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January 2024

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Gaza War: It isn’t Over Until it is Over by Amir Taheri

By on January 7th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20277/gaza-not-over

The usual suspects in the Middle East peacemaking industry are already beginning to recycle their old and discredited ideas. President Joe Biden, sounding like a dummy for the ventriloquist Barack Obama, is talking of “a two-state solution: one for the Israelis and one for the Palestinians.”

The optimists forget that what turned Gaza into the hell-hole it has become wasn’t economic hardship. Before October 7, Gaza had a lower unemployment rate than the West Bank, Jordan and Egypt. In the first two quarters of 2023, the Gaza economy grew by four percent while that of the West Bank remained almost static.

One Iranian IRGC analyst, writing in the force’s Fars News site last week, indicates that Tehran does not expect a Hamas victory but wants it to “continue fighting as long as possible” so that more and more Israelis see that the best option is to leave.

Tehran also promises to throw more of its regional assets, including the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Yemeni Houthis and various outfits in Iraq and Syria into the fray, albeit in small doses so that Iran not be dragged into the war itself.

What turned Gaza into the hell-hole it has become wasn’t economic hardship. Thanks to international aid and donations, Gaza ranked ahead of Iran as percentage of GDP allocated to health and education. At the same time, Hamas did not need to fund its military and the tunnels it dug through taxation, as Tehran covered much of the cost.

As the war in Gaza enters its third month, the short-attention span syndrome that characterizes our age swings in full gear to reduce it to a version of background noise. You might have noticed that the war is bowing out of front pages and dropped down several slots in TV news bulletins.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

‘This Is the Tipping Point’ — Canadian Jewish Business Firebombed, Defaced with ‘Free Palestine’ Graffiti

By on January 7th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/this-is-the-tipping-point-canadian-jewish-business-firebombed-defaced-with-free-palestine-graffiti/?utm_

A Jewish-owned grocery store in Toronto was firebombed and defaced with “Free Palestine” graffiti early Wednesday morning.

“I’ve been a criminal investigator the vast majority of my career, and in most of those criminal investigations, there was a tipping point. This is this tipping point,” Toronto Police Service spokeswoman Pauline Gray said outside the vandalized International Delicatessen Foods building, which is located in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood.

“This is not graffiti on a bus shelter. This is not lawful protest protected by constitutional right. This is a criminal act. It is violent, it is targeted, it is organized, and it will receive the weight of the Toronto Police Service to exactly what it deserves,” Gray continued. “We will leave no stone unturned. We will use all the resources available to us to investigate, arrest and prosecute who is responsible for this.”

Ya’ara Saks, the Liberal Party parliamentary representative for the district, condemned the apparent hate crime in a public note. “I have just learned the shocking news of the attack in #YorkCentre at the Jewish-owned local business International Delicatessen Foods. With each brazen act of incitement and of violence, the cycle of antisemitism and hateful acts increases. This must stop,” Saks, a minister in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, wrote Wednesday afternoon.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Canadian Medical Leader Resigns from University Posting, Citing Campus Antisemitism By Ari Blaff

By on January 7th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/canadian-medical-leader-resigns-from-university-posting-citing-campus-antisemitism/

A veteran medical professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) resigned his academic post citing the school administration’s indifference to campus antisemitism.

Over 200 medical students signed a petition following the 10/7 atrocities denouncing Israel as a “settler colonial state,” guilty of “collective punishment.”  The public letter made no reference to Hamas nor the hundreds of Israeli civilians taken hostage by the Palestinian terror group. “UBC’s declared support for decolonization and practices of equity, diversity and inclusion ring hollow in light of this partisan approach,” the document, which was also signed by over 100 faculty members across the university, argued in late October.

The petition was a response to an official communication from UBC on October 11 which expressed “heartfelt condolences to those in our community who are grieving incomprehensible loss and hoping for the safe return of their loved ones.” “As this conflict deepens and innocent civilians are caught in the tragic repercussions in Israel, Gaza and elsewhere, the implications are distressing for those with families and friends affected,” the letter, authored by the school’s interim president, wrote.

The professor cited the petition and the administration’s failure to address campus antisemitism as the driving force behind his departure. “One third of the medical students and some faculty, have publicly expressed their contempt towards me, as a Jew. I cannot take the risk of being accused of implicit harassment or racism, which is indefensible, by a ‘triggered’ student,” Ted Rosenberg, a family medicine academic at UBC for three decades wrote to the medical school dean.

“Unfortunately, I have no faith in due process in a faculty that does not even acknowledge the existence or presence of antisemitism/Jew-hatred, or my right to work in a depoliticized environment.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Claudine Gay’s tyranny of DEI The career of Harvard’s disgraced president reveals the sickness at the heart of the Ivy League. Tom Slater

By on January 7th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/07/claudine-gays-tyranny-of-dei/

With her ousting this week, Claudine Gay has the dubious honour of being both the shortest-lived president of Harvard University and its most notorious. As significant as America’s most prestigious university is to the rest of the world, producing the future leaders who will rule over the nation that we are all both privileged and cursed to live downstream of, few outside the American elites pay much attention to it, or notice when the deckchairs are shuffled among its leadership team. Not so for Gay. Her resignation – following her woeful response to anti-Semitism on campus and revelations about rampant plagiarism in her academic work – made headlines the world over. For it was a pivotal moment in the clash of values that has been raging in American academia, and spilling out across the West.

This clash centres on DEI, ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ – an ideology that, like so many of the most malignant ideologies today, is presented as something only a monster could oppose. In truth, while dolled up in the language of anti-racism, DEI represents a divisive, racialised worldview – and a corresponding set of policies – that has taken hold in higher education, corporate capitalism and the state. Roughly speaking, it amounts to the institutionalisation of left identity politics and all the ugly things that come with it: concepts of permanent black victimhood and permanent white guilt; racial discrimination revived in ‘progressive’ garb; and an authoritarian bureaucracy to punish wrong-think and ‘protect’ minorities from anything that might offend their allegedly delicate sensibilities. Even at a university, where merit and free speech are supposed to reign.

At Harvard, Gay was its totem. She became president two days after the US Supreme Court’s decision to strike down racial preferences in higher education, euphemistically referred to as ‘affirmative action’. Harvard was a key focus of the case. Its policies were found to have discriminated against Asians to free up places for blacks and Hispanics. The policy had been exposed as an immoral failure. Not only were students – including non-white students – being discriminated against, but the most well-to-do black Americans – many of them the children of wealthy black immigrants – had long been affirmative action’s primary beneficiaries. Gay vowed to respect the ruling, while hinting that Harvard would find a way around it. ‘We will comply with the court’s decision, but it does not change our values’, she said. Harvard would ‘continue opening doors’.

This was pure doublespeak. Gay, who was dean of Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences before she ascended to the presidency, presided over policies and initiatives aimed at closing minds and carving students up according to race. Christopher Rufo, the conservative crusader who helped expose Gay’s rampant plagiarism, has catalogued the materials pushed on Harvard students by Gay’s diversitycrats. They propagandised that America is marred by ‘systemic racism’ and ‘weaponised whiteness’. Students, Rufo notes, were encouraged to ‘unpack’ their ‘white privilege’, ‘male privilege’ and ‘white fragility’ – a word, popularised by author Robin DiAngelo, used to demonise those who dare push back against the lectures of race experts.

How DEI fuels anti-Semitism

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

From Insurrection to Satire: Biden’s Valley Forge Speech Fails to Cement the Trump-Dictator Narrative Roger Kimball

By on January 7th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/07/from-insurrection-to-satire-bidens-valley-forge-speech-fails-to-cement-the-trump-dictator-narrative/

I would not be surprised if future historians singled out Joe Biden’s Valley Forge speech as the moment his campaign began its final retreat into senile collapse.

How deeply has Donald Trump burrowed into the psyche of the Democratic establishment?  I’d say the takeover is nearly total.  For proof, you need only contemplate the alarming pantomime that Joe Biden just acted out at Valley Forge.  It lacked the totalitarian, Riefenstahlich trappings of his speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in Sept. 2022. At that time, the President’s puppeteers believed that they could scare voters by turning the acronym “MAGA” into a negative epithet and affixing the extreme-sounding intensifier “ultra” to its front end.

They managed to scare themselves, but hardly anyone else. By the fall of 2022, the wrecking ball that is Joe Biden’s administration had already smashed its way through the American economy, our southern border, and our foreign policy.  Suddenly, “Make America Great Again” sounded like a pretty good formula.  And if Trump and his supporters were advocating “MAGA with knobs on,” then why not?

That’s what more and more of that most irritating cohort, voters, seemed to think.

Biden’s handlers attempted a variation on the Independence Hall theme at Valley Forge.  Noting the date, they decided to take a risk and memorialize the jamboree at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. That prefabricated entertainment, brought to you by deep state actors like Nancy Pelosi with an assist from extras supplied by Trump Industries, Inc., was at the time baptized as a frontal assault on “Our Democracy™,” the worst thing since 9/11, nay, since Pearl Harbor or the Civil War.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

By on January 7th, 2024

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

While the “river to the sea” thugs harass diners and shop owners and disturb traffic on bridges and airports, and spoil holiday traditions here in America, in Israel, as Michael Ordman catalogs, research and developments in medicine, science and technology proceed beyond the sirens and screeching headlines of an ongoing war. rsk

“Several welcome potential cures were undergoing human trials last week. A stent for blocked leg arteries; Nitric Oxide for cancer; and a device to prevent delirium in immobile hospital patients.  New Israeli technology includes a system that welcomes you and then parks your car automatically. And now that welcome rains have arrived, a solar farm’s systems redirect the water to irrigate crops efficiently. “ Michael Ordman

POSITIVE NEWS DURING A WAR
 
More heroes of Oct 7. (TY UWI) Brothers Daniel and Neria Sharabi, saved dozens of lives at the Supernova music festival on Oct 7 by providing fire cover for escapees with weapons they found in a tank, while receiving instructions over the phone from an IDF officer. They also treated the wounded who were hiding with them.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/brothers-saved-dozens-at-nova-fighting-terrorists-with-commanders-phoned-in-advice/
 
Operation Hug. Some very emotional scenes as Nefesh b’Nefesh flies out parents to Israel to greet their lone soldier children serving in combat units. There is no guarantee that the IDF will release the soldiers to meet up with their parents but just see the reaction when they do! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw8T6_lfvTk   
https://www.nbn.org.il/operation-hug/  https://twitter.com/i/status/1740680579639882126
https://worldisraelnews.com/watch-french-lone-soldier-reunites-with-family-after-9-months/
 
Support for parents of IDF soldiers. Parents Beyachad is a worldwide group of parents of IDF soldiers. They have enlisted famous personalities to record 60+ video messages of support.
https://www.jns.org/wire/video-messages-provide-support-to-parents-of-idf-soldiers/
https://www.parentsbeyachad.org/
 
Word of the Year – Resilience. Israel21c’s Word of the Year for 2023 is Resilience. Israeli NGO Eran defines it as “the ability to enlist internal resources such as flexible thinking, creativity and a willingness to receive help, together with external resources, in order to overcome the challenges and obstacles that always face us.”
https://www.israel21c.org/israels-word-of-the-year-for-2023-is-resilience/  https://en.eran.org.il/
 
Showers, tailor, laundry, beds. Not a John le Carre book, but some of the innovative mobile services that Israelis have developed to provide IDF soldiers with basic necessities. Thanks to Brothers and Sisters for Israel, (see here) the NGO Restart (see here), Rabbi Shai Graucher (see here), and Bentov Ellipsis.
https://nocamels.com/2023/12/beds-baths-beyond-israelis-get-creative-to-support-the-troops/  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPIQpTKUg1k  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eTya3ufLZo
https://www.bentov.net/  https://vimeo.com/882815262
 
The spirit of wounded soldiers. These brave soldiers send out such positive inspirational messages.
https://www.jns.org/a-rare-glimpse-into-the-recovery-of-wounded-soldiers/
 
Just see what Israelis can recycle. IDF reservist Dan Levit is VP of R&D at Israel’s U-Tron Parking. He assembled a team to rehabilitate 24 decommissioned IDF tanks and then trained volunteers to operate them. The appropriately named “Phoenix” tank battalion is already seeing action in Gaza. And the IDF wants more.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/fixing-up-old-tanks-and-recruiting-old-reservists-a-tech-vp-creates-a-new-battalion/  
 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Cure for Peripheral Artery Disease sounds good. Israel’s NovaPulse has developed a “virtual” stent that opens blocked arteries in the legs. The implant sits just under the skin on the leg; when the patient moves, they generate ultrasound waves that dilate the implant, allowing oxygenated blood to flow from the heart.
https://nocamels.com/2023/12/virtual-stent-uses-sound-waves-to-open-blocked-leg-arteries/
https://medxelerator.com/almeda-ventures-joins-medx-xelerator-and-israel-innovation-authority-in-vascular-medtech-startup-novapulse-investment/
 
Nitric Oxide for cancer. Israel’s Beyond Air (see here previously) has partnered with US-based Beyond Cancer to produce a form of immunotherapy for solid tumors known as ultra-high concentration nitric oxide (UNO). The ultra-high concentration of UNO is undergoing Phase 1 human trials.
https://nocamels.com/category/news-briefs/#post-126279
 
Restoring sanity in the ICU. Two Israeli hospitals (Beilinson and Assuta Ashdod) are trialing the innovative communication headset for locked-in patients developed by Israel’s EyeControl (see here previously). They want to see if it can reduce the incidences of delirium (nightmares & hallucinations) in ICU patients.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-med-tech-companys-innovative-headset-could-reduce-delirium-in-icu-patients/
 
Computer games can lift depression. Neuroscientist Prof. Moshe Bar co-founded Israel’s Hedonia and created the computer game Mood Bloom to reduce negative feelings. It is based on a therapy called Facilitating Thought Progression (FTP) in which mini games require the player to focus less on circular thoughts.  
https://nocamels.com/2023/12/hedonia-mood-bloomanxiety-depression-mobile-app/
 
Rehabilitating wounded soldiers. More on the Kemtai AI-powered virtual physiotherapist (see here previously) that Israel’s medical institutions and organizations are using to help get wounded IDF service people on the journey back to health.  https://vimeo.com/707320029
https://nocamels.com/2024/01/virtual-physio-helping-wounded-soldiers-on-road-to-recovery/
 
 
ISRAEL IS INCLUSIVE AND GLOBAL
 
Guardian angels. (TY UWI) The all-female IDF Sky Rider unit operates the drones (UAVs) that protect troops on the ground.  Read here about a battle where they were the eyes in the sky for the 13th Battalion in one of the major battles of the ground incursion Gaza and helped the soldiers on the ground emerge unscathed.
https://www.jns.org/the-guardian-angels-of-golanis-13th-battalion-recall-dramatic-encounter/
 
Friends despite the war. (TY Diana Bletter) Two Jews and two Muslims share an apartment run by Kivunim, an organization that helps young adults with disabilities. Despite Oct 7, the four flat mates get along just as before. Kivunim’s 45 apartments in Nahariya and Haifa house some 120 residents with disabilities.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/at-group-home-in-nahariya-bond-between-muslim-and-jewish-young-adults-survives-oct-7/   https://www.kvn.org.il/en/about/  
 
No cycle of violence here. (TY Diana Bletter) Zippy Schrager, a 56-year-old Rabbi’s daughter, manages a cycle repair shop in Mailiya, a Christian Arab village in the Western Galilee, just 12 miles from Lebanon. Zippy learned how to fix bikes from the shop co-owner Ron Boutillier who is currently on IDF reserve duty.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/amid-gaza-war-a-us-born-jewish-woman-mans-a-christian-arab-towns-bike-shop/
 
Man of the Year. (TY UWI) Frontpage Magazine’s Man of the Year is the IDF Soldier. It writes, “In a year of defeatism and surrender, he is fighting back… The men on the front lines are not the politicians or the generals, they’re among the 360,000 reservists … who left behind their homes, families, and jobs to go and fight.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/frontpage-magazines-man-of-the-year-the-idf-soldier/  
 
Zionist Leadership Academy. (TY Sharon) KKL-JNF and the WZO’s Zionist Leadership Academy is a 10-month program to develop young global leaders who will strengthen connections between their communities and Israeli institutions. Read about the recent mission to Israel of 18 program graduates from 14 countries.
https://baltimorejewishlife.com/news/news-detail.php?SECTION_ID=37&ARTICLE_ID=169222
https://www.wzo.org.il/department/pioneering-youth-and-future-generations/zionist-leadership-academy/en
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh5xnJ5cnzk

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