RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/the-paving-of-a-former-shin-bet-chiefs-path-in-politics/

Two days before Iran attacked Israel with hundreds of drones and missiles, Channel 12’s investigative current-affairs program “Uvda” conducted an in-depth interview with former Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) director Nadav Argaman. The teasers for the broadcast, hosted by Ilana Dayan, promised bombshell revelations about the Oct. 7 massacre.
Despite the left-wing slant of the well-known TV show, viewers across the political spectrum tuned in on Thursday night to watch it. Reeling from and in the throes of Hamas’s invasion of Israel’s southern border six months ago—when its sadistic foot soldiers committed the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust—everyone in the country remains hungry for any sliver of information that might shed light on the travesty.
Capabilities that Israelis had always taken for granted were intelligence-gathering and security. The failure of both prior to and during that “Black Sabbath” shook a core communal foundation.
The question of how the government and Israel Defense Forces weren’t prepared for the mass enemy onslaught, and therefore didn’t prevent or put an immediate stop to it, still lingers, unanswered. That 133 hostages have yet to be freed by their brutal captors in Gaza makes the national need to understand what happened on Oct. 7 even more pressing.
Argaman was invited by Dayan to explain it. After all, he served for decades in the Shin Bet, which he headed for more than five years, starting in 2016. And it was Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu who appointed him to the position.
Anyone hoping to be enlightened by the hyped-up dialogue was let down, however. Other than Dayan, of course, who achieved her transparent aim of having an “expert” blame Bibi for the debacle.
It was a no-brainer that Argaman would deliver the goods. He’s been an “anybody but Bibi” activist since early 2023, when he signed a letter condemning the Netanyahu coalition’s initiative to reform Israel’s judicial system.

Yes, he was one of the hysterics claiming that such a move would constitute the death of democracy and the birth of Bibi as a full-fledged dictator. Raising the issue with Dayan, he argued, “This government is ultimately responsible for Oct. 7, because the judicial overhaul is what led to the weakening of Israel in the eyes of our enemies.”

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

Israel and its allies have just defended the Jewish State from hundreds of drones and missiles launched by Iran and almost all of the projectiles were intercepted.  This newsletter was compiled before the news of that attack. Michael Ordman

Even the neutral to unfriendly reporters praised Israel’s response to modern and high tech Pharaohs.

The National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby said to CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union :Israel’s response to Iran’s attack ‘was an incredible success’. rsk

POSITIVE NEWS DURING A WAR
 
Fallen soldier saves five lives. (TY Yanky) The family of fallen IDF soldier Sivan Weil donated his organs. His heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, and pancreas saved five seriously ill patients at Israel’s Sheba, Hadassah, and Beilinson Medical Centers. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-794971  
https://www.timesofi srael.com/liveblog_entry/parents-of-soldier-killed-in-gaza-say-organs-donated/
 
Protection at sea. For the first time, Israel deployed the C-Dome naval point defense system on a recently commissioned Sa’ar 6-class corvette to intercept an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that had entered its airspace near the southern city of Eilat. Here is an article about the event and the timely implemented new system.
https://www.jns.org/in-first-israels-ship-mounted-iron-dome-downs-target-near-eilat/
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/b10lmpmga
https://worldisraelnews.com/watch-enemy-drone-shot-down-by-ship-mounted-interceptor/  (see video)
 
Rebuilding the South. Israel’s Ben Gurion University has launched “Way Forward” – a campaign to raise $1 billion for rebuilding the Negev region devastated on Oct 7. It will fund capital projects ($500 million), student aid ($250 million), and research excellence ($250 million). Philanthropists have already donated $380 million.
https://www.jns.org/ben-gurion-university-launches-1-billion-campaign-to-rebuild-south/
 
How life can change. Danielle graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Music. She started a bureaucratic job with the UK Government. Then she went to The UK Limmud Conference, and now she is executive director of Israel’s Volcani International Partnerships, repairing devastated farms in southern Israel.
https://www.israel21c.org/danielle-abraham-fixing-the-farms-that-hamas-ruined-and-fighting-global-hunger/
 
A positive BBC interview of 3 Israeli students! Has the perpetually anti-Israel BBC journalist Jeremy Bowen finally seen the light? There was little to complain about his five-minute interview of three students from Israel’s Ben Gurion University who fought against Hamas in Gaza. Apart from some unsympathetic questions.
https://americansforbgu.org/bbc-student-reservist-interview/
 
Why Israelis are happy despite the war. Historian Gil Troy wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that the essence of Israeli happiness lies not in the absence of conflict, but in the deep social cohesion, enduring family ties, and a rich tapestry of tradition and history that bind its people, especially evident after Oct 7.
https://israfan.com/2024/04/11/unity-amid-adversity-the-secret-to-israels-remarkable-happiness/
 
 
ISRAEL’S  MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
A nano-polymer to deliver chemo. Researchers at Israel’s Ben Gurion University have developed a nanometer size polymer containing a peptide for delivering chemotherapy. In lab tests, it was over 50% successful in destroying resistant liver metastases (secondary cancer) materialized from colorectal cancer.
https://www.bgu.ac.il/en/news-and-articles/new-nanomedicine-succeeded-in-treating-metastatic-colon-cancer/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1748013224000379
 
The arms race in the gut. Ben Gurion University scientists have just published the results of their work reported here in 2019. In trying to develop a biologic remedy to reduce the methane produced by cows, they have uncovered a war in the intestines between good and bad bacteria and a probiotic toxin that tries to mediate.
https://www.jpost.com/science/article-795199   https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-023-01521-9
 
Fast-tracking cure for hospital infections. The US FDA has granted Fast-Track Designation to the groundbreaking antimicrobial peptide OMN6 from Israel’s Omnix Medical (see here previously). OMN6 is commencing a Phase II trial in patients with two deadly hospital-acquired pneumonias – HABP and VABP.
https://omnixmedical.com/2024/02/20/omnix-medical-granted-fast-track-designation-by-u-s-fda-for-its-next-generation-anti-infective-omn6/
 
Confirming Deep TMS treats depression. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s BrainsWay’s has published another positive study of 247 depression patients receiving its Deep Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation treatment. 60% went into remission and 80% had a positive response. The results confirmed a 2023 study of 1,350 patients.
https://www.brainsway.com/news_events/brainsway-announces-positive-results-in-late-life-depression-post-marketing-analysis/
 
Improving mental health in the Police force. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s XRHealth (see here previously) is to deploy its VR/AR solution in a specially equipped “quiet room” at every police station throughout Israel. It aims to promote mental health resilience, decrease stress, anxiety, and aggression, and improve performance.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/xrhealth-awarded-contract-israeli-police-120000609.html
 
Israelis are living longer. The number of Israelis aged 75 and over is growing by about 9,000 individuals per year. Life expectancy in Israel is 85 years for women and 82 years for men and continues to increase. Currently some 346,000 people receive elderly care benefits (e.g. home caregiver) as compared to about 180,000 in 2018.
https://www.jns.org/researchers-call-to-reform-long-term-care-as-israelis-live-longer/
 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20565/israel-standing-alone

Israel is currently facing a multi-front war for its survival, with Qatar, Iran and Iran’s proxies, which are encircling Israel, leading the charge. The gravity of this aggression cannot be overstated: not just for the existence of Israel, but also for that of the US, Europe and the West.

Israel’s struggle for survival is not solely a regional conflict; it is a battle between civilization and those who think international law, human rights and the rules of war are a Western joke. Since the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, its rulers have been calling for “Death to America” – now also demanded in Dearborn, Michigan.

Which side is the US on? President Joe Biden’s legacy, especially after surrendering Afghanistan to the Taliban in 2021, will be “Biden, friend of the Terrorists.”

All the US would have to do to stop much of Iran’s bellicosity is take out the bases of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) inside Iran — so there is a direct cost to Iran, not just to its human shields.

Iran, on the way to having nuclear bombs, has provided support to terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and the Houthis, all of which have vowed to annihilate Israel. Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, boasts an arsenal of an estimated 150,000 missiles, many precision-guided, aimed at Israel’s population. Meanwhile, Hamas has demonstrated its willingness to commit a genocide, launching more than 12,000 indiscriminate rocket attacks just since October at civilian targets in Israel, a country the size of New Jersey.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has outlined his vision for Israel’s demise in his book, Palestine, a 416-page “guide to destroying Israel,” and railing against “The Great Satan,” the United States. This is not a hypothetical scenario; it is a meticulously planned campaign of annihilation.

While the Biden administration is threatening to withhold life-saving arms from Israel, the Biden administration just rewarded both of its chief attackers, Iran and Qatar.

The Biden administration just actually invited Hamas’s main funder, Qatar, to operate a planned pier in Gaza to bring in humanitarian aid. All of it will certainly end up with Hamas, not Gazan civilians — and, one can imagine what else Qatar will allow in, from heavy weapons to more terrorists.

A Hamas “victory,” incentivizing aggression, cannot be rewarded; it must be stopped.

https://www.jns.org/hippocrates-and-hypocrisy/

Israel ought to have its head examined. Its bleeding heart could use a check-up, too.

Both became painfully clear this week and by no means for the first time. Whatever the prognosis, one thing is certain: Only a serious disorder could explain the Jewish state’s provision of top-notch medical care for a member of Hamas’s Nukhba force, which led to the Oct. 7 massacre.

A healthy response to the perversion ensued, however. When word got out on Wednesday that the wounded terrorist was being treated at Hadassah Mount Scopus Medical Center in Jerusalem, Herzl Hajaj—whose 22-year-old daughter, Shir, was killed in a 2017 ISIS-inspired truck-ramming attack—went on the offensive.

“Shame on Hadassah Mount Scopus for treating terrorists who murdered, raped, butchered and humiliated our daughters, our loved ones and the entire people of Israel,” he posted on X. “The time has come for Health Minister Uriel Buso … to issue an order to hospitals not to treat terrorists.”

He then called on his social-media followers to protest the “depraved action” of Hadassah, which “has forgotten the terrible massacre and what these despicable terrorists did to our daughters and the people of Israel. We do not forget and will not be silent.”

Shortly thereafter, dozens of angry demonstrators stormed the halls of the hospital. Hajaj, a member of the Choose Life Forum and an activist against the cushy conditions of Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails, showed up to express his outrage.

“Is this where the terrorist son of a bitch is hospitalized?” he shouted at the Hadassah staffers and armed guards protecting the door of the intensive-care unit room where the Nukhba commando lay hooked up to an IV. “Is the terrorist hospitalized here? Take him out of here, not us.”

https://worldisraelnews.com/a-middle-east-quiz-for-pundits-and-protesters/

The six-month anniversary of the savage Hamas terrorist attack of October 7 came and went, and I was left with the feeling that less and less of the American politicians, TV talking heads, protesters, and so-called journalists, who feel they must comment about Israel, should not be.

Far too many just don’t know the simple historical facts needed to intelligently speak about this war. They refer all the time to what they call Palestine, “the Israeli occupation,” “Israeli apartheid,” and “the Israeli settlements”, which shows they lack a basic understanding of simple facts.

How many of these so-called arbiters of truth do you think would be able to pass a simple quiz? Could they even score a 50%? And if they could not, what drives them to speak out so harshly against Israel?

How many pundits and protesters could score a 50% on the below short quiz?

1. What year was the First Zionist Congress held?

This founding Zionist meeting was held in Switzerland in 1897.

The idea that Zionism originated as a response to German Nazism is false as is the claim that the Zionists wanted a Jewish State outside of the Holy Land and Jerusalem. The anthem selected at the 1897 Congress included the words “The land of Zion and Jerusalem.”

The false claims about Zionism’s origins and goals were created to portray Zionism as having been created to further European colonialism and solve the European problem of antisemitism. Antisemitism was never only a European hatred and was just as strong or stronger in Islamic majority countries.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/11/bidens-creeping-betrayal-of-israel/

‘Just call for a ceasefire…’ It was the offhand nature of Joe Biden’s haughty instruction to Israel this week, the insouciance of it, that felt most jarring. Just call for a ceasefire, he told ‘the Israelis’, like it was no big deal. Like it’s an easy thing to do to lay down arms against an army of racist terrorists that has already slain a thousand of your citizens and promises to slay thousands more. Like it’s a simple decision to pause a war for your very survival against a medieval movement that was founded with the express intention of wiping you from the face of the Earth. ‘Relax, stop fighting, it will be fine’, Biden was essentially saying, taking his geopolitical idiocy to dizzying new heights.

It was in an interview with Spanish-language network Univision that he issued his breezy decree to Israel. It was recorded last Wednesday but it only aired this week. As you might expect, it’s caused a storm. What I want, said the puffed-up president, is for ‘the Israelis to just call for a ceasefire… for the next six, eight weeks’. That way, more ‘food and medicine’ can get into Gaza, he said. He slammed Benjamin Netanyahu. ‘I think what he’s doing is a mistake. I don’t agree with his approach’, said our armchair general. Imagine the quantity of brass neck it requires for the leader of a nation that has waged bloody war after bloody war these past 20 years to lecture Israel about its fight against an enemy that poses a very real existential threat.

There was the pungent whiff of hypocrisy to Biden’s sermonising. He fumed about the accidental killing of those seven aid workers in an Israeli airstrike. It was ‘outrageous’, he said, how the aid workers’ vehicles were ‘hit by drones and taken out on a highway’. It was indeed awful. But Biden of all people ought to know that grave errors happen in the violent maelstrom of war. His own military forces accidentally killed hundreds of civilians and allies in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. In one especially dreadful incident, American bombs laid waste to 37 souls at an Afghan wedding party in late 2008. Twenty-three of the dead were kids. ‘Stop killing Afghan civilians’, the then president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, pleaded with the freshly elected Barack Obama. And who was Obama’s vice-president in that era of friendly fire horror? Biden.

https://dianebederman.com/nothin-says-lovin-like-a-baby-in-the-oven-and-islam-does-it-best/

In case you didn’t know – nothing has changed. When it comes to the Jews, Muslims are the Nazis of today. And once again, the West stands with the wrong side. Or, to put it more precisely – Same S*** Different Day

Muslim barbarians, who had been sitting  at the gate, broke through and entered Israel on October 7 and massacred 1200 people; in their homes and at a Music Festival! They didn’t just murder: they raped and pillaged, diced and sliced, including a child from the womb of a pregnant woman, decapitated, Jewish men, women and children: murdered for the crime of being Jewish. Muslim murderers went house to house in search of unarmed civilians. Muslim civilians aided and abetted Hamas in looting and hostage taking and, of course, celebrating. Many of the victims were still in pajamas when they were hunted down. Killings were carried out in close quarters, victims executed one by one in their kitchens, bathrooms and bomb shelters.

These Muslims looked everywhere, behind every nook and cranny, for Jews-including behind rocks and trees.

It was reported that Ibn ‘Umar (may Allah be pleased with them both) said: “I heard the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) saying: ‘You (i.e. Muslims) will fight against the Jews and you will gain victory over them. The stones will (betray them) saying: ‘O ‘Abdullah (i.e. slave of Allah)! There is a Jew hiding behind me; so kill him.’ 1 This Hadith was reported by Al-Bukhari.

Ibn ‘Umar (may Allah be pleased with them both) said that he heard the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) saying: “The Antichrist will pass by this salty barren area i.e. Madinah, in a passage of a canal. Most of those who will come out to him will be women so that a man will return to his intimate wife, mother, daughter, sister or aunt to tie them up for fear that they might go out to him. Then, Allah will afflict him with Muslims who kill him and his followers and the Jews will hide behind a tree or a rock and the rock or the tree will say to the Muslim: There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!” 3 This Hadith was reported by Ahmad in his Musnad.

https://www.jns.org/it-aint-over-til-its-over/

Marking on Sunday six months since the Oct. 7 massacre, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened his weekly Cabinet meeting by listing what he called the “considerable achievements” of the war in Gaza.

“We have eliminated 19 of Hamas’s 24 battalions, including senior commanders,” he said. “We have killed, wounded or captured a large number of Hamas terrorists. We have cleared out Shifa [Hospital in Gaza City] and other terrorist command centers.”

He went on, “We have destroyed rocket factories, command centers and weapons caches. And we are continuing to systematically destroy underground installations.”

Netanyahu punctuated the impressive inventory by stating, “We are a step away from victory.”

Encouraging words, to be sure. Yet, to everyone’s surprise, they were followed by a withdrawal of most of the Israel Defense Forces ground troops from southern Gaza, after four months of fighting in Khan Yunis.

As soon as the IDF announced the pullback, I began receiving frantic calls from abroad and WhatsApp messages at home requesting my take on the move.

“Does it mean that the war is over?” some asked. “Has Israel capitulated to pressure from the White House for a ceasefire with nothing in return?”

Others wanted to know whether Netanyahu and his War Cabinet—despite their repeated assertions—had decided against entering Rafah, where four of the six remaining Hamas battalions are located, along with many of the 133 hostages.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20559/biden-sabotaging-peace-israel-saudi-arabia

Recently, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said after meeting with [Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed] bin Salman that there is “good progress” on Saudi Arabia-Israel normalization talks. “I believe we can reach an agreement which would present an historic opportunity… We had a very good discussion about the work that we’ve been doing for many months now on normalization, and that work is moving forward. We’re continuing to make good progress.”

[T]here is good reason to believe that the Saudis will eventually agree to normalize their relations with Israel. In order for that to happen, however, Hamas, which is strongly opposed to any peace with Israel and does not recognize its right to exist, must be defeated and eradicated.

It is no secret that Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries despise Hamas and consider it a threat to their own national security….

There is no doubt that the Saudis, together with the UAE, Bahrain and the even the Palestinian Authority, are quietly praying for Israel to finish the job and get rid of Hamas. These Arabs, understandably, cannot express their views in public lest they be accused of “colluding” with Israel.

Arab states are motivated to sign peace treaties with Israel when they see Israel as a winner.

By pressuring Israel not to invade Rafah, the US administration is sabotaging its own efforts to persuade Saudi Arabia to normalize its ties with Israel…

By demanding that Israel refrain from entering Rafah, the Biden administration is actually asking Israel to forget about recovering the 130 hostages being raped and tortured by Hamas every day — which still include six Americans – and to lose the war. This is something that neither Israel nor Hamas’s Arab enemies — nor even Biden — can afford to accept.

When the Iran-backed Hamas terror group invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, it not only sought to kill and kidnap Israelis. The group and its patrons in Tehran undoubtedly had other goals in mind, such as thwarting US-sponsored efforts to achieve normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Fortunately, Hamas has so far been unsuccessful in achieving this goal. In addition, Hamas has failed to drive a wedge between Israel and the Arab countries that have peace treaties with it: Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. None of these countries has cut off its diplomatic relations with Israel, despite their harsh criticism of Israel over the war in the Gaza Strip and pressure from the Arab street.