[Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News] 01/06 Links Pt2: The lessons of Fatah Day; The 10-year klepto-dictatorship of Mahmoud Abbas ~ EoZ

From Ian:

In this respect, Fatah Day provides us all with an important glimpse into the mindset of Palestinian society and its leaders. It should open our eyes, if they aren’t already, and sweep away any illusions that might still exist about the ultimate aims of the Palestinian “national liberation movement.”
Abbas and his ilk neither shy away from violence nor revile it. As the celebrations on Fatah Day demonstrated, they wholeheartedly embrace it.
Not only that, but Fatah Day serves as a timely reminder that Palestinian terrorists began attacking Israel more than two years before the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel acquired Judea and Samaria as well as the eastern part of Jerusalem.
In other words, the Palestinian struggle against Israel, which is supposedly all about the “occupied territories,” is in fact much broader and even more sinister.
It is aimed at the very existence of the Jewish state.
And this is why there truly is no peace.
Not because Israelis choose to live in Beit El or in Hebron, but because our Palestinian neighbors simply don’t want them to live at all.

Shmuley Boteach: The 10-year klepto-dictatorship of Mahmoud Abbas

This coming Friday, January 9, will mark the tenth anniversary of his victory in the Palestinian presidential election. His term was supposed to have ended six years ago, but didn’t – mainly because he’s called off every election since. Which means that this Friday will mark not only the birth of Abbas’ presidency, but also the death of Palestinian democracy. Over the course of the past decade Abbas has completely dismantled whatever democratic process existed in the PA , to the extent that it ever did.
The truth is, though, this refusal to step down or call new elections is just one of many symptoms of the dictatorship that has developed under Abbas. In line with other dictators, Abbas has scrapped any semblance of freedom of speech in the PA . Any journalists who attempt to call him out on his despotic ways are quickly imprisoned. The charge? “Extending their tongue.”
Like any dictator, he’s corrupt. His predecessor, Yasser Arafat, was accused of embezzling billions of dollars of money meant for the Palestinian people, with US officials estimating the man’s personal nest egg at between one and three billion dollars. In line with his role model, after whom he named his own son, Abbas has continued this ignominious tradition.

Exploring How the World Turned Against Israel

Below is an excerpt from “Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel” by Joshua Muravchik.
For every Jew in the world, there are 100 Muslims. While Israel is the only Jewish state, 57 states belong to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. The Arabs had been unable to translate these advantages into military strength, but they learned to make them pay off in political clout. They threatened those who crossed them with terrorism, oil cutoffs, and economic boycotts; and the power of their diplomatic bloc, which largely controlled the UN through the Non-Aligned Movement.
While people and countries quite often respond cravenly to such incentives, they seldom like to admit it even to themselves. What made it easier in this case was the rise of a new paradigm of progressive thought: multiculturalism or race-consciousness. The struggle of “the rest against the West,” or of “people of color” against “the white man” replaced the older model of proletariat versus bourgeoisie as the central moral drama of world history. In this paradigm, the Arabs, notwithstanding their regressive social and political practices, assumed a place among the forces of virtue and progress while the Israelis were consigned to the ranks of the villains and reactionaries.
Championed by the Left’s networks of organizations and intellectuals, a Palestinian state became a kind of Holy Grail to enlightened opinion, even while almost no one gave a fig for the aspirations of the Kurds or Tibetans or numerous other bereft peoples. Whether this state would rise alongside Israel or in place of it was of secondary concern.

What’s Wrong with Re-Affirming Israel’s Jewish and Democratic Character?

The critics’ claim may be mistaken, but it points us toward their real problem with the Jewish State Bill: The bill affirms Zionism and its assertion of the Jewish people’s right to establish a state in their ancient homeland, and enshrines them in law. Unfortunately, many people are uncomfortable with the idea that the Jews are a people no less indigenous to the territory of historic Palestine than the Palestinian Arabs. On some level, they believe Israel’s Jewish inhabitants exist by sufferance, and not by right. Although they reserve for themselves the right of any people to define their own identity, they deny this right to Israeli Jews. Instead, they consider the Jews to be foreign colonizers, and for these colonizers to set up not only a state, but a state built on a particular historical narrative and dedicated to maintaining a particular identity, is a step too far. The critics, in short, have accepted the narrative pushed by many Palestinians and their supporters; a narrative that is used as a political weapon in order to strengthen their bargaining position vis-à-vis Israel. After all, how can foreign colonizers make any demands on natives who are being so magnanimous as to offer these usurpers a piece of their territory? In effect, critics of the bill have decided that the Palestinians have the right to define the identity of the Jewish people.
When the international community made it a legal obligation to establish a Jewish state, it accepted the idea that the Jews had the right to define themselves according to their historical connection to their homeland, in the same way as any other people. But decades of propaganda—and terrorist violence—have weakened the international community’s willingness to live up to this obligation. And so an otherwise benign bill is being decried as if it were the second coming of Jim Crow.

Christians in the Holy Land: Don’t Call Us Arabs

Opponents of recognizing a separate Aramean identity claim that it constitutes an attack on Israel’s Arab minority. But the real problem seems to be that granting official recognition to Aramean Christians implicitly proclaims a very old and dangerously subversive truth: The Arabs are not native to most of the Middle East. Their origins lie in the Arabian Peninsula, in what is now Saudi Arabia. And when their armies spread out across the region, there were already people living there, many different peoples. And however many times those peoples have been persecuted, exiled, or sometimes—one regrets to say—slaughtered, they are still there. This is the same truth that was implicitly proclaimed, whether Israeli Jews are conscious of it or not, when sovereignty was returned to the Jewish inhabitants of the Land of Israel.
That is not to say that the region’s Arabs, like Israel’s Arabs, are not an indelible part of the Middle Eastern mosaic of identities. But this does not give them the right to dominate those with other, equally legitimate identities.
Israel’s recognition of its Aramean minority is thus not an attack on anyone. It is a long-delayed recognition of the right of all the Middle East’s minorities to define their own identities on their own terms.

‘Israeli kindness changed my life,’ says Hamas escapee in Canada

The boy belonged to an aristocratic family, in Palestinian Islamist terms. His maternal grandfather, Said Bilal, was the head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Nablus, who oversaw the activities of its Palestinian branch, Hamas. His uncle, Muaz Bilal, was condemned in 2002 by an Israeli court to 26 life sentences for dispatching suicide bombers into downtown Jerusalem in the late 1990s, killing 21 Israelis and injuring 300 in two separate attacks. Two other uncles, Bakr and Obada Bilal, a military Hamas field commander and an explosives expert, respectively, were released from Israeli prison as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap in October 2011.
The trouble at home started when, as a teenager, he began questioning the beliefs and actions of his parents, both ardent Hamas supporters.
“I ended up having a big fight with them, and ran to Israel,” the youth told The Times of Israel in a phone conversation Monday from Edmonton, Canada, where he eventually sought political asylum. A tragic experience in an Israeli prison cell that night sparked a chain of events which would turn the teenager’s belief system on its head, leading him to convert to Christianity and change his name to John Calvin, after the 16th century French theologian.

Anti-Israel Forces Are Losing Ground

Critics of Israel periodically issue doomsday warnings about how the Jewish State will face international isolation if it does not quickly give in to Palestinian demands. Last week’s United Nations Security Council vote shows, once again, how wrong they are.
Earlier this year, Secretary of State John Kerry warned that Israel’s reluctance to make more unilateral concessions would lead to “an increasing delegitimization campaign.” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and other pundits likewise declared that Israel is increasingly “isolated” and is being treated as a “pariah” state.
But when Palestinian advocates last week presented the UN Security Council with a resolution demanding an Israeli withdrawal from Judea, Samaria and much of Jerusalem, they couldn’t muster enough supporting votes – in a forum which, in the past, has been notorious as the scene of international ganging-up on Israel.
The Third World bloc, which is thought of as being uniformly anti-Israel, suddenly cracked. Two African nations, Nigeria and Rwanda, defied the Palestinians and abstained. Further shifts in Third World attitudes toward Israel might be in the offing. According to recent media reports from India, the New Delhi government is seriously considering adopting a more pro-Israel position at the United Nations. As the founder of the Third World / Non-Aligned bloc, India’s possible new orientation would signal that the underdeveloped nations are no longer in the Arab League’s pocket.

The Mendacious Maps of Palestinian “Loss”

Perhaps the best way to illustrate the bankruptcy of the “Palestinian Land Loss” myth is to compare it to a similar situation elsewhere.
An equally absurd set of maps could be drawn up of the Indian subcontinent before and after the end of British rule. It could start with a 1946 map of the entire subcontinent, labeling any private property owned by Hindus as “Indian” and the rest as “Pakistani.” Hindus, after all, are 80 percent of India’s population today, just as Jews are 80 percent of Israel’s. It is absurd to consider anything not privately owned by Hindus under British rule as “Pakistani” when the state of Pakistan did not yet exist, but that is roughly the same as labeling anything not privately owned by Jews under the Mandate as “Palestinian.”
We could then put up a partition map from 1947, with West and East Pakistan next to a much larger India; as well as a post-partition map—perhaps from 1955—showing the land losses along the Radcliffe Line. Finally, we could draw a map from 1971 with East Pakistan shorn off into Bangladesh. A fervently dishonest person might call this series “Pakistani Land Loss,” but it would be such an obvious piece of fiction that no one could possibly take it seriously.
And no thinking person can take “Palestinian Land Loss” seriously. It is just as absurd and just as much a fiction. But it is also, in its own way, extremely destructive. Because these maps and the lies they propagate only encourage Palestinian rejectionism and violence; and as illustrated above, these have always left the Palestinians with less than they had before.

Wiping Israel off the maps

Most important in this dishonest and misleading portrayal of the area are the maps distributed by the Palestinian Authority, by Fatah, and by Hamas, all ignoring the existence of Israel or any hint of the bond of Jews to the Holy Land. The maps, as Hamlet might have said, are documents “within which passes show.”
All of them, whether they are the Palestinian textbooks, National Education for the third grade, or The Geography of Palestine for 7th grade, or are maps circulated by Hamas, show Palestine as a single entity. Most disappointing, in view of alleged moderate policies stated by Palestinian President Abbas, is the map issued by Fatah on December 17, 2014, The Main Page which has a photo of Yasser Arafat and a rifle covering all of “Palestine.”
The saddening reality is that the fallacious maps omitting Israel are not accidental. They indicate a particular necessity voiced by those Palestinians and others.
The maps are part of a larger pattern for those eager to eliminate the State of Israel. Harper Collins has said it has removed the Atlas from sale in all areas but it should be ashamed that it helped endorse this larger pattern by publishing it in the first place.

Is Wiping Israel Off the Map Just the Price of Doing Business in the Middle East?

Much is said here and elsewhere about Palestinian incitement and how the Arab world’s rejection of Jewish rights, if not Jewish existence altogether, has poisoned the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Much is also written about the international community’s toleration of Arab anti-Semitism, and the many forms it takes. But we should single out for special attention those who seek to make a buck off this deadly hate, as a major publishing house was recently caught doing.
The Washington Post highlighted the indefensible actions of HarperCollins when the company was discovered to have been publishing an atlas for schools in the Arab world whose maps did not include Israel. HarperCollins literally wiped Israel off its maps.

To Anti-Semitic Christians, Israel is an Usurper

The Presbyterian Church USA is considering banning the word “Israel” from its prayers. That anti-Semitic resolution was meant to “distinguish between the biblical terms that refer to the ancient land of Israel and the modern political State of Israel".
It has happened.before. In his war against the Jews, Adolf Hitler instructed Christian theologians to rewrite the Bible, in a bid to remove all mention of the Jews. Their barbaric spirit is living on in the Palestinolatry of these liberal Christians.
Located in Eisenach — the city where another anti-Semite, Martin Luther, translated the Bible — the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life published treatises arguing not only that Jesus descended from non-Semitic stock, but that his mission had been directed against the Jewish people. The lead figure was Walter Grundmann (1906-76), a seminal figure in the effort to de-Judaize Christianity and marry the faith to Nazism.
These Nazified Christians vied for influence in German Protestantism with liberal figures like Martin Niemoeller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
In 1940, while Jews in Eastern Europe were already being deported to a certain death, Grundmann and his associates published their version of the Bible. Missing from it were the Old Testament and all references to the Jews.

Major Jewish Group Demands Clarification From Spanish Foreign Minister Over Financing of Anti-Semitic Activities

In a report submitted today to the Spanish Foreign Minister, Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo, the Center’s European representative, Dr. Shimon Samuels, observed that the Ministry’s Agency for International Cooperation (AECID) had provided finance for an exhibition at a university in Madrid that engaged traditionally anti-Semitic tropes to condemn Israel, as well as conferences in Malaga and Seville that promoted BDS and the so-called “one state solution” to the Palestinian conflict with Israel.
The exhibition, which has been on display at the Autonomous University of Madrid’s Economics Faculty since December 3, used “egregious anti-Jewish language and tropes of the type condemned by the European Union Working Definition of Antisemitism and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Berlin Declaration, both issued in 2004,” Samuels wrote, adding: “Spain,of course is a State party in both cases.”
Items at the exhibition include a map of Israel adorned with a Nazi swastika, a photo of the late Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, accompanied by what Samuels called “a fabricated unsourced quote paraphrased from the Nazi period: ‘I do not recognize international principles. I swear to burn every Palestinian child born in this area,’” and a reference to “more than 2 million persons in ghettos or concentration camps” enclosed by Israel’s security fence.
Samuels claimed that the university had agreed to “immediately remove” the exhibition following complaints, but had not complied to far.

Terrorism-Lite: How Universities Let Students Abuse Academic Freedom

Recently, however, there has been a change. Academic freedom in the West has been shrinking to a point where in places it barely exists. Students, chosen so carefully, supposedly come to learn, but lately seem to have been trying to take over the house -- too often, sadly, with the complicity of the administrations.
Speakers are not only "disinvited," they are shouted into silence or swooshed off the stage. Who is allowing this behavior?
At a University of Massachusetts Amherst rally even a few years ago, you could see the hatred and rage in the eyes of the cowardly, masked demonstrators calling for the destruction of Israel. Many were obviously not students at all, and many not young and impressionable. They seemed to have been brought in just to yell slogans and frighten everyone.
Many, however, who did appear to be students, based on what was said had no knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, but seemed to have come just to demonstrate against Israel. Many even seemed good, overachieving children from liberal, upper middle class homes, who had just tagged along, but had no idea what to do in the face of genuine threats of violence. They seemed mostly worried about their grades.

Factoids not facts

What’s a factoid? According to one definition, it’s a questionable or spurious (unverified, false, or fabricated) statement presented as a fact, but without supporting evidence. Factoids are what passes for knowledge among Westerners who vilify Israel and describe it as apartheid, neo-Nazi, warmongering, and more.
Advocates for Israel are often ignorant of many facts themselves, hindering their ability to easily counter the fabrications hurled against Israel. As a primer for those who wish to have quick retorts to factoids, I present the following. It helps to keep in mind what our Jewish guide in Rome, Micaela Pavoncello, replied when I asked her how she answered Jewish and Gentile critics of Israel. Micaela said, “I tell them to go and learn something about Israel and then we can have an intelligent discussion.”

Meet the Jewish Voice for Peace Artists and Cultural Workers Council

Feeling threatened by the success of the Creative Community for Peace, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) has launched its own initiative.
The "acclaimed" members include at least 2 (Morgan Bassichis, then known as Daniel, and Micah Bazant ) who showed their commitment to open discourse by interrupting a celebration of art, music and learning at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center in 2008.
None of these "acclaimed" artists and cultural workers are exactly household names.

A Big Loss for Anti-Israel Academics

The History News Network is right to call the magnitude of defeat stunning. Proponents of the resolutions had more time to organize than did their opponents, and the AHA has not been shy about taking political stands before. Historians like David Greenberg of Rutgers University, Sharon Musher of Richard Stockton College, and Jeffrey Herf of the University of Maryland, who have defended the integrity of AHA against attempts to use it as a political weapon, deserve a lot of credit. But they and their allies will soon enough have to be at it again. Incoming AHA president Vicki Ruiz has decided to devote three of six presidential sessions at next year’s conference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It is disappointing that Ruiz thinks that the AHA staking out its foreign policy is worth half of the time she controls at the conference. But Ruiz has once before stood against the anti-Israel boycott movement, and it is to be hoped that the discussions she organizes will be fairer than has been the norm. Certainly, BDS opponents are not afraid of such discussions. Alice Kessler Harris of Columbia University, a boycott opponent, rose to urge the AHA Council to design a program of education so that if it should come to a vote next year, the vote might actually be informed by knowledge of the issues at stake.
The activists of Historians Against the War tried to interrupt her. I guess they think ignorance is good for their cause.

BDS Is the Same Old BS

The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanction) Movement claims to be pro-Palestinian but let’s call it what it is, an anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic movement created by people who hate Israel. BDS supposedly exists to influence policy, but its tactics border on harassment, and its goal seems to be: Damage anything related to Israel even at the expense of Arab-Israeli cooperation. Frankly, it’s difficult to hate Israel without hating Jews, and this is something the movement’s supporters have demonstrated to us.
BDS is an attempt to end the self-determination of the Jewish People. They don’t do it with bombs or ground troops, they do it by harassing students, businesses, and generally making people uncomfortable. There is a reason they’re referred to as “BDS Bullies.” They claim this is about being “fair,” and forcing Israel to abide by International law and UN resolutions. What they really do is manipulate, intimidate, scare and spin the truth. We could even go with what a friend suggested and use BDS to mean: Blame, Demonize and Subvert, because nearly every policy they support would inevitably lead to the destruction of Israel, all while they advertise themselves as a peaceful movement. Right, all in the name of peace.

‘Footballer’ Mahmoud Sarsak and Israel’s plot “to eradicate Palestinian sports”

Though Sarsak was released in 2012, his legend – as well as the Palestinian narrative concerning a furtive Israeli plan to annihilate Palestinian sport – lives on within the UK media.
An article in the Sport section of Times of London (Palestine Push Back Football Boundaries, Dec. 28th) about the emergence of Palestine’s football team as force within the Asian Football Federation included this passage:
"There are countless examples, so many that, in 2013, the Palestinian Football Association went so far as to issue a booklet detailing hundreds of alleged cases. The most famous was that of Mahmoud Sarsak, the player detained by Israel who stayed on hunger strike for 90 days, attracting global media attention and the support of Amnesty International, before being released."
Interestingly, while the Guardian at least acknowledged terror ‘charges’ against Sarsak, the Times of London reporter doesn’t so much as note the ‘footballer’s alleged links to the PIJ terror group.

BBC framing continues to erase Fatah and PA glorification of terrorism

However, no BBC coverage whatsoever was given to the conflicting messaging in the form of glorification of the terrorist attack which came at the same time from Abbas’ own Fatah party, from Fatah MPs and from Abbas’ advisor.
The BBC has also refrained from reporting the fact that both Abbas’ party Fatah and the PA’s official news agency have more recently glorified the two terrorists who carried out the attack as ‘martyrs’ with Fatah claiming that it took place “at an occupation synagogue in occupied Jerusalem”.

Haaretz Corrects "Lost in Translation" on Mosque Fire

Following communication from CAMERA's Israel office, the English edition of Haaretz has added crucial information to an article which referred to Palestinian allegations of settlers torching a West Bank mosque in November 2014. The English edition's article failed to note Israeli investigation findings which ruled out arson in the Moughayer mosque fire, identifying instead a malfunctioning heater as the source of the electrical fire.
Chaim Levinson's Jan. 1 print article (and the Dec. 31 online version) stated: "In November Palestinian reports said that settlers set fire to a mosque in the village of Moughayer. Worshippers arriving for morning prayers put out the fire."
As Levinson himself reported just a couple of weeks ago, an Israeli investigation found that the Moughayer mosque fire was caused by a malfunctioning heater, and not by arson.

Voice of America Corrects: U.S. Didn't Veto Palestinian Statehood Bid

It is unclear what editors mean when they state that "the U.S. vote against the Palestinian statehood measure had the effect of a veto" (it didn't, and only would have the effect of a veto of nine countries had voted in favor), but their steps to correct the headline and text are commendable.

Did Argentina’s president really save a Jew from becoming a werewolf?

Four days after our piece appeared, the UK Guardian challenged our report, which by then had been picked up by numerous other news outlets. The Guardian quoted Argentine historian Daniel Balmaceda, who asserted that there was no connection between the presidential custom and the myth of the lobizon, a werewolf legend popular among Argentine cowboys. The piece further suggested that media outlets were quick to report a story suggesting the Argentine president believes in werewolves because of a tendency to view Latin American leaders as “erratic.”
If we are to trust Balmaceda, we would need to believe that two entirely unconnected customs relating to the seventh son coexisted in Argentina — one concerning werewolves, and one concerning presidential adoptions — and that the former had absolutely no bearing on the latter.
This is almost certainly not the case.

Poland to Restore PhDs Voided by Nazi Germany

A Polish university said Monday it will restore doctorate degrees to 262 people, most of them Jewish, decades after Nazi Germany annulled them in the run-up to World War II, according to AFP.
"It's a symbolic gesture," said University of Wroclaw spokesman Jacek Przygodzki, explaining that border changes have made official restitution impossible.
The individuals in question received their degrees from the University of Breslau, which no longer exists. The university was located in the former German city of Breslau, which became Wroclaw in western Poland when the war ended in 1945.

Tourism down overall in 2014, but not by much

Approximately 3.3 million visitors came to Israel in 2014, a 7 percent decrease from 2013.
Despite the drop in visitors, there was an overall increase in the total number of tourists in 2014, with 3,000 more tourists visiting the Jewish state than in 2013, a record year for tourism in Israel, according to a press release circulated Sunday by the Tourism Ministry.
The year 2014 began with healthy increases over the previous year, with January to June seeing an 8% rise in visitors and an 18% rise in tourists spending more than one night in the country.
The trend, however, was broken during Operation Protective Edge, last summer’s 50-day conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, with tourism falling approximately 30% in July and tapering off at a 20% decrease for the rest of the year.

International musicians invest in Israeli app

What do British rock band Coldplay, American singer Nicki Minaj, American rapper Will.i.am and French electro music producer David Guetta have in common?
They have all invested in an Israeli company from Kibbutz Glil Yam, which has developed the "WhatsApp of music."
After selling social multimedia platform Pheed to the Mobli Media Group for $40 million, entrepreneur Oded Kobo developed Music Messenger, a free music messaging app.
The application, which is available for iPhone and Android and already has one million users around the world, allows you to send any song in any language to friends on your contact list. In addition, it allows users to create music libraries and playlist and to search for songs.

Toronto Jews raise over $100k for Har Nof attack victim

Jewish Agency for Israel Chairman Natan Sharansky presented a check for more than $100,000 to the family of Har Nof terror attack victim Howie (Chaim) Rothman in Jerusalem on Monday.
The funds were raised by the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto and are meant to assist with Rothman’s medical expenses and his family’s financial needs. The Toronto community asked Sharansky to present the check on its behalf to Rothman’s family.
Rothman, 54, was badly injured in the November 18, 2014, terror attack on a synagogue in the western part of the city’s Orthodox Jewish Har Nof neighborhood by Uday and Ghassan Abu Jamal, Palestinian cousins from East Jerusalem. Five people — four worshipers and a policeman who tried to stop the attack — were killed by the gun-, meat cleaver- and axe-wielding terrorists.

The nanoparticles coming to attack cancer

An Israeli breakthrough in the treatment of cancer has the international medical community taking notice. Developed by Tel Aviv University Professors Rimona Margalit and Dan Peer, this novel drug-delivery platform involves the use of “GAGomers,” a new class of nanoparticles (coated with glycosaminoglycan, or GAGs, a polysugar) that specifically target tumors and blood cancers based on a biomarker expressed on malignant tissue.
For their groundbreaking work, Margalit and Peer were granted the prestigious Untold News Award in New York City in November.
But it was already back in 2010 that leading Israeli venture capital firm Pontifax established the bio-pharmaceutical company Quiet Therapeutics, to make Margalit’s and Peer’s innovative platform accessible and marketable to oncology patients and their doctors.
Currently funded by Pontifax and Arkin Holdings, the biotech startup initially operated within the incubators program of the Office of the Chief Scientist, the arm of the Economy Ministry charged with fostering industrial research and development in Israel.

Hebrew U elects first-ever Indian student leader

An Indian doctoral research scholar from the Gujarat State in Western India made Hebrew University history last month when he became the first-ever Indian to represent the Rothberg International School to the school’s Student Union.
Zulfigar Sheth, an economics student who is attending Hebrew University as a Visiting Research Fellow, is also a Muslim. A student at Aligarh Muslim University in India, he came to Israel through an Indian government-run exchange program, sponsored by the Indian Government’s Ministry of Human Resources and Development.
“Despite being diverse, one thing we have in common is that at the end of the day, all we need is peace and prosperity,” Sheth says of the students at the Hebrew University. “I will follow one simple thing: accepting differences and searching for common ground.”

Emu on the run

Israeli traffic really went to the birds this weekend.
Drivers heading through the central Israeli town of Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, were astonished on Sunday to see an escaped emu running down the main road between cars in the rain. Local authorities say the bird escaped from a private farm.
Passerby Iliya Zelser, 27, filmed the bird's run, and said he felt as if he was watching a cartoon, specifically the Road Runner.
The 27-year-old told The Associated Press: "I said to myself, in a second, a coyote will appear from behind. This was a really absurd situation."
Dorit Basman, the spokeswoman for the town of Herzliya, says authorities caught the emu and safely returned it to its owner.