RUTHFULLY YOURS

Below is a speech I delivered at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue in New York City to commemorate the 75th annual memorial for Ze’ev Jabotinsky on August 4, 2015.

Close your eyes – and picture Ze’ev Jabotinsky urging the Jews in Europe to leave in the days before the Holocaust. Picture the days before the State of Israel, when the Irgun forced the British to leave the land. Picture the one-armed hero Joseph Trumpeldor, who fought at Tel Hai in 1920 – dying with the words on his lips “Never mind, it is good to die for our country.” Picture the boys of Betar who formed Plugat Hakotel and protected Jews who visited the Western Wall when Jews needed protection going there.

And now, open your eyes.

As a Betari, as the son of Penny Waga, a woman who revered Ze’ev Jabotinsky, I am here to tell you on the 75th anniversary of the death of this great man, the ideals of Jabotinsky are very much alive.

And now with your eyes wide open, picture the streets of France today where young Jewish members of Betar fight to protect the community there. In Israel, in the Prime Minister’s office is a picture of the great Ze’ev Jabotinsky (Bibi Netanyahu’s father was a long-time assistant to Jabotinsky). And all over the world, in the United States and elsewhere, those of us who follow Ze’ev Jabotinsky are often on the front lines of fighting for important issues affecting the Jewish people.

The media are trying to eject Donald Trump & his Border Wall from the presidential primaries before a single voter gets the chance to pull a lever.

And they say Donald Trump is a disgrace. Some thoughts while trying to keep pace.

1. “News” organizations should not run presidential debates.

As Michael Savage noted on his radio show, the first GOP debate this week was co-sponsored by Fox News and Facebook. Fox News is owned by pro-amnesty Rupert Murdoch and Facebook is owned by pro-amnesty-Mark Zuckerberg.

No wonder the fix seemed to be in. No wonder the Fox-Facebook debate demonstrated there is no mythological “balance” to be found between “conservative” and “mainstream” media; nor, I would add, is baiting candidates the best use of the public airwaves to inform the electorate. That said, they have to get used to it — and so should we, and *even* from Fox.

Fox News, a slick establishment machine with “conservative” branding, showed itself to be actively hostile to both “true conservative” Cruz and No. 1 Trump, who has connected with voters in an unprecedented way with his vigorous, unapologetic build-the-wall, stop-the-alien-invasion, and save America message.

For decades, the Left, including today’s Democrat party, has had one overarching goal – to secure enough Democrat voters to establish a permanent majority from which to unleash its full scale program to transform the nation. Essential to this strategy is letting in as many illegal immigrants (preferably the unskilled from impoverished backgrounds to whom government benefits will mean significantly more) while gaining favor from currently residing immigrants- legal and illegal. Securing our borders so that we as a nation can choose who enters is as intimately connected to our concept of “nationhood” as the ability to lock one’s doors is to the notion of “home.” Nonetheless, the Left has held border security hostage to some fantasized “comprehensive” solution aimed at addressing the status of existing illegals.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Discovery of the melanoma trigger. A team of researchers from Tel Aviv University, Israel’s Technion, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Sheba Medical Center have discovered what causes melanoma cells to turn into aggressive tumors. The scientists are convinced that it will soon lead to a breakthrough treatment.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/melanoma-cure-may-be-within-reach-tel-aviv-u-study-shows/

Diagnosing malaria in only 3 minutes. (TY Hazel) Israel’s Sight Diagnostics (SightDx) uses computer vision technology to scan “stained” blood samples under a fluorescent microscope and detect the presence of anomalies in blood cells due to malaria. The 3 minute test contrasts with current tests that take one or two days.
http://nocamels.com/2015/07/sightdx-detects-diseases-in-minutes/

Dancing can treat Parkinson’s. When Professor Rafi Eldor was told that he had Parkinson’s disease, seven years ago, he felt that the sky had fallen on him. Two years later he took up dancing and now watch him dance to the theme tune of the movie “Skyfall”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cBYGh2E6t4

Pluristem stem cells control the immune system. A new study on stem cells developed by Israeli biotech Pluristem shows they can be used to regulate the immune system, speeding it up or slowing it down as needed. They release a cocktail of therapeutic proteins in response to a host of inflammatory and ischemic diseases.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-placenta-derived-cells-get-nod-from-top-researchers/

Voice monitoring to diagnose brain disease. (TY Michelle) IBM Israel researchers are working on a project to detect brain diseases such as dementia, much earlier. It involves monitoring the patient’s voice remotely and detecting changes, so that activities and medication could slow down the advance of the disease.
http://www.research.ibm.com/articles/dementia-treatment-diagnosis.shtml

Protection against microbial infections. (TY Atid-EDI) Professor Ervin Weiss, founder of Israel’s NanoLock, has invented a nano-polymer additive that protects against microbial infections – one of the most urgent medical problems. NanoLock has just acquired licenses and patents for the technology.
http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/nanolock-enters-agreement-to-license-patented-additive-for-mitigating-antimicrobial-resistance-517561311.html

In all past election cycles the summer before an election year engenders testy conversations with my liberal friends and relatives. This time the stakes are so high and the danger to our culture, our economy, our liberty and our security is the worst we have encountered in all my adult life.How shocking it is to me that the barbed exchanges I have been having are with my friends and political allies on the subject of Donald Trump.
James Taranto attended a post debate talk at the Women’s National Republican Club. He reports:
“Our method was to call for a show of hands for each candidate and eyeball the results. Trump was the clear winner….. We asked Trump supporters to explain why they like him. One woman raised her hand and said it was because “I support free speech.” Her point was not that Trump is an advocate of free speech but that he is a practitioner of it: He speaks bluntly and abjures political correctness.”
And so their anger, which I share finds a poster boy in an uncouth oaf, not fit, as they used to say in the Bronx, to run for dog catcher.
I left a post debate party because I was a tad under the weather and on my way out, a brilliant, politically savvy and energetic friend of mine told me that she prefers and roots for Trump. Why?She explained that “he tells it like it is.” Well, I suppose that depends on what the meaning of “it” is. …rsk

A recent BBC poll found that 45% of British Muslims believe extremist clerics who preach violence against the West are not “out of touch” with mainstream Muslim opinion.

“Allah said very clearly in the Koran ‘Don’t feel sorry for the non-Muslims.’ So as an adult non-Muslim… if he dies in a state of disbelief then he is going to go to the hellfire… so I’m not going to feel sorry for non-Muslims.” — Anjem Choudary.

“Under the Shari’ah, the false Gods that people worship instead of Allah will be removed, like democracy, freedom, liberalism, secularism etc.” — Anjem Choudary.

“We are Muslims first and Muslim last. Passports are no more than travel documents. If you are born in a barn that doesn’t make you a horse!!” — Anjem Choudary.

Choudary urged his followers to quit their jobs and claim unemployment benefits so that they could have more time to plot holy war against non-Muslims. He said Muslims are entitled to welfare payments because they are a form of jizya, a tax imposed on non-Muslims in countries run by Muslims… as a reminder that non-Muslims are permanently inferior and subservient to Muslims.

Choudary says he is not afraid of going to prison, which he describes as a fertile ground for gaining more converts to Islam. “If they arrest me and put me in prison…” he warned, “I will radicalize everyone in prison.”

Anjem Choudary, one of the most outspoken and provocative Islamists in Britain today, has been remanded in custody, charged with the terrorism offense of encouraging people to join the Islamic State.

I’ve paid very little attention to the Donald Trump boomlet. I confess to enjoying Kevin and Jonah’s columns on the subject, but I’d enjoy their columns if they were writing about toothpicks. When asked about it, I’ve told people, “Ignore it and it will flame out on its own.” I’ve never met Donald Trump that I can recall. He’s a big New York personality and I’m Bronx born and bred, so of course I’m familiar with him. But I’ve never seen his TV shows, his news interviews are vapid, and I haven’t taken his presidential campaign any more seriously than I took his high-profile handwringing about running for this or that in the past.

What about all this psychoanalysis of the conservative base? We’ve heard the trope: Trump’s poll numbers can’t be ignored because they are not so much about him as about the anger he is tapping into – anger at the bipartisan Beltway political establishment. Well, as anyone who cares to read my columns knows, I am not exactly a stranger to that anger. I don’t need Donald Trump to draw my attention to it, and I don’t see him as a viable vehicle for representing it since he has a history of supporting positions and politicians responsible for a lot of that anger.

Turkey’s championing of the Palestinian Arabs in their quest for an independent State has come back to bite Turkey with a vengeance – as Kurdish Statehood is once again firmly placed on the political agenda.

Turkey became the first country in the world with an ambassador to “Palestine” – after its envoy in Ramallah, Şakir Özkan Torunlar, presented his Letter of Credence to “State of Palestine” President Mahmoud Abbas on 14 April 2013.

Incredibly this self-declared “State of Palestine” – admitted as a member State of UNESCO on 31 October 2011 and as a non-State observer to the United Nations on 29 November 2012 with Turkey’s active support – lacks the four following criteria required by the 1933 Montevideo Convention to qualify as a State:

1. a permanent population;
2. a defined territory;
3. a government; and
4. capacity to enter into relations with the other states.

Turkey’s swift recognition of this illegally constituted state for the “Palestinians” – a people only created for the first time in 1964 by the PLO Charter – starkly contrasts with Turkey’s consistent refusal to grant its 15 million ancient Kurdish community – part of the largest stateless minority group in the world -– the identical right to their own State in Northern Turkey for the last 90 years.

Marco Rubio presents a strong and stirring vision of a greater America than we’ve ever seen, for more people than ever.

Marco Rubio in person is like his book, America Dreams – inspiring, passionate, engaging, personal and a public policy proposal firehose. He brought all of that to RedState Gathering in Atlanta Friday, and the crowd of conservatives responded enthusiastically.

Early in his remarks, he grabbed the third-rail and talked about reforms to Social Security that would not only preserve it for future generations (including his own) without affecting current retirees (like his Mom), but would also lead to an economic revival by relieving the crushing weight of debt from our economy.

His youth, he says, will set him off from Hillary Clinton, but his forward-looking, innovative, technology-embracing attitude may do so even more. The best jobs of the 21st century will be here in America if we break the higher-education monopoly, refocus on vocational education, and realize that though we’ll be ordering our McDonald’s meals from a touchscreen, the people who make those touchscreens will make a lot more money.

The conventional wisdom says that true conservatism cannot win a presidential election, but Ted Cruz challenged that claim today in Atlanta with a full-throated endorsement of vigorous conservative leadership. A hotel ballroom filled with conservative activists ate it up. Like Carly Fiorina before him, Cruz was unstinting in his critique of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. But he took it even further, practically taunting Republican congressional leadership.

Cruz, speaking from in front of the podium without notes, said he welcomes the large field of GOP competitors, and joked that it’s different on the other side.

“The Democrat debate consists of Hillary and the Chipotle clerk. [LAUGHTER] That’s not fair…Bernie Sanders has entered the race. [LAUGHTER] So, they have a wild-eyed socialist with ideas that are endangering American’s place in the world…and Bernie Sanders. [WILD LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE] They’re not even having a debate. They did plan to have a debate earlier, the problem was the invitation was emailed to Hillary.” (H/T to the Cruz joke writer. He killed, as they say in the comedy clubs.)

“There is a reason that the life, vibrancy, energy and excitement is with conservatives this year. Our country is in crisis,” he said, effortlessly shifting the mood in the room. He knows the RedState audience better than most, having spoken here in each of the event’s seven years.