RUTHFULLY YOURS

You will hear a lot between now and when Congress convenes in January about how urgent it is that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s replacement be confirmed by the Senate. The president will nominate someone and then shrug his shoulders at the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, noting that things aren’t going well, and asking, “What do you expect? The Republicans are to blame because they haven’t confirmed the new defense secretary.”

It will all be baloney, of course, because we know that the secretary of defense’s job has been neutered by Obama’s White House team and it will remain so as long as he’s president.

We know this from any number of factual emanations from the administration, not the least of which was former defense secretary Bob Gates’s memoir, Duty, in which he whinged at great length about how all national security decisions were made by the president himself or his White House National Security Council. There is no evidence to show that the White House gave Hagel any greater authority or leeway, and there is no reason to expect that his successor will find any change.

So when the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorialized that, “Given the importance of the issues handled by the secretary of defense, most Americans would probably prefer to hear that Mr. Hagel is leaving President Barack Obama’s Cabinet over policy differences and not some personal dispute,” we have to shake our heads and wonder if its editors have any idea of what is actually going on in Washington, or how America’s national defense decisions are being made.

If they had a clue, they’d know that it will always be easy for Obama — or any president — to find a willing patsy to take a cabinet post — any cabinet post — regardless of the White House’s denizens arrogating all the post’s authority and prerogatives to themselves. The prestige of a cabinet post will always be enough to attract precisely the kind of people you don’t want on those jobs. Which is how Hagel was chosen originally: he wasn’t picked because he possessed a towering intellect and knowledge of the world of defense.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Electrical field slows brain tumors. Israel’s Novocure has announced that its NovoTTF-100A portable scalp device extends the life of brain tumor patients. The device creates an alternating electric field and has had significant success in Phase 3 trials with patients receiving chemotherapy only.
http://www.haaretz.com/life/science-medicine/1.626964

Immunotherapy to fight cancer. Israeli biotech Efranat Ltd. is developing an immunotherapy treatment approach for cancer, based on a glycoprotein named GcMAF (Globulin component Macrophage Activating Factor). Efranat has just raised $4.5 million and is conducting trials at Tel Hashomer’s Sheba Medical Center.
http://jewishbusinessnews.com/2014/11/21/israels-efranat-raises-4-5-million-to-cure-cancer/

Wiping out parasitic worm infections. Ben Gurion University Professor Zvi Bentwich has received a Grand Challenges in Global Health grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for his project in Ethiopia to wipe out parasitic worm infections. Clean water and sanitation facilities and health education are being provided.
http://in.bgu.ac.il/en/Pages/news/bentwich_gates.aspx

Progress in treatment of Celiac disease. Back in Feb 2012 I reported good pre-clinical trials of Israeli biotech BioLineRX’s BL-7010 co-polymer for the treatment of celiac disease, for which there is currently no cure or formal treatment. BioLineRX has now announced successful final results from its Phase 1/2 study of BL-7010.
http://www.biolinerx.com/default.asp?pageid=16&itemid=306

3D printing of medical devices. (Thanks to Atid-EDI) Israeli 3D printer manufacturer Stratasys has joined with US-based Worrell to build medical devices using 3D printed injection molding. With 3D printing, device prototypes can be produced in 95% less time and at 70% less cost compared with traditional aluminum molds.
http://investors.stratasys.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=879379

Paralyzed Marine walks using Israeli exoskeleton to receive Bronze Star. (Thanks to Israellycool.com) A Marine who was left paralyzed by a sniper’s bullet in Afghanistan walked to collect his Bronze Star in a ceremony at Camp Pendleton, using robotic leg braces developed by Israel’s ReWalk Robotics.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/marine-with-robotic-leg-walks-to-receive-bronze-star/

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obama-and-the-ferguson-lynch-mob-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Ernie White, a Civil Rights Activist, Morgan Brittany, a Conservative TV and Movie Star, and Mell Flynn, the President of Hollywood Congress of Republicans.

The Gang gathered to discuss Obama and the Ferguson Lynch Mob, analyzing how a Radical-in-Chief fanned the flames of hate and racial discord. The guests also focused on The Ferguson Jihad, Bye Bye Hagel, The Mullahs Inch toward the Bomb, and much, much more.

Don’t miss it!

The news tells us less about Israel than about the people writing the news, a former AP reporter says.

During the Gaza war this summer, it became clear that one of the most important aspects of the media-saturated conflict between Jews and Arabs is also the least covered: the press itself. The Western press has become less an observer of this conflict than an actor in it, a role with consequences for the millions of people trying to comprehend current events, including policymakers who depend on journalistic accounts to understand a region where they consistently seek, and fail, to productively intervene.

An essay I wrote for Tablet on this topic in the aftermath of the war sparked intense interest. In the article, based on my experiences between 2006 and 2011 as a reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, one of the world’s largest news organizations, I pointed out the existence of a problem and discussed it in broad terms. Using staffing numbers, I illustrated the disproportionate media attention devoted to this conflict relative to other stories, and gave examples of editorial decisions that appeared to be driven by ideological considerations rather than journalistic ones. I suggested that the cumulative effect has been to create a grossly oversimplified story—a kind of modern morality play in which the Jews of Israel are displayed more than any other people on earth as examples of moral failure. This is a thought pattern with deep roots in Western civilization.

But how precisely does this thought pattern manifest itself in the day-to-day functioning, or malfunctioning, of the press corps? To answer this question, I want to explore the way Western press coverage is shaped by unique circumstances here in Israel and also by flaws affecting the media beyond the confines of this conflict. In doing so, I will draw on my own experiences and those of colleagues. These are obviously limited and yet, I believe, representative.I’ll begin with a simple illustration. The above photograph is of a student rally held last November at Al-Quds University, a mainstream Palestinian institution in East Jerusalem. The rally, in support of the armed fundamentalist group Islamic Jihad, featured actors playing dead Israeli soldiers and a row of masked men whose stiff-armed salute was returned by some of the hundreds of students in attendance. Similar rallies have been held periodically at the school.

I am not using this photograph to make the case that Palestinians are Nazis. Palestinians are not Nazis. They are, like Israelis, human beings dealing with a difficult present and past in ways that are occasionally ugly. I cite it now for a different reason.

Such an event at an institution like Al-Quds University, headed at the time by a well-known moderate professor, and with ties to sister institutions in America, indicates something about the winds now blowing in Palestinian society and across the Arab world. The rally is interesting for the visual connection it makes between radical Islam here and elsewhere in the region; a picture like this could help explain why many perfectly rational Israelis fear withdrawing their military from East Jerusalem or the West Bank, even if they loathe the occupation and wish to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbors. The images from the demonstration were, as photo editors like to say, “strong.” The rally had, in other words, all the necessary elements of a powerful news story.

Never mind the Islamic State and its boxes of heads. The consensus among politicians and the media is that the real crisis in the region is that the Jewish State is declaring itself a Jewish State.

Again.

Israel’s flag carries the six-pointed star that was the seal of the House of David. Its anthem speaks of the “Jewish spirit.” Israel’s Declaration of Independence declared “the establishment of a Jewish State.”

It couldn’t be any less unambiguous if Mel Brooks were made the President of Israel (which would also be a manifest improvement over the even more clownish President Rivlin.) Despite that the media and its politicians treated the Jewish State bill as a major development and the end of the world.

And that’s not an exaggeration.

The understated title of a Haaretz article was “The road from Jewish nation-state to the Gates of Hell.” It was only to be expected that the radicals of the leftist paper would lose their minds over a bill that reaffirms reality. Reality has always been the enemy of the left. But the level of hysteria and incitement was a bit much even by the standards of a paper that had called Israeli soldiers and officers “filth.”

The New York Times called the bill “heartbreaking.” This is the first time that the Gray Lady showed anything resembling a heart when it came to Israel.

The State Department, whose boss just decided to ignore the results of a democratic election and press on with his undemocratic agenda, warned Israel to maintain its “commitment to democratic principles.” The European Union, which rejects a democratic referendum, warned Israel to “protect its democratic standards.”

Obama, the EU and the Israeli left like talking about democracy. They just don’t like practicing it.

My e-pal David is so right about this role of language in the identity of Israel….The miracle is that at one time more people spoke Mongolian tha spoke Hebrew. It was the mettle and dedication of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (B.Vilna 1858-D. Jerusalem 1922) who was the architect of the renewal of Hebrew in the modern era. A miracle….rsk

“The main factor that redeemed the Jewish people in our time is the state of Israel. It made them an active, generative people again, not merely scattered minorities contending with the Scylla and Charybdis of antisemitism and assimilation.

But a close handmaiden of the Jewish state in effecting this transformation was the Hebrew language. Along with the magnetic pull of the Land of Israel itself, it was Hebrew that enabled the Zionist endeavor to coalesce and take on a distinctive, organic character.

Hebrew—that is, the revival of the Hebrew language in the context of the return to Zion—achieved that in four main ways.
1. It made unity possible for radically diverse immigrants.

From the onset of Zionist aliyah (immigration to Israel) in the early 1880s to today, when the phenomenon continues, Jews have come to Israel from all corners of the world speaking over a hundred different languages. They’ve come from Russia, Poland, Germany, Morocco, Iraq, Ethiopia, India, America—the list goes on. Although not a few of these immigrants had some degree of knowledge of Hebrew or other Jewish languages, the majority had a non-Jewish mother tongue. In other words, a Tower of Babel.

So the adoption of Hebrew as the dominant language of the prestate community, and eventually of Israel itself, was far from a fait accompli. Some championed Yiddish instead. In 1913 the “Language War” broke out over plans to make German the language of the Technion, a technical college in Haifa that thrives to this day. The Language War galvanized those most committed to making Hebrew the main official language of the emerging polity, and they eventually prevailed.

It was a strategic and wise choice; it not only made unity possible but also much else.
2. It connected the society as a whole to the Hebrew Bible and other sources.

A benefit of writing this piece is that it provides an opportunity for remembrance on how much of note transpires in a mere thirty or thirty-one days. This past November was no different.

The Grand Jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson consumed mountains of press. It also generated outrage among those fired up by the Reverend Al Sharpton and others who saw the lack of an indictment as the furtherance of racial injustice. The consequences included demonstrations and protests that turned violent and destroyed property, mostly of those who had scrimped and saved to open their stores, many of whom are minorities. Nevertheless, my guess is that Ferguson will be only a footnote when the history of this era is written. It wasn’t injustice that resulted from the Grand Jury’s decision; it was justice that did not conform to the preconceptions of those who had tried Officer Darren Wilson in the media. So, like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and his death will disappear from memory, a tragic and unfortunate victim of those who look for racism at every opportunity.

In other news, the President issued an Executive Order granting amnesty to millions of aliens who arrived here illegally from Mexico and Central America. The President has dared Republicans to challenge him by denying confirmations, cutting off funding or shutting down government – a challenge he expects to (and probably will) win. Apparently, breaking the law is okay if you can get away with it, just as upholding only the laws he finds convenient is okay with our President. What an example to set for our youth, especially those African-Americans who saw in the 2008 and 2012 elections the ultimate fulfillment of the Civil Rights movement!

With his poll numbers in the toilet, Mr. Obama is anxious to get good news wherever he can. He signed an agreement with China, which commits that country to do nothing for the next ten years, while imposing burdens on U.S. businesses and taxpayers. It reminds me of the promises made by royalty to their subjects of “air pudding with wind sauce.” John Kerry failed to strike a deal with Iran; so that country continues to barrel toward nuclear capability, which assuredly will create a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. North Korea’s “supreme leader” Kim Jong-un had the temerity to condemn the U.S. for human rights violations! Putin persists pugnaciously.

Shortly after former Tory MP Mark Reckless had defected to UKIP and triggered a by-election (special election) in his Rochester and Strood constituency, David Cameron vowed that the Conservatives would stop Reckless from getting “his fat arse back onto the green benches” of the House of Commons. Well, the Tories did what they could, but there was no bum’s rush for the fat arse. On November 20, Reckless regained his seat with a lead of roughly 7 percent over his Conservative rival, a result rather better than generally expected at the time he announced his defection. Rochester and Strood was not thought to be natural UKIP territory. In preparing Revolt on the Right, an indispensable guide to the rise of UKIP, British academics Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin ranked every constituency in Britain for its likely receptiveness to UKIP. Writing in the Financial Times after the vote, Goodwin noted that Rochester and Strood sat quite some way down on the list, in 271st place to be precise.

Yet Reckless won. British by-elections are notorious for generating freak results. Turnout is low, and electors feel freer to cast a protest vote than they do at a general election, when the stakes are viewed as far higher. Reckless might find it tough to hang on to the seat when the whole nation goes to the polls in May next year.

But UKIP is not going away. Barring schism or major scandal, the party will be a serious player at the general election. First-past-the-post is cruel to outsiders, and UKIP may not win many seats (five or so, if I had to guess) in the 650-strong House of Commons, but it will grab a large number of votes across England, if not in Britain’s Celtic periphery. Opinion polls have been all over the place, with some even showing UKIP running north of 20 percent, but the party appears to have a solid core of support in the mid teens. The traditional assumption, based on UKIP’s historical failure to repeat at home the success it’s had in EU elections, has been that most UKIP voters will return to one of the establishment parties in a general election. In the 2009 elections to the EU parliament, UKIP took 16.5 percent of the British vote. In the general election the next year, that shrank to a little over 3 percent, a sliver, but still enough to cost the Conservatives some 20 seats and, with that, any chance of a clean parliamentary majority.

— Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology.

High-level officials of the United Nations are not known for their perspicacity, competence, or scientific acumen, but the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Margaret Chan, is a particular embarrassment. With so much attention focused on the Ebola-virus outbreak in Africa, her exaggerations and petty scolding have made her a high-profile liability.

In a speech at a regional conference in Benin last month, she warned that the Ebola outbreak “is the most severe acute public-health emergency seen in modern times” and bashed pharmaceutical companies for not developing Ebola vaccines — products that could not possibly be profitable. “A profit-driven industry does not invest in products for markets that cannot pay,” she said — a truism if there ever was one. “WHO has been trying to make this issue visible for ages. Now people can see for themselves.”

Perhaps Dr. Chan is unaware of the U.N.’s own data on the infectious and other public-health scourges that afflict the developing world, Africa in particular.

Let’s consider first how Ebola stacks up against other public-health emergencies in developing countries. As the United Nations’ own data make clear, infectious diseases, many of them preventable and treatable, remain the scourge of poorer populations. In 2008, about 250 million cases of malaria caused almost a million deaths, mostly of children younger than five. In virtually all poor, malaria-endemic countries, there is inadequate access to antimalarial medicines (especially artemisinin-based combination therapy).

The incidence of malaria could be reduced dramatically by the judicious application of the mosquito-killing chemical DDT, but the U.N. and national regulators have curtailed its availability, owing to misguided notions about its toxicity (and no small measure of political correctness). Hundreds of millions suffer from other neglected tropical diseases, including lymphatic filariasis and cholera.

Although new HIV infections worldwide declined slightly during the past decade, 2.7 million people contracted the virus in 2008, and there were 2 million HIV/AIDS-related deaths. By the end of that year, more than 4 million people in low- and middle-income countries were receiving anti-retroviral therapy, but more than 5 million who were HIV-positive remained untreated. The number of new cases of tuberculosis worldwide is increasing, and the growing emergence of multi-drug-resistant strains of the bacteria is especially worrisome.

Vermont’s incumbent governor, Peter Shumlin, wants his state to become the first to launch a government takeover of its health-care system. But the results of last month’s election could give him pause. He was unable to secure a majority of votes this November — after winning 58 percent of the vote two years ago. Now the state legislature will determine whether to send Shumlin back for another term.

What happened in between? Vermont botched the launch of its state-run insurance exchange. By 2017, the exchange is supposed to serve as the “infrastructure” for a single-payer system, with the state picking up the tab for just about every resident’s health care. That exchange hasn’t even gotten off the ground, and state officials have no idea how to raise the $2 billion a year they’ll need to operate a single-payer system.

Vermont’s struggle to implement single-payer health care shouldn’t be a surprise. Such systems are failing to deliver affordable, quality care all over the world. And ordinary citizens are starting to notice.

Shumlin’s administration announced last month that it would shut down the state’s Green Mountain Care exchange for repairs that could take weeks. One state senator said its rollout “has been pretty much a disaster” and “has shaken a lot of people’s faith in the ability of state government to put together something that would work.”

Even if the state could figure out how to operate a single-payer system, it wouldn’t be able to afford it. A 2013 University of Massachusetts study commissioned by the state concluded that Vermont would have to come up with $1.6 billion in new revenue every year to pay for the plan. Now the state estimates that single payer will take $1.7 billion to $2.2 billion in additional annual revenue.

Vermont collects $2.7 billion a year in taxes. How does it expect to boost its tax take by 80 percent to pay for single payer?

Vermonters should be thrilled that single payer has false-started in their state. For evidence that single payer doesn’t work, look no further than the United Kingdom and Canada.