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ISRAEL

The European Union Commission’s war against Israel Moshe Dann

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-European-Union-Commissions-war-against-Israel-604470

Moreover, according to EUC spokespeople, the EUC supports “non-military” branches of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria through transfers of funds to those governments.

According to the European Union Commission’s website, during the last decade the EUC has given over two billion euros to Palestinians in the “West Bank” and the Gaza Strip. This does not include extra payments for health, welfare and education, and legal services to assist claims against Israel. Additionally, the EUC is funding illegal Arab building in Area C, which is under Israeli control via the authority of the IDF and its civilian branch, COGAT. This includes assistance to Palestinian Authority residents who infiltrate into Area C and build illegal homes in Arab villages.

The EUC’s stated purpose is to promote an independent sovereign Palestinian state based on the 1949 Armistice lines (the “two-state-solution”) and “end the occupation of Palestinian territory.” Oblivious of the fact that the PLO/PA and Hamas are corrupt, brutal dictatorships which support and engage in terrorism, the question is:  Why does the EUC waste so much money to advance a goal – Palestinian statehood – which threatens the State of Israel? Is the European community using Arab Palestinians as proxies in a renewed attempt to wipe out as many Jews as possible in Israel? Are EUC policies intended to promote eliminating Israel and genocide? 

Moreover, according to EUC spokespeople, the EUC supports “non-military” branches of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria through transfers of funds to those governments. There is, unfortunately, no accountability for how these funds are used.

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

The Jewish festival of Sukkot (Tabernacles) celebrates Israel’s fruit harvest. The latest positive Israel newsletter includes many examples of the fruits of Israeli labor. Lives saved by new medical treatments, innovations and humanitarian activities; new vegan foods, successful startups, record numbers of tourists and reviving endangered species.I will publish my next newsletter, hopefully, on Sun 27th Oct.  Wishing a Chag Sukkot Sameach / Happy Tabernacles to all who celebrate it. Michael Ordman

 

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Positive results in human trial of ALS treatment. As reported (here)previously, the stem cell ALS therapy developed by Israel’s Kadimastem showed promise in the lab. Now, early results from human trials at Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem show that it has significantly slowed down disease progression without major side effects.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/early-clinical-trial-for-als-sufferers-shows-biotech-firm-on-the-right-track/
 
Helping doctors focus on treatment. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Maverick Medical AI has developed software for reading patient notes to analyze chronic conditions and risk factors. US Health Systems (USHS), in partnership with Arizona Complete Health, is to deploy Maverick’s software within its organization.
https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/maverick-medical-ai-announces-its-first-commercial-deployment-at-ushs-health-system-to-automatically-detect-medicare-advantage-risk-factors-300910593.html
 
Predicting high-risk cardiac patients. (TY Atid-EDI) As reported (here)previously, the algorithms of Israel’s Medial EarlySign detect disease early. Its latest algorithm identifies cardiac patients with a high risk of complications after hospital discharge following a Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) procedure.
https://earlysign.com/news-and-events/new-study-shows-earlysigns-machine-learning-algorithm-can-predict-which-cardiac-patients-are-at-high-risk-following-discharge/
 
Blocking bone cancer in children. Scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have had promising results in the lab with experimental treatments for Ewing sarcoma – a bone cancer common in teenagers with a specific defective gene. Mifepristone – a glucocorticoid receptor blocker – stopped the cancer spreading to other organs.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/a-new-route-to-blocking-children-s-bone-cancer
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(19)31150-7
 
Another early warning of Alzheimer’s. As reported (here) previously, there are at least two signs of the early advance of Alzheimer’s disease. Now doctors at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center have developed Clara – an AI chatbot that questions the patient and compares the answers to a baseline. It is 95% accurate.
https://www.israel21c.org/israeli-chatbot-could-diagnose-early-alzheimers-disease/
https://www.pnas.org/content/112/52/16024.short https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-23212-001

On the Moral Restoration of Israel Netanyahu’s biggest challenge ahead. Jason D. Hill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/moral-restoration-israel-jason-d-hill/

As I wrote in my prescient article a few months ago: A Moral Philosopher’s Letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu, Netanyahu’s victory was inevitable. A moral and political mandate has indeed been issued to the great patriarch of Israel and, at least for now, Israel’s implosion has been forestalled. As the looming October deadline bears down on him to form a coalition government, Israeli’s and all who regard  themselves as defenders of Israel and allies of Netanyahu must face tough fundamental challenges and ask the question: What ultimately must he do to convince the Israeli people that he is indeed their moral and political leader?

First, he must continue to use the moral force of his convictions to form a coalition by communicating directly to the Israeli people that failure to do so will result in the country’s implosion. Netanyahu is a born leader, a man of moral convictions and, like all moral leaders, one possessed of a formidable and charismatic character. It would be in his rational self-interest to point out to his petulant and soulless rivals who have implacably stated that they will not form a coalition union with him what Israel will rightfully become and be seen as in the eyes of the world if they fail to partner with him: a politically failed state and an incompetent democracy. The only beacon of light in a dark and politically primitive and regressive Middle East would have been extinguished. With the ugly presence of the Joint List, the Arab backed third largest party in the 20th Knesset, the country is ripe for a Third Intifada, and a large-scale strike from Gaza.

The Washington Post doesn’t let facts get in its way The Post gives inordinate space to the tiny fraction of Jews who are against the right of Jewish self-determination, consistently omits context, and casts Israeli concerns as overblown and the Arabs as victims.Sean Durns

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/the-washington-post-isnt-about-to-let-facts-get-in-its-way/

The overwhelming majority of American Jewry has a positive view of Israel. Yet, the overwhelming majority of opinion pieces and reporting from major US news outlets doesn’t reflect this reality. Instead, the media promotes a small and unrepresentative minority. The Washington Post offers a case in point.

Ninety-five percent of American Jews have a “strongly positive” view of Israel, according to an August 2019 Gallup poll. The pollster noted that this was “significantly more pro-Israel than the overall national averages of 71% favorable views of Israel and 21% favorable views of the Palestinian Authority.”

Similarly, a 2013 Pew survey observed: “76% of Jews (identified by religion) said they were at least somewhat emotionally attached to Israel. In addition, almost half said that caring about Israel is an essential part of being Jewish (with most of the rest saying it is important although not essential) and nearly half reported that they had personally traveled to Israel.”

In short: American Jewry is, except for a minuscule minority, pro-Israel. Yet, the American media often chooses to give a megaphone to Jews that actively oppose, or are hypercritical of, the Jewish state.

The Washington Post, for example, gives inordinate column space to the tiny fraction of Jews, American and otherwise, who are against the right of Jewish self-determination. In a Sept. 20, 2019 tweet, Mairav Zonszein of +972 magazine cheered that her publication was “all up in The Washington Post opinion pages today,” with two pieces from the same organization appearing on the same day. Zonszein proudly noted that editors of “mainstream outlets” were no longer editing out or tweaking her use of the term “apartheid.”

The U.S. Alliance with Israel Cannot Be Sacrificed to Ideological Purity By Seth Cropsey & Harry Halem

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/us-israel-alliance-cannot-be-sacrificed-to-ideological-purity/

Contrary to what Robert Kagan implies, America cannot sacrifice a critical strategic alliance on the altar of ideological purity.

On September 16, in advance of Israel’s elections, the Washington Post published a long and vitriolic attack by Robert Kagan, a respected writer, on Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu. The gravamen of the accusation is that Israel and its leadership have abandoned its principles. Kagan argues that by “embracing” such caudillos as Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, and Vladimir Putin, Israel is helping to destroy the liberal international order.

This is like blaming Octavius for the Roman republic’s demise — a baseless charge, since civil conflict and competing strongmen had ended the Republic years earlier. While the U.S. remains strong enough — if its citizens possess the will — to salvage what is left of the international order, Israel has no such option. It is a regional power that has existed for 70 years in a very dangerous neighborhood. If it cannot survive, it cannot sustain its founding principles, including democracy, toleration, and respect for minority rights. Israel’s future as well as that of other states demands looking at the world clearly.

The greatest danger a nation can face is political delusion on the part of its elites. An unwillingness to face geopolitical realities jeopardizes a nation’s interest and survival.

The most pernicious form of delusion occurs when the political class cannot rid itself of paradigms stemming from heretofore extant distributions of power. Rather than recognizing a systemic change, it clings to an obsolete understanding of the balance of power. Throughout the 1920s, Britain’s policymakers were convinced that France, rather than Germany, posed a threat to European peace. Even before appeasement, they tacitly encouraged the growth of German power, while restraining Britain’s closest Great War ally.

One must look to the small to detect geopolitical change. Great powers like America can cling to old paradigms, relying on their latent strength to mitigate misperception’s consequences. For small states, however, politics is existential — political death is a persistent possibility. Small states survive by anticipating, rather than reacting to, international events.

Israel, Alone among Nations, Stirs Artists to Silence Other Artists Howard Jacobson

https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/israel-zionism/2019/10/israel-alone-among-nations-s

Last month, the German city of Dortmund decided to rescind the Nelly Sachs Prize—named for a Jewish poet and dramatist who received a Nobel prize in 1966—which it had recently awarded to the Anglo-Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie. The judges reconsidered because of Shamsie’s vocal and longstanding support for the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (BDS). The decision provoked fulmination from Shamsie and a letter signed by 250 indignant writers and published at the London Review of Books website. Howard Jacobson comments:

A cultural boycott, however, imposed by teachers on teachers, thinkers on thinkers, writers on writers, is a monstrous absurdity. The absurdity is self-evident when Shamsie explains her refusal to allow her work to be translated into Hebrew because she is unable to find an Israeli publisher “who is completely unentangled from the state”—who acts, in other words, not by the lights of its own “freedom of conscience and expression,” but by hers. . . .

To the familiar self-righteousness of boycotters, Shamsie adds the overweening vanity of the wounded novelist. A writer has to estimate herself highly indeed to consider the withholding of her words a sanction. Should I turn out to be wrong on this, and not being able to read Shamsie indeed brings the Israeli administration to its knees and opens the gates to a peaceful, flourishing Gaza, I will be the first to apologize. But if books can have this effect in their absence, only imagine what their effect might be if they are read. . . .

To the 250 signatories to the letter, though, I say this: Israel in the eyes of many of you is an anathema, and has been an anathema since the moment of its creation. But might not you, before seizing the pretext of a literary prize to express this view yet again, have paused to consider the nature of that prize, the person after whom it’s named, and the poetry she wrote? One of Nelly Sachs’s most renowned poems is O die Schornsteine—Oh, the chimneys—which begins:

Gerald A. Honigman Of Prophets and Politics

http://q4j-middle-east.com

As of September 3rd, with the failure of talks between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel Beitenu’s Avigdor Liberman to form a national unity government, Israel’s fate is still anyone’s guess. 

Possibly the only good news is that the give-away-everything-but-the-kitchen-sink Left, which repeatedly has prostrated itself to Arabs who won’t accept a viable Jewish State in the neighborhood whether it’s nine or nine hundred miles wide, has been so horrendously discredited by the murderous rejectionist violence by the very Arabs whose derrieres they’ve kissed, is that no suicidal, Lefty government is on the horizon. The willingness, however, of some Jewish parties to ally themselves with Israeli Arab parties which call for the destruction of the Jewish State themselves, and support other non-Israeli Arabs who actively murder Jews, is yet another headache.

Given all of this, perhaps it’s time to turn the clock back–way back–and rethink what politics in the reborn nation of the Jews should be all about. 

Let’s begin…

“And it came to pass that when (the Hebrew Prophet) Samuel was old, he made his sons Judges over all of Israel…And his sons walked not in his ways, but turned aside after lucre, took bribes, and perverted justice…So all the Elders of Israel came together in Ramah and said to Samuel, ‘appoint a king over us so that we can be like other nations’ [Note: Ramah is located in the area of the 20th century C.E.’s renamed , formerly known as Judea and Samaria… 

The EU’s hypocritical, patronizing attitude toward Israel By Alan Baker

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-EUs-hypocritical-patronizing-attitude-toward-Israel-603650

Alan Baker served as legal adviser to Israel’s Foreign Ministry and as Israel’s ambassador to Canada.

One wonders why the EU did not view the recent declarations by the Palestinian leadership canceling the territorial division between areas A, B and C in a similar light.The curious article in The Jerusalem Post (“Peace needs international law and political will,” September 21), by European Union Special Representative for the Middle East Peace Process Susanna Terstal, is indicative of a serious and worrying lack of awareness as well as considerable possible ignorance by the EU as to the legal and political realities inherent in the peace process.

The EU representative evidently believes that incessant repetition of the phrase “two-state solution” adds some element of legitimacy and feasibility to the idea. But the two-state solution has never been agreed-upon between Israel and the Palestinians, and does not figure in any of the agreements between them. It is nothing more than an expression of wishful thinking within the UN and the EU. 

To the contrary, the Oslo Accords, to which the EU itself is a signatory, clearly leaves the issue of the permanent status of the territories to be decided in negotiations. The accords do not predetermine the outcome of the negotiations. Thus, whether the outcome will be one, two or three states, or a federation or confederation, remains on the negotiating table. This cannot be dictated by the EU, however much they might be enamored with the idea of a two-state solution.

Right from Wrong: Owing Israel an apology By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-from-Wrong-Owing-Israel-an-apology-603662

The week between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur might be described as a cheerful lead-up to the holiest and most solemn of Judaism’s High Holy Days.

Every year at this time, the Israeli public is treated to tips on how to get through the 25-hour fast with minimal suffering. Pointers from medical experts interviewed in print and over the airways include the healthiest methods for avoiding feeling faint from hunger and thirst, and the best ways to prevent caffeine withdrawal.In addition, people on the street begin wishing one another an “easy fast,” and bidding them a gmar hatima tova – that the sealing of their fate in the Book of Life for the coming year may be a good one.

It is a particularly odd social convention, considering that the purpose of fasting is precisely to create the optimal conditions for undertaking the toughest spiritual task there is: atoning for sins against God and man.

Theoretically, then, the process of abstinence is not meant to be easy; it is geared towards maximizing the effect of prayer and confession. In practice, however, it translates into a focus on food. We Israelis are Jews, after all.

Another thing we are, like all human beings, is hypocritical.

INDEED, NO SOONER does Yom Kippur end than the very people who spent days apologizing to their friends and family members for any wrongdoing they may have committed – and hours upon hours in synagogue beating their breasts before God – promptly resume mistreating their fellow man without the slightest twinge of remorse.

“Anti-Normalization” With Israel: The True Goal by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14943/anti-normalization-israel

If greeting a Jew on his or her holiday, cleaning the beach with an Israeli, or working in Israel are considered by many Arabs a “crime,” what will be the fate of any Arab who makes peace with Israel?
Those who are calling for boycotts of Israel — and are threatening and inciting their people against any Arab who dares to host a Jew or send him or her greetings — are also emphatically opposed to peace with Israel. For them, making peace with the “Zionist entity” is considered an act of treason.
They are worried that an Arab who greets a Jew may one day make peace with Israel. They are worried that an Arab state that hosts Israeli athletes may one day make peace with Israel. They are worried that Arabs who go to work in Israel may fall in love with Israelis and stop thinking of ways to kill them or destroy Israel.

Arabs who dare to greet Jews in public on the Jewish New Year are being denounced by their fellow Arabs as traitors. Arabs who dare to engage in sports activities with Jews are also being condemned by their fellow Arabs as traitors.

In the past week, many Arabs have taken to social media to express outrage over a Jewish New Year greeting by Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

On September 29, the minister posted on his Twitter account “Shana Tova” (“Good Year” in Hebrew). His greeting to Jews celebrating the Jewish New Year has triggered a wave of condemnations from many Arabs, including Palestinians, who accused the minister of promoting normalization with Israel.