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June 2025

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POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

By on June 1st, 2025

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

Despite the genocidal chants “From the river to the sea” from Israel’s ignorant antagonists, and behind the screeching and biased libels in the media, Israeli scientists and researchers work 24/7 to battle the scourges of famine, drought, and natural disasters.
They also advance state of the art defense technology that is critical in defending all democracies.
Michael Ordman’s weekly accounts of the triumphs in Israel dispel the gloom that the terrorism and blood curdling threats to Israel and America from Middle East tyrants create. rsk

POSITIVE NEWS IN A WAR
 
The first lasers to combat drones. During the Swords of Iron War, the IDF successfully intercepted dozens of drones using new laser interception systems operated by air defense personnel. Israel is the first country in the world to field high-powered, operational laser systems at scale. Rafael’s Iron Beam should be ready end-2025.
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-defense-ministry-drones-intercepted-by-laser-systems-during-war-1001511661
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/rkq073ezge#google_vignette
https://ats.org/ats-news/rafael-gears-up-for-iron-beam-launch/
 
Israel invention saves wounded Israeli. Surgeons at Hadassah Medical Center saved a young Israeli whose heart artery was torn by terrorist shrapnel. The surgeons used Israel’s unique HemaShock tourniquet (see here previously) to squeeze his blood just to his vital organs. His heart restarted while surgeons repaired the artery.
https://www.israel21c.org/a-simple-lifesaver-for-hemorrhagic-shock-or-cardiac-arrest/
 
The first Hassidic pre-army academy. Netzah Yehuda, the organization behind the founding of the Haredi Nahal unit, is set to launch a unique pre-military program designed for Chabad Hasidim. The new initiative will combine Torah study and Hasidic philosophy with preparation for meaningful military service.
https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/05/15/hasidic-movement-launchs-pre-military-academy-for-the-first-time-in-israel/
 
IDF office has Bar Mitzvah in Gaza. Reservists of the Israel Defense Forces’ 8110th “Yoav” Infantry Battalion recently celebrated the bar mitzvah of their commander in Rafah, Gaza. The commander, who had got engaged a few days earlier, had never celebrated his bar mitzvah, so his troops decided to surprise him.
https://www.jns.org/idf-officer-marks-bar-mitzvah-in-rafah-synagogue/
 
Over 1100 new immigrants enlisted. (TY Yanky) During the 2025 Spring recruitment, 1113 new immigrants enlisted in the IDF. It compares to 883 in Spring 2024 and 799 in 2023. Most of the recruits came from the US, Russia and Ethiopia. Over 700 lone soldiers joined the IDF this year – most of them new immigrants.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/they-came-to-serve-the-lone-soldiers-defending-israel-after-oct-7/ 
 
Finland buys Israeli tank protection. Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Trophy’s active armored defense system has saved the lives of many Israeli soldiers during the war. Finland’s majority government-owned Patria group will now integrate it onto its vehicles to protect them from anti-tank missiles, UAVs, and other threats.
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-finland-to-buy-rafaels-trophy-defense-system-1001510475
 
Expanding defense tech production. Israeli defense giant Elbit Systems has raised $512 million on Nasdaq to help expand its production of military systems. On 31st March, Elbit had a record $23.1 billion backlog of orders. The new cash will be used to establish more infrastructure and invest more in R&D.
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-elbit-systems-raises-512m-on-nasdaq-for-production-expansion-1001511132
 
Collapsible drone. (TY Yanky) Flying Production, a subsidiary of Israel’s Elbit Systems, has begun serial production of its new X-Intra combat drone that can carry loads up to 30kg. Stored disassembled, it fits into a padded bag that one soldier can carry, and can be deployed and operational within just two minutes.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/ubpzksl3m  https://flying-production.com/
 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
First Israeli artificial heart implantation. A medical team at Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center saved the life of a 63-year-old Israeli man with the first-ever implantation in Israel of an artificial heart. The man’s heart was replaced with a unique artificial organ made of titanium, animal-derived tissues and advanced sensors.
https://www.jns.org/medical-breakthrough-in-israel-artificial-heart-implanted-at-hadassah-ein-kerem/
 
Teen MDA trainee saves father’s life. 15-year-old Lana, from Tel Aviv, used skills from her MDA youth training to identify a life-threatening condition in her father’s brain and urged immediate hospital care.  Doctors diagnosed and treated a severe bacterial infection in his brain and said that Lana’s actions had saved his life.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/408721
 
Lone soldier saves Massachusetts doctor. Maya Ben Yitzhak, a lone IDF soldier from Chicago, saved the life of a 64-year-old Massachusetts doctor after she donated her bone marrow through Ezer Mizion. Dr. Rothenberg has been battling multiple forms of cancer since she was first diagnosed with the disease in 2014.
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-855688 
 
ECG AI for doctors. Using AI to interpret ECG readings saves time and can find things the doctor might miss. But it’s hard to stop false positives. Scientists at Israel’s Technion have developed a new AI interpretability tool, designed for photographed ECG images, that explains to the doctors the “alerts” and what can be ignored.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-04-ai-doctor-language-tool-ecg.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-025-01467-8
 
300+ at Medex France. More than 300 doctors and medical students from France, Belgium, and Switzerland attended the MedEx conference in Paris. Since the start of 2024, approximately 650 doctors have made Aliyah, with an additional 130 already arriving in 2025.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-855474

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EDUCATION, RELIGION Comments turned off

A ‘classical’ high school seeks to renew Catholicism in D.C.

By on June 1st, 2025

https://www.washingtontimes.com/staff/sean-salai/

This is a welcome development in education. It is happening with the Geneva School(Catholic) and the Emet Classical Academy(Jewish) in New York. rsk

Many high schools have developed curricula to address modern issues such as artificial intelligence, social media and green technology. But a one-of-a-kind school run by Catholics in Northeast Washington is aiming to secure the future by embracing the past.

For senior Magdalena Reminga, St. Jerome Institute’s classical education has made all the difference. Painfully shy when she arrived four years ago, she’s now preparing to attend Hillsdale College and become a speechwriter after having debated the works of Homer, Dante and William Shakespeare at the tiny campus.

“The teachers encouraged me to ask questions and drew me out of myself,” said Ms. Reminga. “I learned how to disagree and push back in discussions. It’s a beautiful feeling of camaraderie in Christ.

She’s one of 10 students graduating Monday from St. Jerome Institute, which was established in 2019 by Catholic parents struggling with a lack of traditional education options in the Archdiocese of Washington. The archdiocese, which oversees the District and suburban Maryland, is now vetting St. Jerome for approval as one of a small number of independent Catholic schools run by nonclergy.  

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard’s Double Standard on Racism by Rafael Medoff

By on June 1st, 2025

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/381799/harvards-double-standard-on-racism/

(Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His book The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews will be published on October 1, 2025, by The Jewish Publication Society / University of Nebraska Press.)

    Harvard University has shown appropriate sensitivity to the African American community by agreeing to relinquish seven photographs of half-naked Black slaves, which a professor commissioned in 1850 because he believed their physique proved they were racially inferior.

    This follows other steps Harvard has taken in recent years to make amends with African Americans, including acknowledging that it once owned slaves, promising reparations to their descendants, and changing its official seal because it included the crest of a slaveowner.

    But when will Harvard finally acknowledge other racist stains on its record—such as the friendly relations it pursued with Nazi Germany in the 1930s?

    Adolf Hitler’s foreign press spokesman, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, was given the red carpet treatment when he visited Harvard in 1934 for his 25th class reunion. Harvard maintained strong ties to Nazi-controlled German universities, especially the University of Heidelberg—even though Heidelberg fired its Jewish faculty members, instituted a Nazified curriculum, and hosted a mass book-burning. Harvard also participated in student exchange programs with Nazi universities, even though a German official said publicly that the students who were being sent to the United States would serve as “political soldiers of the Reich.”

    Harvard also hosted the officers and crew of the Nazi warship Karlsruhe when it docked in the Boston harbor in 1934. And Harvard allowed the Nazi consul-general in Boston to place a swastika wreath in the university’s chapel (in honor of Harvard alumni who fought for Germany).

    All this was exposed by Prof. Stephen Norwood in his book The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, back in 2009. Sixteen years have passed, yet Harvard still has not apologized for the pro-Nazi skeletons in its closet, even as it has been acknowledging its racist actions against Blacks. Why the double standard?

    Harvard is not the only example of an American university that has belatedly come to grips with some of its past racism, while refusing to face up to its friendliness to the racist Nazi regime.

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EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Springtime for Sinwar Notes on the pro-Hamas Left and its antecedents. Jeffrey Herf

By on June 1st, 2025

https://quillette.com/2024/05/02/springtime-for-sinwar-hamas-israel-gaza-campus-protests/

EXCERPTS: FROM QUILLETTE AN AUSTRALIAN PUBLICATION

The Hamas Charter of 1988 represented a sharp turn away from these efforts to distinguish antisemitism from anti-Zionism. The revised Statement of 2017 adopts the language of secular, leftist anti-Zionism but reaffirms Hamas’s determination to eliminate the Jewish state “from the river to the sea.” As justification for its genocidal campaign against world Jewry, Hamas’s foundational Charter invoked the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion along with Nazi propaganda that blamed the Jews for the French Revolution, World War I, World War II, and global unrest in general. The Charter is not just an expression of raw Jew-hatred; by defining its war against Israel as a war of religion, it has become one of the most important texts of reactionary ideology in world politics since the defeat of Nazism. It remains the defining statement of Hamas ideology and policy. 

I. Pre-Modern Hatred in Modern Drag

On the evening of 29 April 2024, demonstrators occupied Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, barricaded themselves inside, and refused to move until Columbia agreed to divest its endowment funds from Israel. A video published by the Free Press shows a masked person using a hammer to smash the glass in the building’s doors, before using what appears to be a bike lock to secure them. Other masked protesters build a makeshift barricade out of chairs. That evening, protesters outside the occupied building cheered its “liberation” and denounced Israeli “apartheid” and “genocide.” One young woman can be seen in a sweatshirt from Choate Rosemary Hall—one of the most expensive and exclusive private boarding schools in the United States. It is a feeder school to the Ivy League, and the alma mater of President John F. Kennedy (among other members of the American establishment). 

In unaccented American English, the supporting crowd chants that “Israel will fall! Brick by brick, wall by wall! We want all of it! Settlers, settlers go back home! Palestine is ours alone!” These young Americans at Columbia university and at other demonstrations this spring are openly—and proudly—calling for the destruction of the state of Israel. Though they have no claim to use the word “ours alone” regarding any territory in the Middle East, in the name of anti-racism and anti-imperialism, they support the “martyrs” of Hamas who aim to create an ethnically and religiously cleansed “Palestine” free of Jews.

These disgraceful scenes are one result of the emergence, over the last decade or so, of a pro-Hamas Left among the faculty and students in America’s universities. 

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BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Unholy Alliance Douglas Murray’s new book looks at the dangers posed by the burgeoning coalition of radical leftists and Islamists in the wake of 7 October.Michael M. Rosen

By on June 1st, 2025

https://quillette.com/2025/05/27/unholy-alliance-on-democracies-and-death-cults-douglas-murray-review/

A review of On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization by Douglas Murray, 240 pages, Broadside Books (April 2025)

On 21 May, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were shot dead in Washington, DC, less than a mile from the US Capitol, apparently by a radical anti-Israel activist. They were attending an event for young Jewish professionals at the Capital Jewish Museum when they were murdered by a thirty-year-old assailant subsequently identified as Elias Rodriguez by DC police.

The museum event, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, featured a multi-faith umbrella of nonprofit organisations working to respond to humanitarian crises in the Middle East and North Africa. A member of an avowedly Marxist-Leninist outfit called the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Rodriguez was heard shouting, “Free, Free Palestine!” upon his arrest. He seems to have killed his victims despite—or perhaps because of—the anodyne mission of the event they were attending. And, apparently, because he thought they were both Jews (Milgrim was Jewish, and Lischinsky was born to a Jewish father and a Christian mother).

Since Hamas’s savage invasion of Israel on 7 October 2023, radical progressives around the world have made common cause with Islamists—not only against the Jewish state, but also against ordinary Jews. Why is this happening? And what can we do about it? In his latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, the British journalist Douglas Murray approaches these challenging questions without an ethnic or religious dog in the fight. That does not make him a dispassionate observer, however, because he is committed to the defence of the free world, of which the State of Israel is a part.

Murray is therefore a longstanding supporter of the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, and an interview he gave to Rita Panahi on Sky News Australia about proportionality in war briefly went viral on social media in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s attack. Murray then made his way to the so-called Gaza Envelope to bear witness to the otherworldly carnage that followed, which he documents in his new book with frank accuracy and intensity.

Even worse, perhaps, than the grievous wound Israel suffered on 7 October is what the massacre portends for the rest of the free world. Murray believes that Israel is merely an appetizer on the menu from which global jihadists have been feasting for decades—the United States and Europe are the main dish. “[W]hat Israel stared into that day,” he writes, “is a reality we might all stare into again at some point soon—and that some of us have already glimpsed.”

Murray summarises his argument in a thesis statement that gives his book its title: “The story of the suffering and the heroism of October 7 and its aftermath,” he reckons, “is one that spells not just the divide between good and evil, peace and war, but between democracies and death cults.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democrats and Men Democrats are spending $20 million to win back men—but until they understand what men actually want, they’ll keep buying maps without learning the terrain. By Stephen Soukup

By on June 1st, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/31/democrats-and-men/

Since last November, Democrats and their friends in the media have spent a great deal of time wondering what they can do to win back male voters. Now they’re prepared to spend a great deal of money to help them figure it out. The “gender gap” in American politics was traditionally about Republicans’ inability to win over a majority of women voters, but this imbalance has more than evened out over the last few election cycles. Today, the Democrats’ struggle to win male voters—and young male voters, in particular—is as pronounced—if not more so—than their opponents’ struggle with women. Some of them, at least, would like to know why and would like to spend $20 million of their donors’ money in the process.

The explanations and consequent solutions offered so far range from the seemingly practical to the hopeless to the head-scratching. One might think that $20 million would buy something more insightful than this, but then, this is the same party that triumphantly chose Tim Walz as its vice-presidential nominee, fully expecting him to be the answer to their gender gap problem. Or in other words, don’t hold your breath.

In reality, the odds that the contemporary Democratic party will be able to win back men, now or in the foreseeable future, are vanishingly small. The party, as it is currently constituted, lacks both the will and the ability to make the changes that would be necessary to do so. What I mean by this is that the contemporary Democratic party is built on a handful of foundational notions that are, by and large, incompatible with the goal of appealing to men.

To start, historically, biologically, and evolutionarily, men need a purpose. That may sound trite or even sexist, but it’s nevertheless true. Perhaps it might be more accurate to say that men need an externally imposed purpose. Whatever the case, women, by definition, have a purpose, namely to create and nurture new life. While men are necessary to create life as well, their role is, obviously, not as involved or enduring. Once upon a time—which is to say from the dawn of history until about 50 or 60 years ago—man’s purpose, therefore, was to provide for and protect the family, to enable the nurturing of new life as safely and successfully as possible. There is an evolutionary reason that men are, generally, bigger and stronger than women—because they had to be able to hunt and work for food and defend their loved ones from danger.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What is American Conservatism? Conservatism, at its core, is a cheerful fidelity to reality—skeptical of utopias, wary of unintended consequences, and unafraid to call things by their proper names. By Roger Kimball

By on June 1st, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/06/01/what-is-american-conservatism/

“To be deceived about the truth of things and so to harbor untruth in the soul is a thing no one would consent to.”
— Plato, The Republic

Let me start with the genus. What is conservatism? The answer? It is cheerful allegiance to the truth. This is especially true of conservatism’s American variant. Conservatism in America has some distinctive features, traceable mostly to two things: the Founders’ vision of limited government supporting individual liberty and the historical accidents of newness, on the one hand, and geographical amplitude and separateness on the other.

Although it may sometimes seem that conservatives are constitutionally averse to cheerfulness, writing works with titles such as Leviathan, The Decline of the West, The Waste Land, and Slouching Towards Gomorrah, by habit and disposition, I submit, conservatives tend, as a species, to be less gloomy than—than what? What shall we call those who occupy a position opposite that of conservatives? Not liberals, surely, since the people and policies that are called “liberal” are so often conspicuously illiberal, i.e., opposed to freedom and all its works.

Indeed, when it comes to the word “liberal,” Russell Kirk came close to the truth when he observed that he was conservative because he was a liberal, that is, a partisan of ordered liberty and the habits and institutions that nurture it. (Is that another definition of conservatism?) In any event, whatever the opposite of conservatives should be called—perhaps John Fonte’s marvelous coinage “transnational progressives” is best, though the old standby “Leftists” will do—they tend to be gloomy, partly, I suspect, because of disappointed utopian ambitions.

Conservatives also tend to enjoy a more active and enabling sense of humor than leftists. Has anyone ever accused Elizabeth Warren of having a sense of humor? How about Rachel Maddow? Or Jamie Raskin?

The nineteenth-century English essayist Walter Bagehot once observed that “the essence of Toryism is enjoyment.” What he meant, I think, was summed up by the author of Genesis when that sage observed that “God made the world and saw that it was good.” Conservatives differ from progressives in many ways, but one important way is in the quantity of cheerfulness and humor they deploy. Not that their assessment of their fellows is more sanguine.

On the contrary, conservatives tend to be cheerful because they do not regard imperfection as a moral affront. Being soberly realistic about mankind’s susceptibility to improvement, they are as suspicious of utopian schemes as they are appreciative of present blessings.

Conservatives, that is to say, are realists. Like Plato, they recoil from the prospect of being fundamentally out of touch with reality.

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