Displaying posts published in

August 2018

Wave the national flag, for Zion Dr. Miriam Adelson

http://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/wave-the-national-flag-for-zion/

This column proudly displays Israel’s national flag. The same flag will appear in the same place on every edition of Israel Hayom from this day forward. That will be our way of saluting the nation-state law, which, among other things, confirms this flag’s central and important role in the State of Israel.

Since you, our readers, naturally do not have a problem reading a newspaper that is openly patriotic, you should wonder about the controversy and antagonism that this law has generated within the Israeli public and among its politicians.

The State of Israel gave itself a very nice gift for its 70th birthday: the nation-state law – a law that defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Israel is proud of this important Zionist legislation, despite the many futile attempts to make it appear hurtful, racist or discriminatory. The law is a true source of pride for the state. I am still waiting for someone, anyone, to point to a single clause in this law that contradicts in any way the values of democracy and equality.

I would like to ask the opponents of this law: What about it upsets you? Is it the clause that talks about Israel being the historical homeland of the Jewish people, where the State of Israel was established? Or perhaps is it the clause that decisively concludes that unified Jerusalem is the capital of Israel? Could it be the one that burns into our psyche that Hebrew is the official language of this state, and the Hatikvah is its national anthem?

Professor threatens to call police on The College Fix for asking about Palestine course Christian Montoya

It’s also a women’s studies course

Tufts University is refusing to answer questions about a “Colonizing Palestine” course taught by an anti-Israel activist who is listed as a member of a group that supports violence against Israeli civilians.

Prof. Thomas Abowd doesn’t want to talk about his course either, telling The College Fix in an email that he would call the police if contacted again.

“Colonizing Palestine” shows up on the fall course list for two programs, Colonialism Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

While pro-Israel activists have criticized Tufts for offering the course, citing both its reading list and its instructor’s background, they have not questioned Abowd’s academic freedom to teach the subject.

Israel ‘illegally occupies Palestine’

“This course will explore the history and culture of modern Palestine and the centrality of colonialism in the making of this contested and symbolically potent territory,” the course description reads.

It does not mince words on its view of Israel, which “illegally occupies Palestine”:

Students will examine the region in which Palestine is embedded through a range of path breaking writers, filmmakers, and thinkers. … Themes covered include notions of nationalism and national identity, settler-colonialism, gender and sexuality, refugee politics, cultural hybridity, class politics, violence, and memory.

When Medical Innovation Meets Politics FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb on the promise and challenges of biologic drugs, capital risk and ‘regulatory arbitrage’ of generics. By Kate Bachelder Odell

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-medical-innovation-meets-politics-1535147861

An Iowa teenager last summer found himself conscripted into a national debate over health care. The state’s largest insurer, Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield, was threatening to pull out of the ObamaCare market. One reason, a Wellmark executive said, was a single patient whose care cost $1 million a month. The young man (never publicly named) has hemophilia, which prevents his blood from clotting. The standard treatment, infusions of the missing clotting factor, is expensive. In severe cases, a patient can require several infusions a day.

What if there were a cure? Researchers are developing therapies that could permanently alter a patient’s genes, allowing his body to produce the clotting element. The early results are promising. Patients would live longer, better lives. And with thousands of hemophilia cases nationwide, the potential savings for insurers—and for Medicaid—are enormous. But when?

Part of the answer depends on the Food and Drug Administration, where hundreds of applications involving gene therapy for various diseases are pending. At the helm is Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who operates without much publicity but may have the most consequential job in Washington given the furious pace of scientific change and his potential for long-term impact. For years Dr. Gottlieb, 46, wrote forcefully, often in these pages, about how to reform the FDA, including by overcoming an “excessive desire for certainty” that delays treatments.

That’s a countercultural sentiment at the FDA, where Dr. Gottlieb, who has also practiced internal medicine, was a deputy commissioner from 2005-07. Now he’s running the agency during a historic time for medical innovation.

Impeachment for Dummies By Roger L Simon

https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/impeachment-for-dummies/

At the very moment the GNP is humming along at 4.1 percent, the S & P is at record highs, and unemployment is at record lows (for blacks and Hispanics too), the infantile buffoons in the Democratic Party and their mainstream media lackeys are calling so loudly and incessantly for the impeachment of the president you’d have to be on the North Col of Everest not to hear them. And even then you’d have to be wearing the most expensive noise-canceling ear muffs extant.

And of course they are screaming equally loudly, “Russia-Russia-Russia” when anyone with an IQ within spitting distance of triple digits knows the real problem for the USA has been China by roughly 400X for the last decade or longer.

If you’re looking for someone to impeach, how about Dianne Feinstein who, we just learned, had a Chinese spy as her chauffeur for twenty years, even while she was chair of the Senate Intel Committee? At virtually the same time — 2010-ish, when Obama was president — close to the entire U.S. spy network in China, several dozen people, were apprehended by the Chinese on their soil in an unprecedented intelligence disaster. Only a few survived. Connection? Perhaps the New York Times or the Washington Post will investigate (as if).

Meanwhile, China, until quite recently and, still to a great extent, had the run of the U.S. higher educational system via thousands of exchange students and their Confucius Institutes. These are the same American universities where professors urge the president’s impeachment while promoting the virtues of socialism even though Venezuela, once by far the wealthiest country in Latin America, is imploding at an extraordinary pace with unheard of inflation, banknotes used for toilet paper, because of…. socialism.

Left declares Trump’s concern about South African farm expropriations ‘racist dog whistle’ By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/08/left_declares_trumps_concern_about_south_african_farm_expropriations_racist_dog_whistle.html

See also Rick Moran’s: Did Trump endorse ‘white nationalist conspiracy theory’ in South Africa tweet?

A hideous specter is descending over the once-promising South African political landscape: Race hate. An end to property rights. Poverty. The grotesque inequality of all socialist regimes. And an inevitable Zimbabwe-like ruin.

The country of course, has rather insanely started expropriating the country’s white-owned farms without compensation, imagining that in doing so, its government will finally make black South Africans rich and equality the reality. It’s simple: End the niceties of rule of law, and all you do is add free stuff. Or, get your free stuff (and vote for us!) How’d that work out in Venezuela? Heck, how’d that work out in Zimbabwe next door? We are looking at the most prosperous and developed nation on the African continent about to become an absolute dump in a striking parallel to its fellow formerly rich country across the Atlantic, Venezuela.

To see this happen is astonishing. South Africa 20 years ago was a nation so full of promise in its commitment to a ‘non-racial’ society. To see a smart nation like this go off the cliff like another lemming in the name of ‘equality’, after all we know about how this works out elsewhere, shows the amazing disconnect from reality that infects the minds of socialists.

On Hush Money, the President’s Best Defense Is Lack of Criminal Intent By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/trump-cohen-hush-money-president-had-lack-of-criminal-intent/

The prosecutor must establish that Trump understood that his conduct was illegal. The government is unlikely to meet such a demanding burden of proof.

You can be forgiven if you’ve forgotten there even is a Mueller investigation.

Just a week ago, the country was on tenterhooks as the jury in Paul Manafort’s trial headed into the weekend without having reached a verdict. Would they hang? Had Special Counsel Robert Mueller overreached? Did federal judge T. S. Ellis of the Eastern District of Virginia undermine the prosecutors?

Such is the permanent frenzy of the Trump news cycle that, even with Tuesday’s convictions, Manafort and Mueller seem like old news. They’ve been superseded by Michael Cohen’s guilty plea; specifically, by the fallout of Cohen’s having implicated the president in felony campaign-finance offenses during his allocution in Manhattan federal court late Tuesday afternoon — an otherworldly media moment, simultaneous with the jury verdict in Manafort’s trial 200 miles south.

“Implicate” is a loaded word.

MY SAY:THE HIVES OF AUGUST-MEDICINE’S BOLD NEW FRONTIERS

I grew up to senior level on standard laboratory tests, vaccinations, CAT scans, anti-biotics, the dazzling triumphs over heart disease that prolonged the life of millions, the absolutely infallible curative power of chicken soup, and the ministrations of my father and my late husband who were both internists.

This August I developed an acute and then progressive allergic reaction…details are boring…I feel well and remain under the treatment and guidance of wonderful doctors in varied specialties. What really dazzled me are the new frontiers of medical research today that neither my husband or father knew anything about. My granddaughter is in medical school and, fortuitously, quite aware of this new and growing research, namely, immunology, immune suppression, genetic predispositions, diagnosis to control and cure, and computational medicine with mathematical modeling of complex medical systems.

Look around you folks, many oldsters you see will be nonagenarians with active lives due to magnificent American Medicine. Don’t let “reformers” sell you on Socialized Medicine. Hold your legislators’ feet to the fire. 

However, chicken soup still works wonders on mind and body. rsk

John Bolton Warns: U.S. Wants Hezbollah Out of Syria Caroline Glick

http://carolineglick.com/john-bolton-warns-u-s-wants-hezbollah-out-of-syria/

U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview on Wednesday that the Trump administration insists “Hezbollah forces in Syria have to go back to Lebanon.”

In a wide-ranging conversation following several days of meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior Israeli defense officials, Amb. Bolton discussed the U.S. position on Iranian and Hezbollah operations in Syria and the threat they pose to Israel and to U.S. interests in the region.

Syria and Iranian deployment in Syria, he said, dominated President Donald Trump’s discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki last month. That came after Netanyahu had previously expressed grave concern regarding the threat Iran’s entrenchment in Syria poses to Israel.

In Bolton’s words: “Syria was the main topic of discussion during President Trump’s meeting with President Putin in Helsinki. This was the case both during their meeting with their advisors and during their one-on-one meeting. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s discussion of the issue during his phone call with the president earlier that week and during his visit with Putin during the FIFA [World Cup] tournament [on July 12] contributed to making Syria such an important issue.”

During his press conference with President Trump, Putin prompted concerns from critics about his intentions regarding the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.

Macron’s Partition of France? by Yves Mamou

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12909/macron-partition-france

The first legislative rider abolished the obligation of religious associations to declare themselves as lobbying groups — a measure that clearly opens the way for entities such as Muslim Brotherhood to lobby Members of Parliament without leaving a trace.

Is it, however, the business of the secular State of France to organize Muslims and train “republican” imams?

The tradition in France ever since the 1905 secularism law — one accepted by all religions except Islam — is that religion may not to impose its rules on secular society. Now it is France that must adapt to Islam.

The big question is: Who will be heading and managing this new framework? Will it be the Muslim Brotherhood, the most powerful organization, which controls more than 2,000 mosques in France? Or a young guard of Muslim technocrats close to the president but with no ties to mosques, imams and the organized Muslim community in general?

In a confessional book, “A President Shouldn’t Say That…”, published in 2016, a few months before the 2017 French presidential election, France’s then President François Hollande admitted that France has “a problem with Islam. No one doubts it,” he wrote. He wrote as well that France has a problem with veiled women in public and with mass immigration. Then he added: “How can one avoid a partition? Because that is still what is happening: a partition”.

The “partition” about which Hollande was talking was the partition of France — one part for Muslims and another for non-Muslims.

NeverTrump Turns to Porn to Make Ends Meet By Thomas Farnan

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/24/nevertrump-turns-to-porn

As Julie Kelly established in these pages last week, when stripped of its Oz-like bluster, Conservative, Inc. is just Bill Kristol behind a curtain pulling levers. The cynical purpose is to create a mirage that scares people into providing tribute to the great and powerful punditocracy.

The “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” protests that followed Kelly’s report that Kristol cribbed off the Steele dossier in July 2016 to conjure Putin’s disembodied head surrounded by fire and smoke were certainly telling, eh?

This week, for the 71st time in Trump’s presidency, the sneering smart people in Washington who are threatened by a popular movement that overruled their veto and put him in office, declared once again that it is “finally over.”

As in the campy serial cliffhanger of yore, they have the hero strapped to a conveyor belt moving slowly toward a buzzsaw. He will not be able to escape his own lawyer’s guilty plea for paying the porn star, they think.

One wonders what comes next in their fantasy. Maybe 62 million Trump voters subscribing to The Weekly Standard to read 4,000-word essays about Montenegro’s crucial but underappreciated role in NATO?