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Friday, April 01, 2016

04/01 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: Bewildered Britain still doesn’t get it; Zionist 'joins' radical leftist tour

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Bewildered Britain still doesn’t get it
The British still don’t understand, though, that the UK and Europe have long funded and connived at not just Palestinian terrorism, but the incitement that causes it.
They don’t understand that this incitement is based on anti-Semitism, not a dispute over land boundaries.
They don’t understand that anti-Semitism is the signature motif of a deranged culture that should be treated as a pariah rather than excused, sanitized and rewarded, as Britain does with the Palestinians.
They don’t understand that the anti-Semitic derangement that drives the Palestinians also drives the Muslim war against the West.
They don’t understand that by indulging the lies, intimidation and moral inversion of Palestinian Jew-hatred, Britain and Europe have made it impossible to fight off the Islamist threat to themselves.
They will only start to defend themselves properly when they start treating Israel as their indispensable ally rather than a cosmic foe.

David Collier: Jews and Hamas propaganda at Birkbeck
The event started and the ‘Palestine Remix’ product itself is impressive. The technology behind the website allows for the user to engage with documentary evidence, search videos using text references and then take the chosen excerpts to share on social media, download or to ‘remix’ into a bespoke documentary. All available in several languages. ‘Heady stuff’.
And they want to push this as an education tool in our schools and in our universities. Coming just a day after I attended a dire Zionist event, this highlights the gulf between the tired, lifeless, self-indulgent Zionist leadership in the UK and the fresh, innovative and spirited defence emerging from the Palestinian side. And a useful tool it would be too if it were not total propaganda. Al-Jazeera has delivered an instrument of total historical revisionism. The timeline of 1948 does not include a single violent Arab action. This, the underlying distortion in the Arab narrative that turns a bloody civil war and a battle for survival into a one sided and brutal rout.
There is even a documentary about Moroccan Jews who describe Zionist actions that ‘conned’ them into fleeing Morocco. As hundreds of thousands of Jewish Arab refugees were created through persecution and expulsion, this website passes it off as a self created ‘Zionist plot’.
Rawan Al-Damen relies on the exception/rule strategy that fuels the entire Palestinian propaganda machine. They take the rule (Arab violence and rejectionism) and make it look like an exception whilst taking the exception (Israeli extremist action) and make it look like the rule. This way, they get to turn the entire story on its head and the victim becomes the aggressor. This piece of software should get nowhere near children or students, it is a brain washing machine.



Larry Summers: Colleges have become hypersensitive to racial prejudice. Why not anti-Semitism?
It has seemed to me that a vast double standard regarding what constitutes prejudice exists on American college campuses. There is hypersensitivity to prejudice against most minority groups but what might be called hyper-insensitivity to anti-Semitism.
At Bowdoin College, holding parties with sombreros and tequila is deemed to be an act of prejudice against Mexicans. At Emory, the chalking of an endorsement of the likely Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, on a sidewalk is deemed to require a review of security tapes. The existence of a college named after a widely admired former U.S. president has been condemned at Princeton, under the duress of a student occupation. At Yale, Halloween costumes are the subject of administrative edict. The dean of Harvard Law School has acknowledged that hers is a racist institution, while the freshman dean at Harvard College has used dinner place mats to propagandize the student body on aspects of diversity. Professors acquiesce as students insist that they not be exposed to views on issues, such as abortion, that make them uncomfortable.
As I have discussed in the past, this is in my view inconsistent with basic American values of free speech and open debate. It fails to recognize that a proper liberal education should cause moments of acute discomfort as cherished beliefs are challenged.
But, if comfort is elevated to be a preeminent value, the standard should be applied universally. Unfortunately, there is a clear exception made on most university campuses for anti-Semitic speech and acts.
The Left stands with the Islamist thought police
It is what happened to Salman Rushdie after the release of the “Satanic Verses”, when so many left-wing writers attacked not the Iranian Khomeini, but the writer: Roald Dahl, celebrated author of amusing children’s books, said that “Rushdie is a dangerous opportunist,” George Steiner, one of the most respected cultural critics, declared that “Rushdie has made sure to create a lot of problems,” Kingsley Amis commented that “if you go looking for trouble, you can not complain when you find it,” while the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper said to enjoy the suffering of Rushdie.
And it will happen again with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the most brave and important Islamic dissident. In the book “Murder in Amsterdam” and in a series of articles for the New York Review of Books and The New York Times, leftist relativists such as Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash attacked Hirsi Ali. Her call for the emancipation of women marked her as an “Enlightenment fundamentalist.”
A few days after the murder of Theo van Gogh, The Index on censorship, the magazine founded by Stephen Spender to defend freedom of expression during the Cold War, published an essay by Rohan Jayasekera, associate director of Index, which described Hirsi Ali as a silly girl manipulated by Van Gogh in a “relation of exploitation.”
And when the Netherlands deprived Hirsi Ali of the bodyguards she needed for protection, the appeal to assign her protection of the European Union, promoted by French Socialist Benoît Hamon, failed in the absence of a sufficient number of votes, when only 144 of 782 supported the motion.
This is the terrible meaning of the “Daoud Affair.”
JCPA: The Aftershock of the Nazi War against the Jews, 1947/1948: Could War in the Middle East Have Been Prevented?
Abstract
This article demonstrates that an Arab war against the United Nations’ decision in favor of the partition of Mandatory Palestine was not inevitable. It deals with the after-effects of Nazi anti-Zionist propaganda in the Arab world and the antisemitic campaign of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin el-Husseini, who was supported by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Even though the Arab world rejected the Partition Plan, there was at the same time a general reluctance to go to war, not only among the Arabs in Palestine but also among the governments of major Arab League states such as Egypt. It was the mobilization of the Muslim Brotherhood that caused the Arab League to embrace the Mufti, a Nazi-collaborator and war criminal, as leader of the Palestinian Arabs. By staging destabilizing mass demonstrations and a murderous campaign of intimidation, Hajj Amin el-Husseini and the Muslim Brotherhood dragged Egypt and other Arab states into a full-scale war against the Jews of Mandatory Palestine. The inability of key Arab actors to stand their ground, combined with the cowardice of the Western powers who tacitly anticipated a Jewish defeat, paved the way for one of the most fateful turning points in twentieth-century history, one that has shaped the Middle East conflict to the present.
Ryan Bellerose: Crimes
I cannot be more clear – a great crime was committed against the Jewish people – in fact many were – but I think the greatest crime was the most recent one, the attempt to steal and deny their history. That is something I cannot remain silent about. I will not and you shouldn’t either.
When I say to stand together in solidarity, I mean it. It means that we support your struggle and you support ours. What does that mean? It means attending events, it means understanding that we are not (the majority of Indians) asking to blow up Canada, we want equal and fair representation, we want the treaties to be respected and followed and we want to be able to live unmolested on our ancestral lands with access to our sacred sites. Period.
What can we do? We can talk openly and honestly about the indigenous rights of all peoples, we can speak about the importance of identity and cultural resurgence, we can encourage people to regain traditions language and spirituality, all of those things help the struggle. We can make sure people understand the importance of being moral and ethical, and basing our positions on rational examination of fact. We can help our friends understand what it means to see ourselves through the lens of indigenous people rather than the way colonizers see us, because that’s of primary importance. Once we understand who we are supposed to be, we can manifest that. NOBODY can take away your identity if you do not allow it. When you see someone spreading lies or nonsense, you should call it out. Don’t be silent, Don’t wait for someone else to do it. You can be the change we need, I believe that, or I would have stayed on the Rez in Paddle.
Why a militant atheist Brit decided to become a Jew
Subjected to racist push-back after he wrote a blazing book decrying the Left, journalist Nick Cohen embraced the challenge and became what his enemies think he is.
Despite not being Jewish, atheist Nick Cohen, one of Britain’s best-known journalists, had never had a problem with his surname. It was, he thought, part of the furniture.
On his paternal side, the family had “abandoned their religion, so he wasn’t Jewish, and more to the point, my mother and my grandmother weren’t Jewish either, so according to Orthodox Judaism’s principles of matrilineal descent, it was impossible for me to be a Jew,” says Cohen.
But then in 2007 Cohen wrote a book, “What’s Left?”, a provocative and witty account of his belief that British liberals had lost their way. According to Cohen, “all hell broke loose” in the wake of that book’s publication.
“The book was an attempt to answer a question which is not asked often enough,” he says. “If I were to show you a newspaper article defending a movement that was misogynist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, or decided to kill any Muslim who had decided of their own free will to change their faith or have no faith, and ask what kind of newspaper it was, you’d say, obviously it is a left-wing newspaper.
Israel, the hasbara nation, feted for its digital diplomacy clout
Israel prides itself on being a wellspring of technological innovation. But one thing the self-styled start-up nation does not often garner much praise for is its ability to present its best face to the world.
Yet, when it comes to combining public advocacy, or hasbara, with social media, Israel apparently doesn’t do too shabbily, at least according to a study published Thursday.
In the field of digital diplomacy, the study says, Israel’s Foreign Ministry is the eighth-best player in the world, beating powerhouses such as Germany, Japan and Switzerland.
The importance Israeli diplomats place on harnessing social media was evident as study author Gökhan Yücel, from the Istanbul Center for Digital Affairs, presented his findings Thursday in Tel Aviv at the first International Digital Diplomacy Conference.
Foreign Ministry Director Dore Gold, who does not use Twitter, called the conference “a revolutionary event,” at the opening Tuesday.
Netanyahu guilty of 'diplomatic terrorism against US,' Livni says
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's decision to move forward with the appointment of a new head of the government's public relations department was described as an act of "diplomatic terrorism" against the United States, Zionist Union MK Tzipi Livni said on Friday.
The former foreign minister attacked Netanyahu's decision to name Ran Baratz as his next chief media adviser despite highly critical online posts that he wrote about US President Barack Obama and US Secretary of State John Kerry.
Government officials confirmed a Channel 2 report about Netanyahu's decision to move forward with the move, and said that earlier this week Netanyahu sent the nomination to the Civil Services Commission for approval.
Baratz's appointment has been held up since November, after it became known that he referred to Obama’s angry response to Netanyahu's speech to Congress as “modern anti-Semitism,” and wrote that Kerry's mental age does not exceed that of a 12-year-old child. He also has written denigrating Facebook posts about President Reuven Rivlin.
Questions for the Candidates
Tachlis, candidates. Here are some specific questions:
- Will you reaffirm George Bush’s promises to Ariel Sharon as confirmed by both houses of Congress but rejected by Obama?
- Will you move the US embassy to Jerusalem as required by the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 passed by the 104th Congress on October 23, 1995?
- Do you believe that solving the Israel/Palestine conflict is the key to solving all or any problems in the Middle East? If not, what are the problems and how would you use the resources of the United States to alter that position?
- Do you believe that pressuring Israel is the sole answer to the Israel/Palestine conflict? If not, what steps will you take to pressure the Palestine Authority, Iran and other Arab states?
- Who will advise you on Middle East policy?
- Will you introduce inspections of Iran’s alleged nuclear facilities which Obama assures us is the achievement of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)?
- Will you oppose labeling on all Israeli products not just those from outside the 1948 Armistice lines? Will you oppose labeling on Israeli products from outside the 1948 lines?
SPME BDS Monitor: Presidential Candidates Renounce Boycotts as Antisemitism Spreads
The BDS movement suffered major losses in March as politicians and legislators condemned the movement. Particularly important were condemnations from all remaining US presidential candidates, representatives of European governments and Christian leaders. University trustees in the US also condemned BDS antisemitism, setting up confrontations with faculty members, while campus antisemitic incidents increased. Overall the inherent antisemitism of BDS is being revealed, particularly on campuses, as the movement experiences real pressure.
In March, BDS became an issue in the US presidential campaign. In speeches at the annual AIPAC Policy Conference Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton and Republicans John Kasich, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, all condemned the BDS movement as antisemitic. Democrat Bernie Sanders did not attend but his comments on BDS echoed those of the other candidates. Their comments do not represent policy commitments but reflect a perception regarding the seriousness of the BDS issue for American Jews and others.
These condemnations were repeated in other settings by global politicians including US Senator Cory Booker, a group of Latin American and Caribbean lawmakers, British Justice Minister Michael Gove, and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom also condemned the BDS movement but did not refer to antisemitism. These remarks reflect the growing political realization that BDS is inherently antisemitic, discriminatory, and a threat to civil society.
Watch: Zionist 'joins' radical leftist tour
Attorney Nati Rom, founder and director of the Lev Haolam organization that ships products from Judea and Samaria worldwide, joined a tour of Hevron led by the radical leftist NGO Breaking the Silence where he tried to explain the situation to the European participants - in three languages.
"During a publicity tour that I arranged, I passed next to a group of Breaking the Silence tourists. The guide told them stories slandering IDF soldiers, the Jewish residents and the state of Israel," said Rom.
"This time I decided to get involved, to try and understand what motivates them and to try to understand where these falsified stories come from. However they decided to ignore me, to be silent and to run away."
The attorney continued his description, saying, "I decided to join a tour and stood beside (European) members of parliament, I listened to the guide talk about IDF soldiers who just 'shoot, butcher and abuse innocent Arab civilians', as he put it."
"When I saw them passing by a monument to the Levy couple and ignoring the story of how they were murdered, I decided to 'break the silence.' I asked them if they heard about Gadi and Dina Levy, the couple murdered on their way to pray (at the Cave of Machpelah), they responded with scorn, chose anti-Semitic statements and continued walking."


Daphne Anson: North of the Border Up Napier's Way
Wrote Scottish political journalist Stephen Daisley in the Jewish Chronicle last Autumn:
'It reads like the grim manifesto of a fringe group.
"We condemn Zionism as a racist ideology based on Jewish supremacy in Palestine, as well as the related ideology of Christian Zionism.
.. We support the Palestinian non-violent struggle for resistance to the colonisation of their lands, resources and peoples by Israel and by Zionist settlers."
In fact, these words come from the policy statement on Israel and Palestine adopted by the Scottish Green Party at its conference last weekend.The document has attracted attention for its demand that Hamas be removed from the list of proscribed terrorist organisations, but there are even more disturbing provisions.
The resolution "condemns Israel's claim to be 'the Jewish State'", instead declaring it an "apartheid" society "in which non-Jews have inferior rights". As such, it demands the law of return be scrapped for Jews and a right of return introduced for Palestinians.
The party has carved out a startlingly extreme niche.
Students for Justice in Palestine, UC Berkeley Administrators Clash With Pro-Israel Group on Campus
A group of pro-Israel students stood opposite a mock “apartheid wall” and checkpoint dominating the center thoroughfare of the University of California, Berkeley campus Tuesday to provide a counter-narrative, its leader told The Algemeiner on Thursday.
Michaela Fried, President of Tikvah: Students For Israel, said that her group came out to contrast the display by Berkeley’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). But, she said, it also had to deal with an “inordinate presence” of campus administrators, “who on multiple occasions asked us to move our counter-demonstration further away and to not hold signs near the ‘apartheid wall,’ severely limiting our ability to make our voices heard.”
Nevertheless, she said, she felt they had achieved their goal of presenting “compelling and eye-catching images which people deeply connect to.” She explained that they had chosen to protest specifically the intentional violent targeting of civilians, which “occurs so frequently in Israel and elsewhere in the world. We stood holding the names, pictures and stories of victims of recent terror attacks directed at Israeli civilians.”
Tensions are often high between SJP and her group, Fried added, since some members of each group are “connected to what is going on in the Middle East because they have family there.” Although they sometimes know each other from classes, their interactions in Sproul Plaza, the center of student activity at Berkeley, are “usually hostile,” whether during demonstrations or weekly tabling events.
Columbia University Gives Platform to Anti-Israel Blasphemy
When protesters at a pro-Israel event at UC Davis unfurled a banner reading “1948=1492,” thereby drawing a connection between Israel’s founding in 1948 and Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America in 1492, it was “intersectionality” in action. Anti-Israel activists have appropriated this academic theory, which holds that oppressive social structures reinforce each other at every level, resulting in heightened oppression.
Illustrating this trend, the Center for Palestine Studies (CPS) at Columbia University recently held a lecture titled, “Palestine Re-Covered: Reading a Settler Colonial Landscape,” by Abdul Rahim al-Shaikh. Al-Shaikh is an associate professor of philosophy and cultural studies at Bir Zeit University, and a Fulbright Visiting Senior Scholar at CPS. The audience of approximately sixty people continued to trickle into one of the smaller semi-circular lecture halls in Jerome Greene Hall, even as al-Shaikh began. He opened with the aforementioned “intersection” between 1492 and the Zionist return to the land of Israel in the mid-nineteenth century:
The moment of 1492 is an intersection between the conquest of America and the conquest of Palestine. . . . 1492 is occupied by the threshold of the longstanding amalgam between the neo-American colonial enterprise and Zionism. Since then, the idea of America and the idea of Israel managed to form the power that realized the Zionist myth.
UK Muslim school teaches that ‘Jews are plotting world domination’
A private Muslim school in the north of England is teaching its students that Jews are plotting to take over the world, and its founder quotes a notorious anti-Semitic tract in the written material he disseminates.
Islamic Tarbiyah Academy in Dewsbury, Yorkshire teaches some 140 students of elementary school age in classes that take place after the school day ends, Sky News reported Friday. The report described the academy’s founder and leader, Mufti Zubair Dudha, as “a respected cleric from the orthodox Deobandi sect, which is thought to control half of all mosques and madrassas in the UK.”
But, the report continued, Dudha has produced flyers that quote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged text produced in Russia at the turn of the last century that purports to outline Jewish plans to take over the world.
According to Sky, Dudha has also produced other written materials that brand institutions that host men and women as evil, advocate a ban on television and urge Muslims not to adopt British customs. Some leaflets also call for women not to work and to be fully covered before leaving the home.
U of Chicago Students Mobilize Against Suddenly Launched BDS Campaign on Campus
Pro-Israel students at the University of Chicago (UC) are mobilizing to respond to the sudden launch of a campus divestment campaign against Israel, The Algemeiner has learned.
Andrea Hoffman, executive director of the Newberger Hillel Center at UC, told The Algemeiner that the organization had first learned of the campaign Monday morning, along with everyone else. Despite the lack of advance warning, she said, however, “It wasn’t really a surprise, given the current climate on campuses today.”
The campaign, sponsored by a group calling itself “UofC Divest,” is a local campus manifestation of the worldwide Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Specifically, UofC Divest aims to persuade the student government to pass a resolution calling on the university to divest from certain companies allegedly “complicit in” or “profiting from” Israel’s “ongoing military occupation, apartheid, and other human rights violations in Palestine/Israel.”
“We at the UC Hillel are opposed to BDS,” Hoffman said, “and are disappointed to learn about the efforts to bring this to a vote in the College Council. But I am so proud of the way our students, both Jewish and non-Jewish, conservative and progressive, are mobilizing, and how deeply they care about Israel and Jewish life on campus.”
The New York Times Renames Holy Sites to Make Jews Seem Like Occupiers
The New York Times is re-labeling the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, in order to make Jews seem like occupiers of Muslim holy sites.
The Cave of the Patriarchs is mentioned in the first chapter of the Hebrew Testament, Genesis 23:9. Genesis was written about 3,400 years ago, but the oral recording of the Bible preceded that. Islam is 1,400 years old. Therefore, the “Cave of the Patriarchs” was the name in use for at least 2,000 years before Muslims could possibly have formulated an alternative name.
Israel controls Hebron now, and has a strong claim to the area. So whether your criterion for authoritative naming is who originated it or who controls the area now, the Jewish people possess that authority.
As with the Temple Mount, the Times went from: (1) Using the official name; to (2) giving equal billing to the two religions’ names — the Israeli name followed by the Muslim name; to (3) calling it the Muslim name followed by the Israeli name; and (4) calling the Cave the Ibrahimi Mosque, without referring to its Jewish name.
BBC WS Newshour erases perpetrators from item about hijacking
The March 29th evening edition of the BBC World Service radio programme ‘Newshour’ included an item concerning the same day’s hijacking of an EgyptAir plane. Following a report on the incident, the item turned to a more general topic, introduced by presenter James Coomarasamy (from 34:50 here) as follows:
“Well let’s hear now from someone who knows a thing or two about hijacking; he’s 85 year-old Uri Bar Lev. He’s a retired Israeli pilot and back in 1970 when he was flying an El Al plane from Amsterdam to New York he became the first and possibly the only pilot to foil a hijacking in mid-air.”
The ensuing conversation with Uri Bar Lev was also promoted separately on social media but remarkably, one rather relevant piece of information was omitted from the entire item.
At no point were listeners informed that the plane piloted by Bar Lev was the target of an attempted hijacking by the Palestinian terrorist organisation the PFLP. Especially when one considers that over the past two and a half years the BBC has produced at least three items of content concerning that story and has repeatedly portrayed one of the hijackers on Bar Lev’s flight – Leila Khaled – as an ‘icon’, that is quite an omission.
Gideon Levy Puts Moderate Palestinians To Shame
Soon after the terror attacks in Brussels, which Israelis evidently could relate to, Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy felt it was important to distinguish between different kinds of terror. While he proclaims ISIS terror as unjustifiable, he says Palestinian terror is “justified in its cause,” and both insults and misjudges the Palestinians when he says their terror is “the resort of those who have no choice, a tool of the weak to gain their more­-than-­justified goals.”
He states the apparent simplicity of the situation, that “ISIS’s goals are insane, the Palestinians’ goals are justified.”
Exactly which Palestinians’ goals is he talking about?
– The ones who wanted to take revenge on the deaths of terrorist-relatives killed by Israeli soldiers, by targeting innocent Israeli civilians?
– The ones who wanted to act against innocent Israelis because of the rumor fuelled by Palestinians that Israel was going to “change the status-quo” on the Temple Mount?
– The ones who want to destroy Israel and replace it in its entirety with a Palestinian state free of all Jews?
– The ones who simply want any and all Jews dead, wherever they are?
Guardian editor Katharine Viner reveals* origins of paper’s anti-Israel agenda (*This post is an April Fool’s satire)
‘When Alan [Rusbridger] called me into his office to explain the policy, I have to admit at first I was perplexed. Why run a campaign against a small far-away country that, to most fair-minded people, seems far more sinned against than sinning.
‘Look Kate – may I call you Kate?’
‘No’
‘Look Katharine, we’re losing money hand-over-fist – 50 million a year to be precise, even though we employ mostly unpaid interns these days So, I was quietly tinkling the old ivories in my second home in the Cotswolds the other day and it suddenly struck me. There’s a lot of unfair-minded people out there. There’s a whole ocean of Israel-haters out there – some because they’re anti-Western, some because they’re political ignoramuses, some because they’re simply old-fashioned antisemitic bigots. But there’s a huge potential to be tapped into. We need some way of bringing in the readies and we won’t achieve that with Polly’s boring drivel about public services or Giles’s lunatic rants on Anglicanism and Planet Earth’.
It was then when I realized that, behind the public façade of odious moralizing prig, Alan was in fact a true capitalist visionary. That he was worth every penny of the £450,000 salary the Scott Trust lavishes on him.’
Holocaust Scholar Says He Was Wrong to Assume Serious Jew-Hatred Wouldn’t Resurface After Nazi Defeat (INTERVIEW)
“Antisemitism has become a serious threat once again,” an eminent Holocaust scholar told The Algemeiner on Tuesday, saying he had thought that after the demise of the Nazis and knowledge of the destruction they wrought, serious public Jew-hatred was unlikely to surface again in the West in any major way.
“I was wrong,” Alvin Rosenfeld, professor of English and Jewish studies at Indiana University, said, pointing to a conference he has organized for next week, aimed partly to respond to and address the problem.
“It is critical that we call attention to the phenomenon and try to understand it, and the underlying issues, including the role that hostility to Israel plays in it. And to do that we begin by bringing scholars together,” Rosenfeld said.
The conference — “Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and the Dynamics of Delegitimization” — runs from April 2 through April 6 at the Bloomington campus, and was a year and a half in the planning. “There has never before been a conference on this subject of this size and scope at any American university, as far as I know,” Rosenfeld said. “We sent out a ‘call for papers’ in early 2015, looking for papers addressing the relationship between anti-Zionism, antisemitism and broader ideological currents of thought. We were happily surprised to receive 85 submissions from around the world, from Europe, Israel and Asia, including many from major scholars.”
UK denied compensation to thousands of Holocaust victims, papers reveal
Newly released records revealed for the first time Thursday that thousands of traumatized Holocaust survivors have struggled to receive compensation from the United Kingdom, according to The Jewish Chronicle.
The report cited documents that show that out of 4,206 applicants, less than a quarter (1,015) received benefits.
Established in 1964, the Nazi Persecution Compensation plan was designed to allocate up to 4,000 pounds ($5730) to each individual given to Britain by Germany.
But documents show that applicants were denied financial assistance if they could not prove they were held in a concentration camp or similar institution, according to the rules imposed by the British government.
Thursday saw the UK Foreign Office release over 900 documents, with four more batches expected to be made public in the coming weeks.
'They are killing people, it's not even their land' : Video captures man's anti-Semitic rant as he refuses to leave Starbucks
A man has been captured unleashing an anti-Semitic tirade at a women in a Toronto Starbucks.
In the video at the Canadian coffee shop the man is seen loudly arguing with the woman after they appear to have finished their drinks.
It is hard to understand what he says before he realises the cameraman is filming him on a mobile phone.
The man, wearing a black shirt and baseball cap, says to the camera: 'Okay go ahead, if you put that let me tell you the truth, you are going to be in trouble.
'You see, this is a money sucker mother******', he says turning back towards the woman.
Repeating himself he says again: 'Don't worry. Let me tell you, if you do that you are going to be in trouble. I will tell you the truth. You see, he's a mother******.'
A member of staff then butts into the debate and asks the angry man to leave the store.
But he ignores her and turns back to the woman to continue arguing.
'The true Hebrew Israelis are black people,' he says making the cameraman giggle.
Disney, Saban invest $15 million in Playbuzz
Playbuzz, a leading platform for online content engagement and social distribution, today announced it has raised $15 million in new funding, led by Saban Ventures with participation from The Walt Disney Company. Existing investors 83North, Carmel Ventures and FirstTime Ventures also participated in the investment round.
Playbuzz — used by tens of thousands of publishers, brands and content creators – says it will use the investment to further enhance its publishing platform and expand its sponsored content business.
“Playbuzz enables publishers and brands to create content that matches today’s content-consumption habits, while generating meaningful engagement and new monetization opportunities,” said Shaul Olmert, co-founder and CEO of Playbuzz. “The support of global leaders in media, such as Saban and Disney, will enable us to expand both our editorial reach and sponsored content business.”
Playbuzz’s innovative content formats include slideshows, flip cards, galleries, quizzes, lists and video snaps.
Israeli ice device destroys breast tumors
For the past year, a novel Israeli medical device has been changing the way American doctors remove fibro-adenoma tumors – benign breast lumps. Now an internationally renowned Japanese surgeon is testing IceSense3, made in Israel by IceCure Medical, to destroy small malignant tumors as well.
“This is the future,” CEO Hezi Himelfarb tells ISRAEL21c.
During an ultrasound-guided procedure, the IceSense3 probe penetrates the tumor and destroys it by engulfing it with ice. Needing only local anesthetic, the cryoablation process takes five or 10 minutes in a doctor’s office, clinic or breast center, and the patient can get up and leave afterward. No recovery period or post-care is necessary.
Before the Israeli device got US Food and Drug Administration approval in December 2010, many women preferred to simply monitor harmless growths instead of having a surgical procedure that is expensive, time-consuming and painful. The new solution, which is quick and virtually painless with no scarring, offers a more attractive option.
“I don’t know any woman who wants to get up every morning and feel a lump in her breast even if she knows it was diagnosed as benign,” Himelfarb says. “It creates anxiety because it might potentially hide other tumors, and it is preferable to get rid of it.”
Israeli Team Treats Pediatric Heart Patients in Tanzania
Shadia Jirani, an 18-month-old Tanzanian girl, was born with a giant hole in her heart. Without surgery her chances of survival were grim.
Shadia was the first child wheeled into the operating room at Jakaya Kikwete Cardiac Institute (JKCI) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, during a weeklong medical mission in March undertaken by a team of cardiologists, nurses and volunteers from the nonprofit Save a Child’s Heart (SACH) at Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, Israel.
“It would seem the SACH team arrived just in time,” remarked Randi Weiss, SACH Young Leadership director in her daily blog about the mission, which was sponsored by Save a Child’s Heart Canada.
Shadia is doing well after a three-hour operation by SACH lead surgeon Dr. Lior Sasson and Dr. Godwin Godfrey, Tanzania’s first pediatric cardiac surgeon, who trained with SACH specialists for six years in Israel with the support of the Australian Pratt Foundation. Assisting them was Dr. Yayehyirad Mekonnen, currently training in Israel through SACH to become Ethiopia’s first pediatric cardiac surgeon.


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