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March 2019

BOOKS Comments turned off

Why your immune system is key in the fight against cancer Harnessing the power of our immune system will be one of the most important scientific discoveries in history Daniel Davis

By on March 12th, 2019

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/immune

We are at the dawn of a health revolution. Cancer physicians agree that immune therapies – the subject of the most recent Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine – is a game-changer, and now sits alongside surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, as a mainstream option for the treatment of some types of cancer.

Crucially, neither of the two Nobel Prize winners, Jim Allison and Tasuku Honjo, directly set out to cure cancer – “that wasn’t it at all,” Allison has said – they were trying to understand how the immune system works. And this can’t be emphasised enough: curiosity-driven research won the prize and brought us new cancer medicines.

Some scientists do and should focus on understanding cancer or other diseases but we must also fund science which might seem esoteric – those who are merely asking what does this or that gene or protein do in the body – because so many of our greatest discoveries came out of left field. As cosmologist Martin Rees once wrote: “A research proposal to make flesh appear transparent wouldn’t have been funded, and even if it had been, the research surely wouldn’t have led to the X-ray.”

It was in trying to understand the details of what two specific receptor proteins did in the immune system which led Allison and Honjo to stumble upon our immune system’s brakes. They discovered brakes built into the immune system to dampen its activity after some time. Brakes act on the immune system to bring the body back to its normal resting level after a virus, for example, has been cleared from the body. This led to the idea of using medicines to block or switch off these brake receptors to unleash a stronger and longer-lasting immune response to better fight cancer.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

ERIN GO BAD- IRISH ANTI-SEMITISM….

By on March 12th, 2019

https://www.ipsc.ie/bds/in-pictures-boycott-eurovision-in-apartheid-israel-pr

With the announcement of Sarah McTernan as Ireland’s entry to the Eurovision in Israel, the Irish Campaign to Boycott Eurovision 2019 in Apartheid Israel held a large protest out RTÉ studios in Donnybrook. Campaigners handed in an additional 5,600 signatures to a petition calling on RTÉ and Ms. McTernan not to take part in the Eurovision, bringing the total number of signatures to over almost 17,000.

Addressing her comments to the Irish contestant, Zoë Lawlor, a spokesperson for the Campaign said “While we congratulate Sarah McTernan on her selection, which is a great honour for her, we must unfortunately draw the her attention to the call from Palestinian artists, journalists, LGBTQIA+ and civil society organisations for artists of conscience to refuse to take part in the Eurovision in Israel due to that state’s ongoing brutal oppression of the Palestinian people.”

Ms. Lawlor appealed for Sarah McTernan to refuse to take part: “Ireland has a proud tradition of standing with the oppressed and against injustice and we sincerely hope that Sarah McTernan will take this opportunity to stand on the right side of history by listening to the Palestinian and international calls for a boycott. It would be a principled stand for freedom, justice, equality and a show of solidarity and empathy with the oppressed.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why Pelosi Folded on Trump’s Impeachment Charles Lipson

By on March 12th, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/03/12/why_pelosi_folded_on_trumps_i

The nation’s top elected Democrat, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has now declared publicly that her party will not impeach President Trump. In a lengthy Washington Post interview published Monday, Pelosi left the door slightly ajar, saying her decision could change if “compelling” new evidence emerged. Still, hers was a significant announcement, signaling a major change in the party’s trajectory.

Why did Pelosi make the decision? Why now? What are the benefits and perils for her party and for Pelosi’s leadership?

The longtime congresswoman is a savvy strategist, and her decision was purely strategic. She made no apology for two years of unproven charges, no admission her party had been fundamentally wrong in its most basic and vocal claim since the 2016 election: that Donald Trump is not the legitimate president of the United States. He is illegitimate, they charge, because the election itself was tilted by Russia. The most incendiary charge is that Trump worked with the Russians to rig the results.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Professor Spoke the Truth, He Still Pays the Price By David French

By on March 12th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/professor-samuel-abrams-spoke-the-truth-he-still-pays-the-price/

Dissenters from campus orthodoxy often need a rare kind of personal fortitude.

Last October, Sarah Lawrence College professor Samuel Abrams wrote an important and insightful essay in the New York Times. While critics of higher education have often focused on faculty bias — in part because a small subset of professors is prone to say ridiculous things — a larger problem has gone mostly unnoticed. Abrams’s research revealed that college administrators are more uniformly progressive even than college faculties. “Liberal staff members,” he wrote, “outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one,” making them the “most left-leaning group on campus.”

At the conclusion of his piece, Abrams made an argument that rang true to my more than 20 years of litigation experience — “ideological imbalance, coupled with [administrators’] agenda-setting power, threatens the free and open exchange of ideas.”

This is exactly right. Administrators draft and enforce speech codes. Administrators are responsible for creating campus kangaroo courts. Administrators kick Christian student groups off campus, and administrators often take the lead in designing campus programming that features overwhelmingly progressive voices. While conservative media often focus their ire on random radical professors, administrators are busy engaging in the overwhelming majority of campus censorship.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Never What? By Victor Davis Hanson

By on March 12th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/bulwark-review-the-case-for-trump-response/

A sophist in service to self

I wrote a book, The Case for Trump, in an effort — as an outsider who has no career investment in Trump and has never met him or visited the Trump White House — to analyze how and why Donald J. Trump was elected president and why his agenda so far has been successful. One Gabriel Schoenfeld has just published a hysterical attack on that effort in the Bill Kristol–Charles Sykes new Bulwark, and it is emblematic of that venue’s promised Never Trump ad hominem assault on individual supporters of the president. A writer for The Atlantic recently interviewed Sykes, noting:

But in the coming months, he [Sykes] tells me, The Bulwark will home in on a specific class of “grifters and trolls” — those opportunistic Trump enablers who still get invited on Meet the Press and write for prestigious newspapers. To Sykes, these are the true sellouts, and he wants to ensure that their public flirtations with Trumpism leave a stench on them.

Though wishing to leave “a stench on them,” Schoenfeld instead gives us a sad exercise in self-abasement. And his review offers an illustration of the poverty of Never Trump personal venom and incoherence.

Reductio ad Hitlerum

In his review, Schoenfeld tosses out names such as Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, the Third Reich Jew-haters in service to Hitler, to suggest, with a wink and nod, that I play a comparable role in relation to Trump.

Schoenfeld certainly has an odd sense of timing. The same day that Schoenfeld, an adjunct Hudson fellow, leveled his smears in The Bulwark, I was speaking at his own home Hudson Institute about the book. I discussed, among other things, Trump’s support for Israel and the dangerous anti-Semitic drift of the Democratic party, a theme I repeated again that evening on television.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iranian Court Sentences U.S. Navy Veteran, Human-Rights Lawyer Judgments issued in separate cases but full picture of charges and sentences remains unclear By Sune Engel Rasmussen

By on March 12th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iranian-court-sentences-u-s-navy-veteran-human-rights-lawyer-11552347406
DUBAI—An Iranian court has sentenced a U.S. Navy veteran for an unspecified crime, according to Iranian state-linked media, in a move that threatens to further strain relations between Washington and Tehran.

Michael White was detained last year in the northeastern city of Mashhad after an individual accused him of wrongdoing, while authorities also were investigating possible security-related charges against him, an Iranian prosecutor said in January.

On Monday, the semiofficial Fars news agency quoted the prosecutor, Gholamali Sadeghi, as saying Mr. White had been sentenced but the report didn’t give any details of the verdict.

A court in Tehran, meanwhile, sentenced Nasrin Sotoudeh, a prominent human-rights lawyer who has become an international symbol of resistance in Iran, to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes, her husband wrote on Facebook Monday. State-linked media reported a different verdict, quoting the judge in the case as saying Ms. Sotoudeh had been sentenced to seven years in prison, five for conspiring against the state and two for insulting Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Ms. Sotoudeh’s husband, Reza Khandan, insisted that his wife had received the longer reported sentence, though he didn’t know the exact charges, according to the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran, which spoke to him.

The verdicts against both Mr. White and Ms. Sotoudeh underscore regular criticism from human-rights advocates and Western government’s of the opacity of Iran’s judiciary system. They have accused the courts of systematically conducting unfair trials, targeting activists and arbitrarily arresting dual and foreign nationals—often charging them with espionage or spreading propaganda, setting up their use by the government as political bargaining chips.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Brussels Jewish Museum Terrorist Sentenced to Life in Jail Mehdi Nemmouche, who was convicted of killing four people, receives the maximum possible sentence By Daniel Michaels

By on March 12th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/brussels-jewish-museum-terrorist-sentenced-to-life-in-jail-11552385511

BRUSSELS—A French-Algerian man found guilty last week of murder in a terrorist shooting at the Jewish Museum of Brussels was sentenced to life in prison, concluding the first conviction of a European who joined Islamic State in Syria and returned to stage attacks.

Mehdi Nemmouche, 33, who was convicted Thursday of killing four people in May 2014, received the maximum possible sentence, but could be released from prison under surveillance in as soon as 15 years.

“Life goes on,” Nemmouche said in court before the sentence was read, according to Belgian state broadcaster RTBF.

Nemmouche’s accomplice, Nacer Bendrer, was sentenced to 15 years for supplying him with the weapons for the attack. He could be released after five years.

The decision, reached after roughly eight hours of deliberation, was read out late Monday night, according to RTBF.

The European Jewish Congress said “this appropriate sentence sends a message that terror and anti-Semitic attacks will be judged to the fullest extent of the law.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

U.K. Parliament Votes Down May’s Brexit Deal Lawmakers’ rejection of divorce agreement with EU makes delay of Britain’s departure from bloc likely By Max Colchester and Jason Douglas

By on March 12th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-k-parliament-votes-down-mays-brexit-deal-11552418563

LONDON—British lawmakers rejected Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit divorce deal for a second time, making a delay in the U.K.’s scheduled March 29 departure from the European Union all but inevitable and intensifying political turmoil and business uncertainty.

The defeat on Tuesday—by 391 votes against to 242 in favor—opens a new chapter in Britain’s chaotic exit from the EU, a process that has already cost banks and companies billions, riven British society and splintered its political landscape.

The deal was meant to set the terms of the end of the U.K.’s decadeslong membership in the EU and its separation from a bloc that represents half of all British trade. Mrs. May’s defeat makes it likely that Parliament will force the government to delay Brexit beyond the end of the month to allow for further negotiations.

Mrs. May could now seek further concessions to her bill from the EU. However, a delayed departure increases the chances for a range of other outcomes, including another referendum over the U.K.’s membership in the EU or a general election.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Ilhan Omar Can’t Break the U.S.-Israel Bond Don’t be afraid of her silly theories about ‘the Benjamins’ and the Jews. By Walter Russell Mead

By on March 12th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ilhan-omar-cant-break-the-u-s-israel-bond-11552345065

To ask whether freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar was being anti-Semitic or merely inartful when she suggested U.S. support for Israel is driven by moneyed interests (“It’s all about the Benjamins baby”) and Americans who owe “allegiance to a foreign country” is a waste of time. Ms. Omar is a gifted and ambitious politician who thinks Jew-baiting will help her career; the question is not whether she is a nice person but whether she is a significant one. Does her appearance on the political stage herald a substantial change in American politics—either a renewed anti-Semitism or a diminished U.S.-Israel alliance?

The answer at this point is that Ms. Omar’s notoriety is more sizzle than steak. Politically, her election doesn’t mean very much. That the congressional district Keith Ellison represented for six terms chose Ms. Omar to replace him hardly represents a political earthquake. Mr. Ellison had ties to the Nation of Islam and a strongly anti-Israel record. Voters in Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District have tolerated these sentiments for some time.

Democratic Party luminaries like Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer supported Mr. Ellison in his 2017 bid to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee (he ultimately became deputy). Even before Ms. Omar, the party has been more interested in reaching an accommodation with militantly anti-Israel politics than in driving it out of the party.

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HISTORY Comments turned off

THE MYTH OF THE NON JEWISH ABRAHAM BY GERALD HONIGMAN

By on March 12th, 2019

http://q4j-middle-east.com

So, unless you’ve been away in another galaxy (but pay attention to what’s happening in our world otherwise), you’ve heard of the BDS movement, “Progressive” higher indoctrination instead of education on too many campuses, increasing worldwide anti-Semitism, and the exploits of The Three Amigas and their abettors in the USA and elsewhere by now.

My friend Cathy recently asked for help to provide a response to Arab assertions that Abraham was a Muslim and possibly Arab, and that Jews were nothing more than Arabs in disguise–unbeknown to themselves. Hey, they both like falafel.
Before tackling these subjects head-on, please permit me to provide a little background…
During the 19th century, European scholars of the Middle East–German Jews in particular–were prone to paint a picture of a tolerant Muslim world which treated non-Muslims admirably.
While it’s true that live Christians and Jews could be a better source of continuous revenue for Muslims via special taxes (the Jizyah) and such than dead ones, even though there was no Holocaust per se of Jews under Muslim domination, it’s also true that dhimmipopulations never knew what the morrow would bring.

Massacres, forced conversions, subjugation, and so forth were no strangers in the realm of Islam. And forget about non-dhimmi “Peoples of the Book”–Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, pagans, and so forth points east either converted and saw the Islamic “light” or were slaughtered. A reading of Middle Eastern Jewish scholars such as Norman Stillman, Sir Martin Gilbert, Albert Memmi, and Bat Ye’or is a must on this subject, as is newer work edited and/or authored by others like Andrew Bostom and the much maligned (especially by those who could not factuallydispute her) Joan Peters.

It seems that 19th century whitewash of Islam–which still continues–was largely done to contrast an allegedly tolerant Arab/Muslim East–where Jews are commonly known as kilab yahud, “Jew dogs,” and killers of prophets–to a historically intolerant Christian West, complete with its inquisitions, crusades, blood libels, demonization, forced ghettoization and conversions, massacres, Holocaust, and branding of the Jew as the deicide people…and that’s just for starters.
So (you ask), what does all of this have to do with Abraham?
First, keep in mind that all that we know of Abraham comes via the Hebrew Bible. That is our one and only original source.

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