wrongs, for men, and for women. Adoption of this foolhardy misstep will entail headaches, loss of efficacy, and needless deaths. Those in the military who know whereof they speak have already predicted “almost certain needless deaths.”
By virtue of being lithe and of lower body mass, and having much smaller feet, in the main, women have always been terrific at mountain climbing. Women with ‘scopes were first among perseverant astronomers, though their achievements were largely ignored and stepped on by males with high-power magnification. Women are superlative and self-abnegating in the lab, often working 50 and 60 years, unmarried and unchilded, in the shadows of their discoveries before they reap awards and recognition.
Women are great in a myriad of occupations and professions, are as brave and heady as males in the full spectrum of human endeavors — not to mention childbirth, which Norman Mailer quipped would never be anything a male could do.
Since time began, women aspiring to “male” jobs and occupations have been derided and disrespected as a consequence of their menstrual periodicity. Everything suspect, from womb-connected “hysteria” to lack of judgment and inferior cognition was assigned to the female, and used as a club to deny women representation in education, careers, the opportunity rung on the rigorous escalator of achievement.
But women, on the whole, are not the best candidates for firefighter roles, other than support. The heavier duties of carrying deadweight injured comrades, the upper-body strength needed for many of the tasks associated with the military, and the steadiness required to maintain combat positions in the face of withering fire and lengthy attack, are not the circumstances where women shine. To disagree that women are, in fact, different from men in these specifics is to live in a faux-construct — we have many strengths, but we are not gorillas, and we have different musculo-skeletal apparatuses and hormonal tides than men.
All this by way of explaining why Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s recent initiative to open some 328,000 combat jobs is a bad idea. The prospective groundbreaking decision overturns a 1994 Pentagon rule restricting women from artillery, armor, infantry and other similar combat roles.
Career advancement, yes, does often result from valorous action in war, and to date these emoluments and ribbons of glory have been male-only. But there are numerous reasons not aired in the miles of ink generated by Panetta’s (and the president’s) little change of definition of who qualifies for what in combat-forward posts and training.
As Ryan Smith, an ex-military (currently a lawyer) who served several battlefield tours in Iraq explains in “The Reality That Awaits Women in Combat: A Pentagon push to mix the sexes ignores how awful cheek-by-jowl life is on the battlefield,” there are egregious battlefront conditions that absolutely militate against women being involved in frontline combat.
If you rejoinder that “women can take it,” assuredly yes, we can. If we choose to subject ourselves to the glaring lack of hygiene, the days-long stakeouts without toilets, the long spans without proper bivouacking, the shattering noise and grime, and the eternal close quarters with men in the same clutch of duty, without end. But the esprit de corps that is critical to unit success in the military is broken by having women around — even expertly trained, above-average-strength women with top honors in pushups and hauling and obstacle-course running.
Women are great firearms experts. We win awards in shooting competitions year after year. And Annie Oakley is a proud estrogenic legend in this country. But shooting is not the sum of tasks in combat. Most of the time is spent in awkward human-human contact that is uncomfortable, difficult, dangerous — and messy.
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2629/hamas_commentary_says_women_spread_disease
If a mainstream Israeli party such as Likud was promoting vile slanders against women, it would be plastered all over the BBC. When it’s Hamas, the silence is deafening
Imagine if the leading outlet associated with Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu had featured an article replete with misogynystic prejudices about women being responsible for spreading disease across Israel. Imagine that the essence of the argument was that women are chatter boxes who have a natural tendency to gather in groups. Imagine finally that the best defences against the health dangers that women pose were for them to wear face masks so as to stop them infecting people and that they should submit to the discipline of men.
Plainly, you’d never hear the end of it. But since it is Hamas, and since Western media outlets such as the BBC are engaged in a campaign to whitewash the realities of mass societal bigotry among Israel’s opponents, it is completely ignored.
Fortunately, organisations such as the Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, exist to provide a more rounded picture of the realities of the Middle East.
In its latest report, MEMRI highlights a disturbing illustration of what Hamas is all about. The article, pegging off an epidemic of Swine Flu in the West Bank, is by columnist Issam Shawer in the Hamas daily Falastin. In it, the author says the following:
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2627/gun_control_usa_but_f_16s_for_the_muslim_brotherhood
The administration of Barack Obama is likely to be remembered, in the short term at the very least, for saying, “No” to Americans owning rifles, but “Yes” to the Muslim Brotherhood’s demands for F-16 fighter jets.
Of course, given Mohammed Morsi’s penchant for anti-Semitism, a fact that extends further than the unscrupulous brain of just the Egyptian President himself, you may have thought the American government would think twice before arming the regime with devastatingly effective fighter jets.
Alas, once again, we are forced to stomach the dealings between Western powers and nasty theocracies.
As we are all painfully aware of by now, many Democrats and a significant number of Republicans are in favour of extending gun control in the United States – an irony not lost on numerous political commentators who have noticed that US legislators seem more comfortable with a heavily armed Islamist bully state than a responsibly armed American public. It is no stretch of the imagination to call it scandalous.
Senator Rand Paul has rightly ignited the debate in the United States regarding arms sales to Egypt and what it means for America’s ally, Israel.
