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Friday, September 10, 2021

09/10 Links Pt2: Caroline Glick: Assessing the twin disasters of September 2001; Danny Lewin H'yd: The very first victim of 9/11; 9/11 event to feature speakers affiliated with terrorists

From Ian:

Matthew Continetti: Year 20
We owe this 9/11 Generation a great deal. I was not the only resident of New York City in the weeks after September 11 to have nightmares of more planes flying into skyscrapers. Nor am I alone when I recall the pervasive fear that accompanied the anthrax attacks the next month or the D.C. sniper rampage the following year. The threat loomed large of another massacre; of suicide bombings on the scale experienced by Israel during the contemporaneous Second Intifada; of terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction. None of that happened.

Why? Because Americans acted. Those Americans, male and female, belonged to every race, every ethnicity, every religion, every creed, every sexual orientation. And they belonged to both political parties. The brightest stars among Republicans and Democrats—from Tom Cotton to Tammy Duckworth, from Dan Crenshaw to Jason Crow—belong to the 9/11 Generation. They may not agree on either the ends or the means of domestic and foreign policy. But they are joined by common citizenship and a mutual interest in the safety and prosperity of America. They ran toward the danger. And they deserve our profound gratitude.

The high cost of war bought safety for the homeland and a reduction in radical Islamic terrorism. Bin Laden wanted his holy warriors to collapse the American economy and drive us from the Arabian Peninsula. They failed. Not only did Osama bin Laden lose his mission and his life. His successors Musab al-Zarqawi and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did too. These victories for freedom did not happen in a vacuum. It wasn't special-pleading or guilt-tripping or an especially scathing diplomatic communique that ended Baghdadi's reign of terror. It was Delta Force.

Which is why the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan has been so dispiriting. It may resuscitate global jihad at the very moment when that ignoble cause was on the verge of defeat. It may revive the fighting spirit and grand ambition of localized and constrained terrorist groups just as America turns inward and aloof.

That danger makes the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 an occasion not for intellectual browbeating but for patriotic resolve. It is the bedrock courage, resourcefulness, and resilience of the 9/11 Generation that will see America through her latest dark night of the soul. The enemy cannot win so long as we never tire, never waver, and never forget.
Caroline Glick: Assessing the twin disasters of September 2001
We have a tendency to forget that two historical events occurred in early September 2001. No one needs to be reminded of the jihadist attacks on Sept. 11 that killed nearly 3,000 people in a single morning. The other event, that tends to be overlooked, was the UN Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, which concluded four days before the attacks.

With 20 years of hindsight, and in light of America's catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan last month, it suddenly seems clear that the Durban Conference changed the course of history equally if not more than the Islamic terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. It was legacy of Durban, more than Sept. 11 that brought the free world to its present perilous juncture. Today a humiliated free world faces triumphant forces of jihad, far more powerful than they were on Sept. 10, 2001. It faces a rapidly rising China. Above all else, it faces internal upheavals and cleavages within its own ranks.

US President Joe Biden justifies his decision to withdraw US and NATO forces from Afghanistan in the shameful way he did by claiming that the time had come to end "the forever war." But it works out that Biden and his advisors don't have a problem with all "forever wars." They just weren't willing to fight jihadist Islam. They didn't want to fight this specific war – against the enemy that attacked America 20 years ago this week. And in their frenzied quest to devote all of their energies and efforts to fighting their chosen forever war, Biden and his team were willing to ignore – or perhaps worse, to accept – two very simple facts of war.

First, the only way to end a war that you haven't won is to lose it. And second, if you end a war without winning it, you hand victory to your enemy.

Several analysts have likened the US defeat in Afghanistan to the fall of the Byzantine capital Constantinople to the Ottoman armies in 1453. The Taliban flag flying over what was the US Embassy in Kabul until the end of last month, and reports that China is considering taking over Bagram Air Base, signal that America's enemies believe they are ascendant, that the free world has been defeated.

The "forever war" Biden, his advisors and supporters are gunning to aggressively pursue until the complete destruction of their enemy is a war within the United States. The "enemy" are their political rivals, who they castigate as "racists." They call their forever war, "the war against racism."

The odd thing about their efforts is that the American war against racism was won decisively more than 50 years ago thanks to the Civil Rights Movement and thanks to the fact that the majority of Americans recognized at the time and since that racism is antithetical to ideals of freedom and equal opportunity on which the United States was founded.

The seeds of this strange war were planted 20 years ago at Durban. We remember the Durban conference mainly for its antisemitic agenda. The plan to present anti-Zionism as a "kosher" form of antisemitism, and use it to abrogate the Jewish state's right to exist was codified at Durban. But legitimizing antisemitism wasn't only a means to hurt the Jews. For many actors on the international left, legitimizing the goal of cancelling Israel's moral and legal right to exist was and remains still today a means to advance their primary goal: destroying America's moral confidence in its role as the leader of the free world and denying the US's moral right to fight to defend its national interests.
Melanie Phillips: Twenty years on, the cultural fault-line remains
Most devastatingly of all, the Holocaust passed a shattering judgment against modernity. So in the repudiation of its foundational beliefs, the west arrived at precisely the same point as the Islamic jihadists.

Of course, westerners never saw any similarity between themselves and Islamists locked into the seventh century and whom it dismissed as incomprehensible, crazy and worthless.

But in a mirror image, the west was busily severing the connection with its own historic values. This was compounded by an arrogant assumption that western attitudes were universal.

The west therefore tried to impose its utopian, post-modern belief in negotiation and compromise upon a Middle East and Islamic world that saw conflict solely in terms of victory and defeat, strength and weakness.

And so the west has continued to repeat its fiascos by indulging in the same fantasies that it will end the “forever wars” — whether through the Israel-Palestine “peace process,” the Iran nuclear deal or abandoning Afghanistan, where both British and American governments are now spinning themselves the fantasy that Taliban “realists” will keep the Taliban jihadists in check.

For Islamists, war is indeed forever. For such fanatics, defeat is only ever temporary.

For the west, however, there are no “forever wars.” Its wars are either won or lost; there are victors and vanquished.

And military strength matters less than belief. The 9/11 attackers didn’t use sophisticated military hardware. They hijacked civilian aircraft and turned them into flying human bombs of enormous destructive potential.

What fuels the jihad is the power of an idea. That idea is the cult of death.

To overcome a cult of death, the west needs a belief in life. Its own life. That is the way to draw the necessary courage and resolve from this most sombre anniversary; but alas, it seems the most difficult of lessons to learn.


Danny Lewin H'yd: The very first victim of 9/11
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Danny Lewin boarded American Airlines Flight No. 11 in Boston, expecting to reach Los Angeles. Instead, the flight was hijacked and commandeered by Arab terrorists, crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. On that fateful flight, Danny Lewin became the very first victim of the largest terrorist attack in history in which almost 3,000 Americans died. An internal memorandum of the Federal Aviation Administration says “that in the course of a struggle that took place between Lewin, a graduate of Israel’s elite commando unit, Sayeret Matkal, and the four hijackers who were assaulting that cockpit, Lewin was murdered by Satam Al Suqami, a 25-year-old Saudi.”

Sometime after the attack, the Lewin family in Jerusalem received a telephone call from the FBI offices in New York. On the line was the agent responsible for the investigation of the attack on Flight 11. He told Danny’s parents that there is a high degree of certainty that Danny tried to prevent the hijacking. The FBI relied, among other things, on the testimony of the stewardess Amy Sweeney.

Sweeney succeeded in clandestinely getting a call out during the flight to a flight services supervisor in Boston, from the rear of the plane: “A hijacker slit the throat of a passenger in business class and the passenger appears to me to be dead.” To this day the American investigators are not convinced that Danny Lewin was murdered on the spot. An additional stewardess, Betty Ong, who succeeded in calling from a telephone by one of the passenger seats, said that the passenger who was attacked from business class seat 10B was seriously wounded. It turned out that 10B was the seat of Danny Lewin.

The Lewin family, Danny’s parents and brothers, have no doubt that Danny battled the hijackers. And it is for them a tremendous consolation. “I wasn’t surprised to hear from the FBI that Danny fought. I was sure that this is what he would do,” Yonatan, his younger brother, said. “Danny didn’t sit quietly. From what we heard from the Americans, the hijackers attacked one of the stewardesses and Danny rose to protect her and prevent them from entering the cockpit. It is a consolation to us that Danny fought. We see it as an act of heroism that a person sacrifices his life in order to save others.


Seth Frantzman: 9/11: US and Israel learned to stop attacks, but not terrorist groups - analysis
WHAT WE learned after 9/11 was that the US embarked on a wide-ranging global war on terror, but the US never really sought to eradicate all terror groups. Instead the question of what constituted a “terror” group would constantly change. Israel likely thought that the US joining the war on terror would mean US sympathy for what Israel was facing. However, deeply ingrained views in the West that portray the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as sui generis mean that terror groups like Hamas were seen as different than al-Qaeda. Iranian-backed groups like Hezbollah have also been seen consistently as different.

There were some consolation prizes for Israel. Warnings about the growing role of jihadist violence and groups likened to the Muslim Brotherhood led some European countries to start to want to learn from Israel’s experience. Where European countries had once portrayed terror attacks like the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre as something done just to “Israelis,” soon after 9/11 there would be a series of jihadist attacks in Europe, from the Madrid bombings in 2004 to the 2005 London bombings and to the attacks the following decade in Paris and elsewhere. However, it’s not clear what lessons were learned in the end from Israel’s experience. Israel never completely defeated terror groups; it merely walled Hamas off in Gaza, and pounded Hezbollah in 2006 until both Hezbollah and Israel appeared tired of fighting. Meanwhile, the US didn’t learn the lessons of Israel’s counter-insurgency challenges, and went into Iraq in 2003 without a plan of how to get out.

What the US found in Iraq was what Israel found in Lebanon in 1982, initial success followed by a decade of war. America tried different strategies, such as counter-insurgency and counterterrorism. Eventually the US even moved through the “surge” to what it called the “by, with and through” strategy, which put most of the focus on local forces doing the work. While that worked in eastern Syria against ISIS, it failed miserably in Afghanistan, and the Afghan government collapsed in a week of fighting in August 2021. The Iraqi army was only able to defeat ISIS because of the mobilization of Kurdish Peshmerga and Iraqi Shi’ites, backed by pro-Iranian militias.

Twenty years after 9/11, the lessons of that day are still inconclusive. It was traumatizing for a generation. Today a new generation must manage a world left behind by America’s attempt to impose its will on countries and then Washington’s decision to retreat from those same countries, such as Afghanistan.

In the long-term wake of the attacks it appears US adversaries such as China, Russia and Turkey are rising, and US friends are weaker than in the past. The Taliban have won in Afghanistan. An al-Qaeda offshoot now controls Idlib province in Syria and is backed quietly by Turkey. That means that the same extremists the US once fought are now appearing to get the red carpet from Moscow to Doha.

On a purely security front, the US and its allies, including Israel, have learned the lesson of how to stop most terror attacks, but they haven’t learned how to defeat terrorist groups.
Phyllis Chesler: 9/11, 20 Years . . . and Forgetting
I remained rooted to my chair, transfixed, as I watched the twin towers come down—and when I finally stepped out into my front yard, I said to my neighbor: “Now, we are all Israelis.”

It was an idea that I repeated many times in 2002 and again in 2003 in “The New Anti-Semitism” and one that my neighbor, German journalist Anya Osang, has also repeated many times, with even more understanding since she and her journalist husband lived in Israel for two years.

Twenty years later, and here I sit, reading an excellent article about 9/11 by Fern Sidman at The Jewish Voice and watching an equally excellent documentary on Netflix about 9/11: “Turning Point.”

Here I sit, transfixed again, reliving the timeline of Islamic terrorist attacks against Israel, America, and the West. I acknowledge that in record time, Israel stopped most such attacks with its Security Wall and then with its Iron Dome, for which it was defamed and demonized.

Europe and America also stopped many—but not all— Islamic/Islamist acts of terrorism before they could be carried out. However, I cannot understand how or why Western leaders and the “chattering classes” managed to forget, minimize, deny, and actually give cover to such plots and plotters. Jihadists are Holy Warriors against Racism.

Jihadists are mentally ill.

And now, America has left Afghanistan where bin Laden plotted 9/11, and we have done so in the most shameful and dishonorable of ways. Who has best captured the reality of the Taliban and their interpretation of Sharia Law?

Why, none other than George Orwell and Margaret Atwood. Strangely enough, many mainstream columnists viewed both “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Testaments,” and the documentary based upon these works as dystopias that describe white Christian misogynist men and a Puritan-style Biblical Hell.
Biden Will Not Deliver Live Remarks on 9/11 Anniversary
President Joe Biden will not give a live speech to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. He will instead release a prerecorded video of his remarks.

"You will hear from [Biden] in the form of a video in advance—or if that will be available that day, I should say," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday.

The president will attend events at all three 9/11 memorial sites—in New York City, Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon—on Saturday, the anniversary of the attacks. Psaki said Biden's busy schedule that day precluded him from giving a live address.

Former president Donald Trump delivered live remarks to commemorate the attacks on each of the four years of his administration, as did former president Barack Obama each year of his two terms.


September 11 event to feature speakers affiliated with terrorists
Speakers with terrorist affiliations or those who have expressed support for terrorism will be featured at a 9/11 event sponsored by Rutgers University and San Francisco State University on Saturday.

The panel, "Whose Narrative? 20 Years since September 11, 2001," will serve as a launching point for a semsester-long event that will explore, among other topics, challenging the "exceptionalization of 9/11/2001" and "legitimization of 'war on terror.'"

Speakers on Saturday will include Dr. Sami Al-Arian and Dr. Rabab Abulhadi, academics who have in the past courted controversy in their engagement with terrorists and terrorist organizations.

According to the event landing page, sponsors include SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicity and Diaspora Studies (AMED Studies) program, Rutgers' Center for Security, Race and Rights, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, two Jewish Voice for Peace Chapters, the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and America Muslims for Palestine (AMP).

The International Legal Forum, an Israel-based NGO with a global network of over 3,500 lawyers and civil society activists in over 40 countries, uncovered the panel and has sent letters to the administrations of Rutgers and SFSU demanding the event be canceled.

"Robust free speech and academic freedom might be sacrosanct, but it is a red line and simply inexcusable for public institutions, such as SFSU and Rutgers, to sponsor and endorse this event, which effectively glorifies terror and the use of violence, by providing a platform to convicted terrorists, conspiracy theorists and purveyors of hate," Arsen Ostrovsky, Chair and CEO of The International Forum, told The Jerusalem Post. "The International Legal Forum calls upon SFSU and Rutgers to immediately and unequivocally withdraw their association with this event, which furthermore, may be in breach of US anti-terror legislation.”
Cross-Party Fury as Taxpayer-Funded Venue Hosts 9_11 Event With “Apologists For Terror”
A Camden theatre that receives tens of thousands of taxpayer funding has been slammed for hosting a three-day event with a group that Boris previously described as “apologists for terror”. In April 2021 they were given a £33,671 grant by DCMS…

The Camden People’s Theatre has been accused of a “grotesque lapse of judgement”, compounded after it emerged they’re to soon host one CAGE speaker who previously questioned whether Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11, and another who called Jihadi John a “beautiful young man”. The same week that one Labour council no-platformed comedian Roy Chubby Brown, yet not a peep from Camden council about this…

The event has been highlighted as part of PolicyExchange’s Understanding Islamism project, which documents the activities of Islamists, both violent and non-violent, and their sympathisers Tory MP and Senior Fellow Nus Ghani said:
“It’s absurd that taxpayers’ money has been allocated to events or individuals who have stated that the Islamic State’s violent Jihadi John is a ‘beautiful young man”.

Fellow senior fellow, and Labour MP, Khalid Mahmood also says it “worries me deeply that official Arts Council and UK Government funding could be going towards something that seems designed to offend the British and American public” Guido expects a swift DCMS review…
20 years ago, the UN Durban Conference aimed to combat racism. It devolved into a ‘festival of hate’ against Jews.
Some of the Jewish organizational officials flying into the coastal city of Durban, South Africa, on the last week of August 2001 were excited. They believed the U.N.’s anti-racism conference there would be an opportunity to exchange notes on a cause that the Jewish world had worked on for decades.

Others, steeped in how the United Nations and its affiliates functioned, were wary of some of the players, who were known for tirelessly steering every international conference to complaints about Israel. Still others who had been tracking preparations for the gathering knew that Iran, Israel’s implacable enemy, was planning to take over the proceedings.

But no one was prepared for what it became — a carnival of antisemitic expression that drove Jewish participants to tears each night and had them fearing for their physical safety.

“It was worse than I had imagined,” recalled Irwin Cotler, a longtime Jewish human rights lawyer in Canada who would go on to be his nation’s justice minister. “Because it was a festival of hate.”

As is conventional at U.N. forums, the governmental conference, which ran Sept. 2-9, was preceded by the nongovernmental organization conference Aug. 27-Sept. 2.

Both would be overshadowed by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But the NGO conference, say the Jewish participants who attended, was a template for the next 20 years of anti-Israel rhetoric, codifying the argument now increasingly prevalent on the left that Israel is an apartheid state deserving of isolation. It was also an eye opener for many in terms of how criticism of Israel, however legitimate, can be co-opted by an antisemitic agenda.


Unpacked: Is the Focus on Antisemitism Overblown? | Antisemitism, Explained
With Jews making up a mere 0.2% of the world’s population, one might reasonably wonder, “Why should we give antisemitism so much attention?” But as professor Walter Russell Mead explains, “Societies that tolerate antisemitism...take a fateful step towards the loss of both freedom and prosperity.” History has shown that societies suffer where antisemitism is prevalent. When the focus is on blaming the Jews, the real causes of society's problems go overlooked. This makes antisemitism more than just a problem for the Jews, but actually something we all should be concerned about.


St. Mary’s College Postpones Event With Professor Accused of Promoting Antisemitic Libel
St. Mary’s College has postponed an event featuring an Islamic law and theology scholar following complaints about antisemitic comments, the California Jewish newspaper J. reported on Wednesday.

University of California-Berkeley lecturer Hatem Bazian — whom the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recently criticized for retweeting a cartoon that depicted an Israeli soldier taking the heart of a dead Palestinian — was scheduled to appear at “How to Be a White Ally While Challenging Islamophobia” on Wednesday evening.

“Due to the multiple perspectives and information shared by members of our community, the organizers have decided to postpone the event until they can investigate further and decide how best to meet their goals for the planned event,” wrote President Richard Plumb in a campus-wide email sent before the virtual event, sponsored by the Center for Women and Gender Equity (CWGE), took place.

“Conversations have begun to address how to gather information, review the concerns surrounding the speaker and the community’s response, and move forward,” he said.

According to the Moraga, California college, “How to Be a White Ally” was part of the college’s commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the September 11th attacks. It first addressed the controversy prompted by Bazian’s planned appearance in campus-wide email on Monday, according to J.
Update on California Ethnic Studies Bill, AB101
Assembly Bill 101 (AB101) is legislation that would make ethnic studies a graduation requirement for all public high school students in California, starting with the 2029-2030 academic year.

StandWithUs has been deeply involved in the debate over ethnic studies in California since August, 2019. We are sharing an update now because AB101 has passed the California Assembly and Senate, and is expected to be signed by the Governor soon.

We believe the goal of ethnic studies is important and positive: to represent and uplift marginalized communities in public education. Because of our work together with thousands of citizens and partners across the state, the California State Board of Education recognized that content about Jews and antisemitism belongs in K-12 ethnic studies.

However, interest groups are working harder than ever to use these courses as a platform for anti-Israel propaganda, antisemitism, and other forms of bias. They are pushing slanderous curriculum materials directly to local teachers, schools, and school districts, regardless of what California's state government does.

We cannot allow this hatred to be institutionalized in our public education system, especially through courses that students are required to take in order to graduate. As such, we supported amendments to AB101 and have been closely tracking the bill.

The original version of AB101 included a requirement that ethnic studies instruction and materials, "not reflect or promote, directly or indirectly, any bias, bigotry, or discrimination" against anyone based on their identity.


BBC again flouts editorial guidelines in interview with ‘activist’
Nevertheless, Knell failed to provide readers with “appropriate information” about the person described only as an activist and a “critic”, or the organisations he represents.

As noted here in June when BBC World Service radio interviewed Ubay al Aboudi, he has been arrested at least three times due to his membership and activity in the PFLP terrorist organisation – most recently in November 2019. In his Linkedin profile al-Aboudi describes himself as also working for an NGO called UAWC which has links to the same terrorist group.

In December 2019 employees of both UAWC and the Bisan Center (both of which have received EU and other foreign funding) were arrested as part of a PFLP operated terror network connected to the murder of Rina Shnerb in August of that year.

Al-Aboudi’s own links to the PFLP as well as those of organisations he works for are clearly “relevant to the context” of his criticism of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, not least because such condemnation on the part of the PFLP predates the Nizar Banat story.

There is of course plenty of reason for foreign journalists to report on the Palestinian Authority’s corruption, crackdowns on critics and abuses of freedom of expression, not least because of the financial support it receives from Western nations. However, audience understanding of those topics is not enhanced by the BBC’s repeated superficial portrayal of anyone critical of the PA as ‘human rights activists’ without any clarification of their own often no less problematic actions, ideologies and “particular viewpoints” and – in this case – a history of links to a terrorist organisation.
Sky News (in Arabic) suggests all of Israel is a 'settlement'
Emirati affiliated Sky News Arabia persists in calling Israeli communities inside Israel’s internationally-recognized territory “settlements”, even after its correspondents were publicly called-out by CAMERA staff.

This is how CAMERA Arabic advisor Meir Masri responded on air to Sky News Arabia’s Israel correspondent Firas Lutfi calling the Israeli city of Kiryat Shemona a “settlement”, in an August 4th broadcast following Hezbollah firing missiles at Israeli northern communities that day:

However, not only did Sky News Arabia fail to correct its online item which referred to Kiryat Shmona and other Jewish communities within pre-’67 Israel as “settlements” earlier that day, its website subsequently published three additional items over the next five days which used the same terminology.

August 4th, headline: “Missiles fall close to an Israeli settlement near Lebanon, and the Israeli military responds”; photo caption: “A missile fell in an open area close to the Kiryat Shmona settlement“; body: “The Israeli military responded with [firing] seven rockets across the border with Lebanon, at the Marjayoun plateau facing the two settlements of Metula and Tallat al-Hamames [probably the Har Tsfiya neighborhood, also in Metula; Tallat al-Hamames is an uninhabited hilltop inside Lebanon].”
Slovakia apologises for imposing antisemitic laws during the Second World War
This week, Slovakia’s Government apologised for imposing antisemitic laws during the Second World War.

Yesterday marked the 80th anniversary of the adoption of the Order on the Legal Status of Jews, also known as the “Jewish Code”, a policy that limited the civil, social, religious, and property-related rights of Jewish citizens.

The Slovakian Government released a statement on Wednesday that said: “The Slovak cabinet feels a moral duty to publicly express regret over the crimes committed by the ruling power of that time, especially over adopting a condemnable regulation restricting the fundamental human rights and freedoms of citizens of Jewish origin on September 9, 1941.”

Slovakia adopted the International Definition of Antisemitism last year.
Police search beach for stolen Torah scrolls in Long Island
On Tuesday, police divers searched the waters around a Long Island beach for Torah scrolls and artifacts that are believed to have been stolen.

A 23-year-old man was charged with burglary and other charges after two Torahs went missing from Chabad of the Beaches at Temple Beth El in Long Beach. The man, who was arrested by Long Beach police last month, was reportedly found naked, apart from wearing a Jewish prayer shawl, and was holding a spear.

Nassau Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder said that he did not believe the incident to be caused by antisemitic intent, and noted that the man appeared to be under mental distress. Commissioner Ryder said: “There is a rise of antisemitism around the country, but not so much in Nassau County and we want to keep it that way.”

The man is expected to appear in court on Thursday.
Joe Bennett No Longer Working on Marvel's Timeless After Posting Anti-Semitic Image
Artist Joe Bennett (Immortal Hulk) is no longer working on Marvel's Timeless one-shot after posting an anti-Semitic image on social media.

CBR has confirmed Joe Bennett is no longer a part of the Timeless creative team, and is not on any future Marvel projects. Bennett's Immortal Hulk collaborator Al Ewing publicly severed his relationship with the artist last week after becoming aware of the image, which Ewing called "reprehensible."

"An armoured swordsman, which I assume represents Bolsonaro given Joe's commentary, slaughtering tiny, scurrying people, with the buck teeth and ears of rats," Ewing wrote when describing the 2017 illustration by Bennett. "And big noses. One of them is cosplaying Dracula." Ewing also called out the anti-Semitic caricatures in the art, which has an undeniable political agenda. "I'm assuming these are political enemies of some kind, but even if not, the tropes are apparent," he said. "Human beings as vermin being exterminated. Even if it's no longer up, that it was drawn in the first place, signed, and so proudly displayed by Joe speaks volumes."


Israeli oxygen therapy effective in helping slow Alzheimer's disease
Tel Aviv University and Shamir (Assaf Harofeh) Medical Center have set out to cure Alzheimer's disease by reversing the main activators of the disease, and their latest research – published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Aging on Thursday – attests to their efforts bearing fruit.

By using hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT), researchers improved the cerebral blood flow in elderly patients by 16-23%, alleviating vascular dysfunction and amyloid burden, both crucial elements in the development of Alzheimer's and cognitive decline.

Each patient received 60 HBOT sessions over a 90-day period and showed substantial improvement in cognitive functions – with memory, attention and information processing speed exhibiting the strongest results.

The study – part of a comprehensive research program directed toward aging and accompanying ailments as a reversible disease – holds promise for a new strategic approach to the prevention of Alzheimer's by addressing not only the symptoms, but rather the core pathology and biology responsible for the advancement of the disease.

"By treating vascular dysfunction, we're mapping out the path toward Alzheimer's prevention," research group leader Professor Shai Efrati said. "More research is underway to further demonstrate how HBOT can improve cognitive function and become an influential tool in the imperative fight against the disease."
Technion Scientists Create Wearable Motion Sensor That Identifies Bending, Twisting
Scientists at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa have produced a stretchable electronic material and created a wearable sensor capable of precisely identifying bending and twisting motion. It is essentially an electronic skin capable of recognizing the range of movement human joints normally make, with up to half a degree of precision.

This breakthrough is the result of collaborative work between researchers from different fields in the Laboratory for Nanomaterial-Based Devices, headed by Professor Hossam Haick from the Wolfson Department of Chemical Engineering. It was recently published in “Advanced Materials” and was featured on the journal’s cover.

Haick’s lab is focused on wearable devices for various uses. Currently, existing wearable motion sensors can recognize bending movement, but not twisting.

Existing twisting sensors, on the other hand, are large and cumbersome. This problem was overcome by Ph.D. candidate Yehu David Horev and postdoctoral fellow Arnab Maity. Horev found a way to form a composite material that was both conductive (and thus, usable as a sensor) and flexible, stretchable, breathable and biocompatible that didn’t change its electrical properties when stretched.

Maity then solved the mathematics of analyzing the received signal, creating an algorithm capable of mapping bending and twisting motion—the nature of the movement, its speed and its angle. The novel sensor is breathable, durable and lightweight, allowing it to be worn on the human body for prolonged periods.







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