Tuesday, April 07, 2015
BDS is not just anti-Semitic, it is racist
In a recent interview with the Jewish Media Agency (JMA), David Feldman, the director of the London-based Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism, denied that the boycotts, divestments and sanctions (BDS) movement is anti-Semitic.World soccer chief head opposes Palestinian bid to bar Israel
“I think the BDS movement is a broad church. It attracts support from some people who would like to see a one-state solution, but I think many people are attracted to BDS because they strongly oppose Israel’s conduct in the occupied territories,” he told JMA, before adding: “I haven’t seen the evidence to suggest that movement as a whole should be characterised as anti-Semitic.”
Now Feldman is either in denial or he has not experienced BDS at close quarters. Does he realise that in July and August 2014, shops, banks, universities, theatres and entire towns in Britain were targeted by a contingent of BDS activists comprising jihadi Islamists, anarchists, local gangsters and Socialist Worker Party members?
For example, in Manchester, which is home to Europe’s fastest-growing Jewish community, an Anglo-Israeli cosmetic shops was subject to a daily boycott that lasted for six weeks. I lost count of the times that I heard comments such as “Jews killed Jesus” and “You have blood on your hands.” A number of BDS activists were captured on camera expressing their admiration for Hitler or making Nazi salutes. Jews (including elderly men and women) were threatened and intimidated. Anti-Semitic leaflets were handed out to members of the public.
FIFA president Sepp Blatter on Tuesday expressed his opposition to a Palestinian bid to bar Israel from international competition, saying such a move would harm soccer’s governing body itself.Latma: We'll be the Judge, episode 9
Blatter is due to meet Palestinian Football Association (PFA) chief Jibril Rajoub in Cairo later Tuesday to discuss PFA calls for Israel to be suspended by FIFA for its “racist behavior against Arabs.”
When asked by AFP at a press conference to comment on the PFA request, Blatter said that “such a situation shall not occur at the FIFA congress because suspension of a federation for any reason is always something which harms the whole organization.”
“I will meet Mr Jibril Rajoub, president of Palestine Football federation, later this afternoon. I can’t give you more details,” said the outgoing FIFA president who is seeking a fifth term in office at an election next month. (h/t Bob Knot)
The ninth episode of the Israeli satire program "We'll be the Judge," from the creators of Latma's Tribal Update, Israel Channel 1, April 1, 2015.
Phyllis Chesler: B’Kol Dor V’Dor….In Every Generation
Who would have believed that the Jews would ever be so defamed again? That Israel and Zionism—the liberation movement of the Jewish people--would become despised by both western intellectuals and Islamist mobs?Swastikas Scrawled Across Northeastern U. Campus
Who could ever have predicted that the United Nations would remain utterly ineffective in all things save one: the legitimization of Jew-hatred?
Who could have imagined a world in which savage Islamist leaders would be stoning, crucifying, and burning civilians alive; blowing up other Muslims at prayer; building monuments to Palestinian human homicide bombs—but in which the New York Times would denigrate mainly Israel—systematically and often twice daily?
Who would ever have believed that an American president would operate so blatantly and shamelessly in such a pro-Islamist (not merely a pro-Muslim) way? That he would bow to and “negotiate” with barbarian tyrants and publically scorn and threaten America’s most reliable, most stable, and most militarily adept ally—Israel--in the Middle East?
A prominent university is rushing to do damage control after police were called to investigate the scrawling of swastikas inside a common campus area, according to university officials and sources familiar with the incident.Virginia State Bar Won’t Reconsider Canceled Seminar in Jerusalem
The office of president of Northeastern University, a top-ranked liberal arts college in Boston, sent an email to students last week marked as an “important message.” It expressed “outrage and extreme disappointment” following the discovery of anti-Semitic graffiti in a building in the school’s International Village.
The local campus police department “immediately” responded to the incident and is “actively” investigating the scene.
But experts who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon described the incident as the latest in a string on anti-Jewish hate and bigotry that has engulfed the campus in recent years.
The sources explained to the Free Beacon that efforts to work with the university’s administration to dampen the climate of hostility toward Jewish students had not proven fruitful.
The Virginia State Bar will not reconsider holding its seminar in Jerusalem this year, the group’s president said Monday, despite an international outcry earlier this month after canceling the trip following pressure from anti-Israel activists.SodaStream reportedly changes some labeling to ‘Made in the West Bank’
VSB president Kevin Martingayle, who has faced a deluge of criticism from pro-Israel groups after scrapping the state agency’s upcoming conference in Jerusalem, said there would be no seminar trip at all this year.
Martingayle initially cited Israel’s “unacceptable discriminatory policies” as a reason for the cancellation, but later said the decision was due to low interest.
He told the Washington Free Beacon that the VSB would not reinstate the Israel visit, despite calls from pro-Israel groups, outraged VSB members, and the speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates.
Martingayle said other groups of attorneys were welcome to contact the VSB’s travel agent and take over the plans for the trip, which have not been completely discarded.
SodaStream changed the labels on some of its products to note that they were manufactured in the West Bank, according to an international media group.Knell’s follow up on Cremisan Valley marred by BBC mantras
The labels were changed to read “Made in the West Bank” following a complaint filed nearly a year ago with the Oregon Department of Justice, the International Middle East Media Center, a collaboration between Palestinian and international journalists, reported.
Two groups that advocate for boycotting products made in the West Bank accused SodaStream of violating the state’s Fair Trade Practices Act by labeling its products as “Made in Israel” when its main production plant is in Ma'aleh Adumim, a West Bank settlement.
Oregon’s Fair Trade Practices Act is a consumer protection law that makes false advertising of a consumer product illegal.
The complaint was filed last May by the PDX Boycott Occupation Soda! Coalition and the Mid-Valley BDS coalition of Oregon’s Willamette River Valley. SodaStream is preparing to move from its West Bank headquarters. (h/t Yenta Press)
On April 3rd 2015 Knell reported on the Supreme Court decision given the previous day (according to which the Israeli authorities will have to find an alternative route for that particular section of the anti-terrorist fence) in an article titled “Israeli court rejects Cremisan Valley West Bank barrier“.BBC again avoids informing audiences about PA debt to Israel
Despite Israel’s Supreme Court having accepted a petition presented by a non-Israeli municipality and tens of individuals who are not Israeli citizens in a case concerning the route of a structure described by the court as “one of the ways of dealing with the threats of terror and with the aim of preventing and avoiding the infiltration of terrorists into Israeli territory”, Yolande Knell chose to downplay that exceptional aspect of the story, instead opting to focus readers’ attentions on the standard BBC mantras relating to the anti-terrorist fence and ‘settlements’.
In addition to its debt to the IEC, the Palestinian Authority has also incurred significant debts to the Israeli water company Mekorot (16.7 million shekels as of May 2014) and to Israeli hospitals in which Palestinians have been given medical treatment (34 million shekels as of May 2014).Edgar Davidson: UK media continue to ignore the elephants in the room
So, whilst the BBC devotes an entire article to the amplification of Mahmoud Abbas’ amateur dramatics, it once again refrains from making any effort to inform its audiences of the background to the latest installment of this long-running story.
The massacre of nearly 150 Christian students in Kenya, who were separated from Muslim students by their Muslim attackers before being slaughtered, was presented in British media headlines as a story of unspecified Africans militants killings unspecified African victims. Any media outlet presenting the story in any kind of detail, however, was unable to avoid the fact that this was a terrorist attack by Muslims targeting non-Muslims, so they had to be especially creative to ensure that Muslims were still seen in a positive light or even as victims.Once Again, Obama Statement On Terror Victims Doesn't Mention That They're Christians
Typical of such a report was that by Lisa Holland on Sky News, which started with scenes of female students in hijabs comforting survivors. Holland then stated that the area that was targeted was one of the poorest parts of Kenya whose population was almost exclusively Muslim, without any explanation as to why so many Christian students were there and why they alone were singled out. She went on to explain that the 'militants' came from Somalia (even though survivors had already said that most were Kenyan Muslims and one was actually the son of a Kenyan government official) and that they were simply protesting the presence of Kenyan troops in Somalia. She ended with the obligatory reference to the poor local Muslims fearing a 'backlash'.
Once again, President Barack Obama has released a statement denouncing a mass terror attack on persecuted Christians, without mentioning the fact that they were killed for their faith.Netanyahu Offers Condolences and Assistance to Kenyan President
When 21 Coptic Christians were beheaded by ISIS in February, the president’s statement condemning their deaths did not mention they were killed for their faith. Later, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said he “[couldn't] account for” the omission.
When nearly 150 students at a Kenyan university were massacred on Friday, the Islamist terrorists affiliated with al-Shabaab separated the Christians from the Muslims, killing only the Christians. But in Obama’s statement condemning the slaughter, once again there was no mention of the fact that the students were killed for their faith:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered condolences and assistance to his Kenyan counterpart in the wake of the brutal terror attack at the east African country’s Garissa University last week.Advocate for Christian IDF Soldiers Receives Death Threats
The Israeli prime minister’s office said that Netanyahu spoke with Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta on Sunday, where he conveyed his condolences in the wake of the “reprehensible terrorist attack” perpetrated on April 2.
Netanyahu also told Kenyatta that Israel and Kenya stood together in the war against terrorism and offered assistance to the east African nation. Israel and Kenya have long enjoyed a close relationship in areas such as agriculture, education and more recently in military and intelligence assistance in the fight against terrorism.
In a speech over the weekend, Kenyatta vowed to respond “in the severest ways possible” to the attack by al-Shabaab terrorists that left 148 people dead because they were Christian. Kenyatta said that the al-Qaeda-linked Somali terror group posed an “existential threat” and that they will fail to set up an Islamic caliphate in his country, which is roughly 83 percent Christian.
A lawyer who represents soldiers from Nazareth serving in the Israeli Defense Forces has begun to receive death threats from residents of the heavily Christian city in northern Israel.In 10 Days: UN Confab on Threats to ME Christians
With growing debate over the initiative to draft Israeli Christians into the IDF, Nazareth has seen a hotbed of local Arab anti-draft groups. Last April, a large rally against IDF enlistment was held there.
Many Israeli Christians - most of whom identify as Arab, but with an increasing number seeking to reconnect to their original Aramean roots - are departing from their community's traditional anti-Zionist stance and signing up for national service as Israel has rapidly emerged as the only safe refuge for Christians in the Middle East.
But that movement has triggered a fierce backlash from both Muslim and Christian Arab extremists, including prominent community figures and even MKs from the extremist Joint List party.
Another historic UN conference organized by the Eze Foundation and sponsored by the Permanent Missions of the Holy See, Argentina, and Palau is coming up. The conference will expose the terrible threat Christians face in the Middle East and the threat Islamist expansionism poses to world security. The “Threat to Middle East Christians” UN Conference will be held from 3:00p.m. to 7:00 p.pm on Friday April 17, 2015, a week from this coming Friday, at the UN Headquarters in New York at the ECOSOC Chamber.Islamic State blows up Syrian church on Easter Sunday
Late last year, Ms. Ugoji Eze of the Eng Aja Eze Foundation hosted a sell-out conference on Anti-Semitism Threat to Word Peace. The conference is open to the public, but any person wanting to attend must RSVP ahead of time for security purposes.
The keynote speakers range from the Christian world through to the Jewish world, and all Jews are asked to support solidarity with their Christian brothers in the Middle East by coming to the United Nations and showing support for the Christians, in their struggle against the terrible scourge of Islamic extremism that is running rampant over the Middle East.
Islamic State insurgents blew up an 80-year-old church in Syria's northeastern province of Hassaka on Easter Sunday, Syrian state news agency SANA said.Muslim groups attack Egyptian Copts over church honoring Christians killed by ISIS
SANA, which did not report any casualties, said the militants had planted explosives inside the Church of the Virgin Mary in Tel Nasri, an Assyrian village in an area where Christian and Kurdish militia have been battling Islamic State.
Islamic State controls the village, the news agency said on Monday.
The militant group, which controls swathes of Syria and Iraq, espouses a fiercely purist school of Sunni Islam, deeming many other Muslims to be heretics. Its fighters have destroyed Shi'ite and Sufi religious sites and also attacked churches.
Relatives of the Coptic Christians beheaded last month by jihadists in Libya – their deaths immortalized in a gory video set against the backdrop of a Mediterranean beach – are facing new extremist-Muslim violence as they seek to build a church to honor their murdered loved ones.Iraqis exhume mass graves of 1,700 killed by Islamic State
An angry mob in the Upper Egyptian village of Al Our – the proposed site of the church because it was home to 13 of the 21 Christians murdered in the mass “beachfront” decapitation – descended on the community’s current church after the midday Islamic prayer Friday and chanted that they’d never allow construction of the new place of worship to begin, witnesses told Egyptian activists in the U.S.
Things turned far uglier after nightfall, the witnesses said, as a smaller number of individuals threw Molotov cocktails and stones at the church, injuring several people, and setting cars ablaze, including one that belonged to a relative of one of the victims of the Libyan massacre.
“The police came, but after the attack,” said Mina Abdelmalak, a Coptic Christian living in Washington who is in close contact with the witnesses to the events in Al Our. “There were already cars on fire. People had been bloodied. Stones and bricks had been thrown.”
Iraqi forensic teams in the newly liberated city of Tikrit have started exhuming bodies from mass graves believed to contain hundreds of soldiers killed by Islamic State militants last year, a government spokesman said on Tuesday.ISIS thugs wreck ANOTHER historic site: Extremists use sledgehammers and AK-47s to destroy walls and statues at UNESCO World Heritage site in Iraq
Around 1,700 soldiers were captured by the extremists in June as they were trying to flee Camp Speicher, an air base on the outskirt of Tikrit that previously served as a US military facility, following an onslaught that stunned security forces and the military, which melted away as the militants advanced and captured key cities and towns in the country’s north and west.
Then, the extremist group posted graphic photos that appeared to show its gunmen massacring scores of the soldiers after loading the captives onto flatbed trucks and then forcing them to lay face-down in a shallow ditch, their arms tied behind their backs. Other videos showed masked gunmen bringing the soldiers to a bloodstained concrete river waterfront inside the presidential palaces complex, shooting them on head and throwing them into The Tigris.
A few days after recapturing the city by Iraqi security forces and allied Sunni and Shiite fighters, the government teams started Monday opening up eight locations inside the complex where much of the killing believed to take place, the spokesman of Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry, Kamil Amin, told The Associated Press.
A shocking video has emerged of ISIS thugs using sledgehammers and AK-47 rifles to destroy walls and statues in Iraq's UNESCO World Heritage city of Hatra.Dutch Soccer fans boast Nazi heritage at game, chant 'Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas'
In the slickly produced seven minute footage, jihadists are shown smashing shrines and statues in the 2,000-year old city.
Militants are also recorded chipping away at the bases of some of the larger wall sculptures and cracking boulders into ancient city pillars, while eerie music plays in the background.
The video cuts to jihadists speaking directly to the camera with one declaring they destroyed the site because it is 'worshipped instead of God'.
A Dutch soccer club is working to identify fans who chanted anti-Semitic slogans about the Holocaust during a match with a rival team from Amsterdam.Finnish politician: Israel systematically murders children
The chants were documented on Sunday at Galgenwaard Stadium in Utrecht, a city situated 40 miles southeast of the Dutch capital Amsterdam, during an honor division match between Amsterdam’s Ajax team and FC Utrecht, the De Telegraaf daily reported.
Utrecht supporters chanted the slogans to insult rival fans, whom they often call “Jews” because of the historical Jewish presence in Amsterdam, which is sometimes colloquially called “Mokum” after the Yiddish word for “place.”
During the match, dozens could be seen and heard chanting: “My father was in the commandos, my mother was in the SS, together they burned Jews cause Jews burn the best” and “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.” The chanting went on for several minutes, according to The Post Online news website.
A candidate for Finland’s Center Party said Israel is systematically murdering Palestinian children, women and elderly people.Graves vandalized in Polish town where Nazis tortured Jews
Abdirahim Hussein, a former chairperson of the Center Party’s youth division, made the statement last week in a blog post about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to the Tundra Tabloids website.
“We have for the last few years witnessed brutal actions in which children, women and the elderly having been systematically murdered. This all happened less than a year ago,” wrote Hussein, who was born in Somalia in 1978 and immigrated to Finland in 1994.
Unknown individuals painted pentagrams and wrote a former Pope’s name on several Jewish tombstones they desecrated in southern Poland.Hollande visits French WWII Jewish orphanage raided by Nazis
The desecration occurred recently at the Jewish cemetery of Olkusz, a town located 25 miles northwest of Krakow, according to a report released Monday on the Facebook page of the Monitoring Centre for Racist and Xenophobic Behavior, a Polish nongovernmental watchdog.
The group presented three photos of desecrated headstones on its Facebook page. One of the images showed a pentagram — a five-pointed star which is a Christian symbol sometimes associated with Satanism — painted on the a gravestone. Smashed headstones can be seen in the background.
French President François Hollande on Monday visited the site of a World War II orphanage for Jewish children that was raided by the Nazi Gestapo on April 6, 1944.British forensics expert shapes the future of Holocaust research
Between May 1943 and April 1944, the orphanage at Izieu in the Ain region in southern France took in scores of children fleeing Nazi persecution.
On April 6, 1944, 44 children aged between four and 12, as well as seven adults looking after them, were arrested in Izieu on the orders of Gestapo boss Klaus Barbie, known as the "Butcher of Lyon" for his brutal crackdown on resistance fighters there.
The children and their minders were ultimately deported to the death camps at Auschwitz (Poland) and Reval (Estonia). Of the entire transport, only one of the adults survived.
Hollande is the first French head of state to visit the site since former president François Mitterrand, who paid homage to the victims of the Gestapo raid on April 24, 1994.
When she was 21, Caroline Sturdy Colls set her sights on what seemed an unobtainable goal: to conduct archeological research at Treblinka, the former Nazi death camp in Poland where up to 900,000 Jews were murdered.For US Journalists, Ben-Gurion U. Science Mission More Than an Assignment
As a graduate student in archeology, Sturdy Colls looked to Treblinka as the ultimate in situ crime scene for her masters’ thesis. Inspired by Holocaust survivors she’d met while growing up, the budding scientist wanted to apply relatively new, non-invasive forensic methods to uncovering evidence at the notorious killing field.
More than a desire to dig in the ground, Sturdy Colls wanted to bring CSI-like tools to Treblinka, seeking — for instance — to identify former camp buildings, or locate previously unknown mass graves.
“I saw working at Treblinka as a cold case,” Sturdy Colls told The Times of Israel in a phone interview from her home near England’s Staffordshire University, where she is an associate professor specializing in forensic and Holocaust archeology.
“Also, I work with families in forensics work, and I can’t imagine what it’s like not to know what happened to your family members,” said Sturdy Colls, who has published extensively on forensics.
“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer.” When Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, spoke those words, he could very well have been referring to the scientific breakthroughs that were destined to emerge from the school that would bear his name.U.S., Israeli Firms Collaborate to Create Genetically-Modified, Longer-Lasting Flowers
What Ben-Gurion may not have envisioned is the emergence of an annual rite in which American journalists see those discoveries for themselves. After 10 years, the Murray Fromson AABGU (American Associates, Ben-Gurion University) Media Mission has brought nearly 100 reporters and editors from across the Atlantic for an up-close look at the cutting-edge research taking place at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), which is home to some 20,000 undergraduate and graduate students.
“We want them (the journalists) to see that, although it’s so new, only 45 years old, this university was the realization of Ben-Gurion’s vision of a world-class research center in the heart of the desert,” said Ronni Strongin, the AABGU vice president who initiated the media trip. “With each group of journalists who come and see it, the news gets out there about the amazing things going on here.”
The theme of this year’s mission—which wrapped up March 20 after a week of demonstrations and insider briefings by top scientific researchers—was the health and medical advances currently being developed at BGU. The showcase included research and innovations in the fields of neuroscience and imaging, stem cell research, biomedical robotics, biopharma, and medical informatics.
A pot of pretty petunias will practically sell itself, but petunias don’t retain their beauty for long. A joint Israeli-American “precise breeding” project is now working toward extending the shelf-life of these popular flowers. The three-year collaboration brings together a patented plant-breeding technology called MemoGene, developed by Israel’s Danziger Innovations and the Hebrew University’s Yissum tech-transfer company, with a DNA editing platform developed by Precision Biosciences in North Carolina. The platform’s biological “scissors” will be tailored to cut open the flower’s genome at exactly the right spot for MemoGene to deliver the life-extending trait. “It’s a perfect symbiosis, because we each have a piece of a two-piece puzzle,” says Hanne Volpin, deputy CEO and head of R&D at Danziger Innovations. “We have the technology to deliver tools to make the modification to the genome, while Precision Biosciences owns the [intellectual property] for the biological scissors that cut the genome.”Diabetics worldwide to benefit from artificial pancreas
The partnership is supported by a grant from the BIRD (Israel-U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development) Foundation awarded in December last year. “This new technology enables and democratizes the process of crop perfection, because until now only very large corporations like Monsanto were active in this area,” BIRD Director of Business Development Ron Maron tells ISRAEL21c. “Now, smaller companies and even university startups can get into this field and offer quicker and cheaper new traits to plant breeders.” It’s fitting that the petunia project has an Israeli partner. “Plant breeding started in the Middle East and a few other places about 8,000 years ago, and we’re continuing the tradition,” Maron points out.
Israeli medical tech firm DreaMed Diabetes has struck a deal with Medtronic, the world’s biggest medical device company, to use its MD-Logic Artificial Pancreas algorithm in Medtronic’s insulin pumps.Weizmann Institute of Science tops in obtaining prestigious European research grants
Under the terms of the agreement, DreaMed Diabetes will receive undisclosed royalties from future sales of each device utilizing MD-Logic.
In addition, Medtronic has made a minority investment in DreaMed Diabetes of $2 million.
A distribution deal with a company like Medtronic is about as big a deal as a medical technology developer of any type could hope to achieve. The company had nearly $30 billion in revenue last year, and a market cap well over $100 billion, and operates in more than 160 countries.
The Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot has the distinction of having the top score of grants awarded to it by the EU’s European Research Council’s 7th Framework Program.Israeli-Australian Researchers Discover How to Regrow Heart Muscle
The institute said on Thursday that between 2007 and 2013, it received such grants for 35 percent of its grans proposals, getting the top score among all the top European research institutes and universities.
This figure is in comparison to the average among other Israeli research institutes and universities of 18% and of all ERC proposals of only 10%. In absolute numbers of grants – a metric that puts the institute in direct competition with much larger institutions – the Weizmann Institute was number six, with a total of 82 grants worth nearly €150 million.
These figures were recently published by the ERC Scientific Council in its 2014 annual report on activities and achievements. Under the 7th Framework Program, the ERC awarded grants to researchers in almost 600 research entities from 30 different counties.
Scientists in Israel and Australia have discovered a way to regrow heart muscle cells, a breakthrough that may have major implications for heart attack victims. According to World Health Organization (WHO) statistics, coronary heart disease is the number one cause of death in the State of Israel.Delegates from Middle East, Muslim world to convene in Israel for nuclear conference
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot and the Victor Chang Institute in Sydney have discovered a way to stimulate the growth of heart muscle cells, according to the study’s principal investigator, molecular biologist Gabriele D’Uva.
Professor Richard Harvey of the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, a key member of the team, spoke with The Guardian newspaper about the findings, which were published Tuesday in the scientific journal, ‘Nature Cell Biology.’
“There’s always been an intense interest in the mechanism salamanders and fish use which makes them capable of heart regeneration,” Harvey explained. “One thing they do is send their cardiomyocytes, or muscle cells, into a dormant state, which they then come out of to go into a proliferative state – which means they start dividing rapidly and replacing lost cardiomyocytes.
Israel will be host to an important and highly-prestigious UN-sponsored international conference on the ban of nuclear tests next week, drawing representatives from Arab and Muslim countries which do not currently have diplomatic relations with Israel. Jordanian and Egyptian delegates will also attend the conference.Wounded Syrians taste matza in Israel
Around 100 representatives will take part in the meeting organized by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), headquartered in Vienna, Austria. To ensure the safety of the participants, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued safety and travel assurances.
Leading the international delegation will be Dr. Lassina Zerbo, executive secretary of the CTBTO. He will meet with Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz and other Israeli officials.
One of the purposes of the visit is to persuade Israel to ratify the CTBTO treaty. Israel joined the treaty in 1996 but did not ratify it, following the lead of eight other countries: The United States, China, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Iran and North Korea. Without their ratification the treaty cannot be enforced.
The purpose of the conference is to evaluate and draw lessons from a recent field exercise held in Jordan in November 2014. Israeli officials participated in the exercise in senior positions. The field exercise tested the preparedness of monitoring stations around the globe and equipment used by CTBTO to monitor nuclear tests. (h/t Bob Knot)
Hebrew-language media reported Tuesday on one Syrian boy who was severely injured in his legs and was told by Syrian doctors, after 17 operations, that he would never walk again.
His mother brought him to the Israeli border, where the IDF picked him up and transported him to Ziv Medical Center.
After a complicated operation, the boy now walks with the aid of a walker and doctors say he has a good chance of regaining full use of his legs.
But the boy’s visit to Israel included one more experience, shared by other Syrians currently recuperating in Israeli hospitals.
Since the hospital is observing Jewish dietary laws, it has replaced bread for the duration of the Passover holiday with unleavened bread.
After explaining to him the story behind the festival food, the hospital staff gave the Syrian boy his first sheet of matza.
In a sentiment that might surprise many Jews, he reportedly called the cracker-like matza a “delicacy.” (h/t Yenta Press)
