02/09 Links Pt2: Israel’s dangerous anti-strategic game; In France, it's dangerous to be a Jew ~ EoZ

From Ian:

Israel and the Apartheid Narrative: 2 South African Student Leaders Weigh In

About two-dozen people file into Dodd 175 at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) campus on a Thursday night, scouting out seats and picking at the kosher pizza in the back of the lecture hall.
Miyelani Pinini knows the drill. A former student president of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, she’s attended and even organized her share of free-pizza events.
But now she and a fellow South African student leader were the stars of this one, brought to campus by StandWithUs, a pro-Israel education and advocacy organization, and Students Supporting Israel, a national network of pro-Israel campus groups.
Having traveled to Israel and the West Bank on the inaugural trip for the South Africa-Israel Forum (SAIF) in January 2015, she and law student Jamie Mithi undertook a whirlwind southern California speaking tour, weighing comparisons between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and the South African apartheid regime.
“Our apartheid narrative is literally being stolen right under our feet just as our resources have,” Pinini told the lecture hall at UCLA on Feb. 4.

1975 anti-Semitism speech to UN even more relevant today, UK historian says

In 1975 Chaim Herzog gave a firebrand speech to the UN General Assembly vehemently rejecting its resolution that equated Zionism with racism. Today, 40 years later, prizewinning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore describes the address as “one of the great speeches of the 20th century.”
He speaks from knowledge: A 2013 book Sebag Montefiore edited, “Speeches That Changed the World,” features Herzog and his speech, alongside figures ranging from Jesus to Churchill.
1975’s infamous UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 had been promoted by the Soviet and Arab blocs as part of a diplomatic campaign to isolate Israel. Although the anti-Israel resolution was denounced by the Western, democratic states which opposed it, it was adopted on November 10, 1975, by a vote of 72 to 35 (with 32 abstentions) following a furious debate.
Herzog, who refused to be put on the defensive during the debate, declared, “For us, the Jewish people, this is but a passing episode in a rich and an event-filled history.” He further stated that the resolution’s supporters were motivated by the “two great evils” of “hatred and ignorance.”

Seth Frantzman: Israel’s dangerous anti-strategic game

Israel has a difficult strategic problem. In the long term its support in Europe is eroding. Its support in America is likely to erode as a new generation takes the reins of the Democratic Party. It has new allies in Asia and the disintegration of the Middle East is both a benefit and a threat. It is so entangled in the West Bank its ability to withdraw is in doubt.
The worst thing for Israel is the constant abdication of responsibility by its political elites. “They hate us” is not an answer to a strategic goal. Israel chose to conquer the West Bank. It chose to export a half million citizens into the West Bank. It chose to annex east Jerusalem. In all these choices the local Palestinians were not asked their say in the matter. All of the choices are Israel’s. Yet the rules of the game are such that the media and international community are biased against Israel or hold it to a higher standard.
Israel abdicates responsibility by deciding that despite knowing the rules of the game, it will continue to play by the Palestinian timetable, waiting for peace and love to breakout, managing the conflict and complaining that the rules won’t change.
Someone needs to remind Israelis and their supporters: The rules are never going to change. The international community and media will continue to be biased against the country. Most Palestinians will never change their overall views of Israel. Brand Israel will continue to be toxic in the West. You have more to lose, and time is probably not on your side. There is dire need for a long-term strategy to address that. It’s time to ask the right questions, rather than just feign irresponsibility.

Shmuley Boteach: Hillary’s Gender Is Irrelevant; Her Anti-Israel Stance Isn’t

When Blumenthal sent Hillary an article from his son, Max, filled with his usual anti-Israel drivel, Hillary forwarded the article to Sullivan with the message, “Interesting reading.”
Sullivan responds to her,”This is really fascinating. Does Beinart get into all of this?”
Hillary responds, “Yes.”
In other words, Sullivan’s response to another Israel-hating Max Blumenthal article is to call it “fascinating” and to try and compare the ideas it contains with the writings of Israel critic Peter Beinart. Furthermore when he asks Hillary if Beinart “gets into all this” he is implying that Hillary is well read up on Beinart’s ideas and works, and Hillary confirms this when she responds “yes”. Let’s also not forget that Bill Clinton wrote a wild endorsement of Beinart’s book The Crisis of Zionism, where Beinart disgustingly charges Israel with everything from racism to apartheid-like conditions against Palestinians.
Beinart’s writings are completely in the acceptable spectrum of legitimate approaches towards Israel in Hillary’s world.
The truth is, my article could have been many pages longer. The accumulated evidence regarding Hillary Clinton’s views on Israel is too much for one column, and this is only a sampling. It’s important to note that when former senior adviser to Obama Dennis Ross wrote his tell-all book, Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama, he described a faction within the White House that saw Israel as “more of a problem” than a partner.
Since Hillary describes herself as someone who was a great friend to Israel in the Obama administration, it becomes downright scary to imagine what the anti-Israel camp in the administration must have looked like.

Daniel Pipes: Assessing Obama’s Mosque Speech on Islam

Wishing to address growing anti-Islamic sentiments among the American public, Barack Obama ventured on February 3 to the Islamic Society of Baltimore (sadly, a mosque with unsavory Islamist associations) to talk about Islam and Muslims. The 5,000-word speech contains much of interest. Here’s an in-depth assessment of its key points:
OBAMA: a lot of Americans have never visited a mosque. To the folks watching this today who haven’t — think of your own church, or synagogue, or temple, and a mosque like this will be very familiar. This is where families come to worship and express their love for God and each other. There’s a school where teachers open young minds. Kids play baseball and football and basketball — boys and girls — I hear they’re pretty good. Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts meet, recite the Pledge of Allegiance here.
All true, but what about the dark side, the unique and repeated role of mosques in parlaying totalitarian ideas and fomenting violence? That goes unsaid in the President’s rose-colored presentation.
As Muslim Americans, you [worry that] your entire community so often is targeted or blamed for the violent acts of the very few.
Obama makes Muslims sound like innocent bystanders when there’s a perfectly reasonable fear of them due to (1) so much violence emanating from this 1 percent of the US population and (2) non-violent Muslims showing sympathy for the violent ones.

New Israel Fund’s Reach Might Affect Israel at the United Nations

NIF’s supporters are a steady stream of American leftist “Jewish leaders” who believe that these methods of shaming Israel and its people is helpful. Philanthropists — including UJA-Federation of New York President Alisa Doctoroff, Jewish Communal Fund President Karen R. Adler, a JCRC of New York board member, David Hochberg, Carole and Saul Zabar; Sally Gottesman, and others have made it so that Obama receives legitimacy from the Jewish community while openly opposing Israel and seeing it delegitimized on an international level.
It matters not that some of these very groups were recently exposed for being part of a scheme to kill Palestinians who sold land to Jews. When “humanitarian” Ezra Nawi was caught on record bragging about his role in the demise of Palestinian land owners and later arrested for it, the fact that he was on the payroll of Rabbis for Human Rights and getting money from Breaking the Silence did not jolt NIF’s supporters. Neither did the actions of Nawi’s partner in crime, a B’Tselem worker named Nasser Nawaj’ah, who was also implicated.
The truth falls on deaf ears and the damage they have done for years is having the impact they so desperately want.
When Zionist Organization of America National President Morton Klein is the only Jewish leader to publicly bare the hypocrisy of the UN, the US president, and other world leaders who criticize Israel, the NIF seems to have done its job.
When there is no one calling out Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas when he proclaims, “If there is an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, we won’t agree to the presence of one [Jew] in it,” or calling of those who claim Israel is promoting apartheid, NIF has done its job.
The past several months have been difficult on Israeli citizens, as terrorists run amok stabbing and shooting people at random. Abbas calls these people “heroic,” and Ban Ki-Moon suggests the terrorism is Israel’s fault, while the leftist NGOs and their supporters continue to harangue Israel endlessly. That too is the NIF doing its job.
At the very least, those of us who stand with Israel must continue to insist that the NIF, its funders, and its leaders be considered non-kosher.

In France, it's dangerous to be a Jew

Lucien de Hirsch, a Jewish school located on the 19th arrondissement of Paris, looks like a fortress. The gigantic school, attended by 1,250 students from kindergarten to the 12th grade, is protected by a platoon of camouflage-attired commandos, rifles at the ready. Since the attack at a kosher Jewish supermarket in January 2015, in which four Jewish men were murdered, the French don’t take any chances, and there are just as many security personnel here as there are at the Eiffel Tower. This is the situation in France in 2016, where it is dangerous to be a Jew. This is how every Jewish school is protected, as well as synagogues and other institutions in the Jewish community.
Baron Hirsch, who founded the school in 1901, named it after his son Lucien. He wanted to preserve the Jewish identity of the students, but had no idea that 115 years later, most of its alumni would be making aliyah to Israel. This is not only because of the Zionist education they received, but primarily because of the growing anti-Semitism in France. Out of the 70 high school students that graduated in 2015, 40 of them immigrated to Israel without their parents.
The classrooms are becoming increasingly empty, causing principal Paul Fitoussi to seek new students among those that up to now studied in the public schools in Paris. The task is not hard: Jewish parents who thought in the past that if their children study in a public school, they would not be bothered - realized they were wrong, and prefer to enroll their children at Lucien de Hirsch and take advantage of the security offered there.
A survey conducted recently by the Diaspora Affairs Ministry showed a substantial increase in the number of Jews wishing to make aliyah to Israel from France. The current number is about 57 percent out of about 500,000 Jews in France.
“Praise God, our children are immigrating to Israel,” Fitoussi says. “Every child that studies at the school and immigrates to Israel is a success in my opinion. My daughter also immigrated a year and a half ago, after graduating, and she is now doing National Service (Sherut Leumi).

Bomb threats made to Jewish schools in UK

At least eight Jewish schools in Britain received bomb threats on Monday, the Community Security Trust reported.
The threats are the latest in a series of similar such warnings that have been issued against schools across the UK and further afield.
The bomb threats were made in the form of a recorded message, with a voice threatening that the school in question will be bombed, while Arabic or Islamic music was heard in the background.
The press bureau of the Metropolitan Police Service covering London said that six schools, including non-Jewish schools, had received bomb threats on Monday in the capital, but that all schools had been checked by the police and no evidence of any bombs or explosives had been found.
The police are not seeing these threats as credible, an official in the press bureau said.

US professor: Israel assassinates teens, harvests organs

Vassar College, located in upstate New York, is again receiving attention for its extreme anti-Israel events.
Last week its Women and Gender Studies Professor Jasbir Puar gave a speech titled "Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters," in which she expressed a litany of complaints against Israel, including that it "assassinates" teenagers, harvests organs, and deliberately prevents resources from reaching Gaza in order to "maim" and "stunt" the growth of Palestinians.
Legal Insurrection reports that the speaker who introduced Professor Puar requested that people in the audience not record what the talk "in the spirit of congeniality and mutual respect." Despite this, members of the campus group Fairness to Israel (FTI) attended and recorded the speech in an effort to counter Puar's claims.
Puar made no attempt to hide her biases. She began by encouraging the college to boycott Israel and saying, "We need BDS as part of organized resistance and armed resistance in Palestine as well."
During her talk, Puar made numerous exaggerated and false statements about Israel's actions, often without any sources or by using vague wording to introduce conspiracy theories.

Pro-Israel group to show movie boycotted by Norwegian festival

A Norwegian film festival refused to screen an Israeli film because of its adherence to a cultural boycott. Now, a pro-Israel organization is arranging for the film to be showed through its own initiative.
The Other Dreamers, a documentary about Israeli children with special needs, was rejected by organizers of the Human Rights Human Wrongs film festival last August due to their requirement that only Israeli films that deal with the “occupation” will be considered for screening.
This prompted MIFF, a group whose name is a Norwegian acronym which means “for Israel with peace,” to arrange its own public screening of the film.
“By appearing at the screening you are helping to provide a powerful demonstration that we cannot tolerate this discrimination,” MIFF said.

50 European MPs slam NGO bill as ‘inherently discriminatory’

The controversial legislation, which has been criticized by European and American officials, passed in its first reading Monday night.
“We write to you as Members of the European Parliament, who are committed to values of democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression, to convey our deep concern at the proposed ‘NGO Bill’,” the 50 members of the European Parliament wrote in an open letters addressed to Israeli MKs.
“We support transparency in the conduct of public affairs in any democracy. However, we are concerned that this law is inherently discriminatory. It is framed in a manner that delegitimises and demonises NGOs who promote and defend human rights, as well as the European states and institutions that fund them.”
If passed into law, the bill would obligate Israeli nonprofits who receive most of their funding from foreign governments — which is true for many left-wing groups but not for NGOs from the right side of the political spectrum — to disclose their income in every meeting and in in all public communications.

IsraellyCool: The BBC Destroys Arab Indigenous Claims To Israel

Every now and then the BBC publishes the truth without realising quite how spectacularly important it is. Here’s a little story about Algeria that contains a devastating fact. Here’s the whole story. See if you can spot the paragraph that confirm Jews are indigenous to Israel and Arabs are recent invaders.
Did you see it? A prize if you spotted this.
The Berbers were the original inhabitants of North Africa before the seventh century Arab invasion, and they now make up 13 million of Algeria’s 39 million people.
And that, my friends, is the little line that applies absolutely equally to Israel. Jews are the indigenous people (as Israellycool has talked about at length) and Arabs are the imperial, colonial invaders.

Host of Tax-Payer Funded VOA Show Thinks Anti-Israel Op-Ed is ‘Balanced’

The host of a Voice of America (VOA) current affairs program, “Press Conference USA,” Carol Castiel, has claimed that a recent one-sided, anti-Israel commentary by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in The New York Times is balanced. VOA, founded during World War II as the official external broadcast institution of the United States government, asserts that its goal is to provide news coverage that is “accurate, objective, and comprehensive.”
On Feb. 1, 2016 Castiel took to Twitter to share Ban Ki-moon's February 1 New York Times Op-ed, “Don't Shoot the Messenger, Israel.” Ban Ki-moon took to The Times after being criticized for January 26 remarks, apparently excusing the Palestinian Arab “stabbing intifada” against Israelis with the apologia, “It is human nature to react to occupation.”
Castiel tweeted “No balanced oped goes unpunished @UN_spokesperson. You'll hear from @CAMERAorg.” The VOA host seemed not only to be praising Ban's Op-ed as balanced but also, spuriously, that CAMERA would “punish” it for being so.

Radio NZ Fails to Challenge Lies

Gone are the days of unbiased, credible international news coverage on Radio New Zealand. At least that’s the impression one gets from listening to recent “Worldwatch” broadcasts presented by John Greaves. On 2nd Feb and again on 3rd Feb and yet again on 4th Feb, Radio NZ aired an “exclusive interview” with Hanan Ashrawi. Radio NZ described her as “arguably one of the most powerful women in the Middle East,” yet John Greaves did not ask her any questions that might have tested this. Hanan Ashrawi was treated like a benign grandmother and given an uncontested platform to spout her propaganda. There was not even a hint that she has been the least bit controversial. And yet there has been much controversy.
Radio NZ gave a total of almost 60 minutes of airtime to Ashrawi without raising any of the above controversy or asking any hard questions. In the interview she was given license to promote the following propaganda and lies without challenge:

Has the BBC opted out of ISIS terrorist’s Gaza convoy links story?

The investigation by the Washington Post and Buzzfeed which revealed the identity of a British member of an ISIS execution cell which murdered journalists, aid workers and others has naturally raised keen interest in most of the UK media. Among the many outlets which have reported the story are the Telegraph, the Independent, the Mirror, the Daily Mail and the Sun.
The reports include information about Alexanda Kotey’s participation in the 2009 ‘aid convoy’ to the Gaza Strip organised by former MP George Galloway’s ‘Viva Palestina’ group.
This is not the first time that the ‘Viva Palestina’ “vetting procedure” has been shown to be unreliable and, courtesy of Harry’s Place, it can be seen that Kotey’s name appeared on its list of participants in that particular convoy.
At the time of writing the BBC News website does not carry any coverage of this story on its international, national or local pages. However, seeing as George Galloway is a regular guest on BBC programmes, we can surely anticipate that it will not be long until a BBC journalist quizzes him on the topic of the criteria he laid down for his organisation’s “vetting procedure”, what exactly it was intended to check and the question of whether the organisation he headed exercised due diligence. After all, it would surely be in the public interest to hear the answers to such pertinent questions from a man who now aspires to run Britain’s largest city.

North Korea Rocket Launch Draws Renewed Focus on Military Alliance with Iran

Researchers from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies published a research paper in January outlining Iran’s past and present military dealings with North Korea, concluding that “the signs of military and scientific cooperation between Iran and North Korea suggest that Pyongyang could have been involved in Tehran’s nuclear and ballistic-missile program, and that state-run trading companies may have assisted in critical aspects of Iran’s illicit nuclear-related activities.” They added that more needs to be known about Iranian-North Korean cooperation, recommending a number of measures, including getting China more involved in non-proliferation efforts, increasing the study of locations where Iran and North Korea focus their efforts on procuring sanctioned technologies, and ensuring the transparency of the international financial system.
In How Iran and North Korea Became Cyber-Terror Buddies, which was published in the January 2015 issue of The Tower Magazine, Claudia Rosett reported on how Iran and North Korea’s cooperation in nuclear research may have been the basis for cooperation in other scientific areas, especially cyber-warfare.

Reporter Laughs at State Department’s Corporate-Speak Response to North Korea

State Department Spokesman John Kirby was laughed at Monday by AP writer Matt Lee over Kirby’s answer to how the United States was responding to a missile launch by North Korea.
“I heard your colleague at the White House describe the response so far as ‘robust’, and I’d just like to, do you share that?” Lee said. “Do you think that it’s been a ‘robust’ response from the Security Council or others in the International-”
“We believe that there has been certainly, we believe there has certainly been a high level of focus on this,” Kirby said, “And every intention in the international community to take it seriously and to act accordingly. And again I point you back to some of the things that Ambassador Powers said yesterday.”
“But there hasn’t actually been any action?” Lee said.
“There have been active discussions on pursuing measures,” Kirby said, “Now has there been a vote in the UN, has there been a vote?“
At this point, Lee began laughing.
“That-that’s going to be in the book. Active discussion on pursuing measures?” Lee said.
“That’s exactly right,” Kirby said.
“And that’s action?” Lee said.

Satellites Show Mystery Construction at Iran’s Top-Secret Military Site

Newly released satellite images of Iran’s top-secret Parchin military complex reveal that even as Iran was working to negotiate a nuclear deal, it was apparently working to hide its atomic work of the past and hedge its bets for the future.
Forecasting site Stratfor.com says the images published Monday show Iran building a tunnel into a heavily guarded mountain complex inside the Parchin facility, some 20 miles southeast of Tehran, while also working to erase signs of alleged high-explosive testing at another area on the site.
“We’re not saying they’re cheating on the nuclear deal,” Stratfor analyst Sim Tack told The Daily Beast. “The images show Iran was going through the motions to hide what it’s done before, and it is still…developing facilities that the IAEA may or may not have access to,” Tack said, referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The progression of satellite images tracking construction at Parchin from 2012 to 2015 show how Iran’s leaders apparently worked to keep regime hardliners happy by moving forward with weapons programs, even as the leadership worked to erase signs of an illegal nuclear weapons program, Tack said.

Khamenei slams US support for ‘child-killing Zionists’

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Monday called the US’s self-proclaimed support for human rights and democracy hypocritical in light of Washington’s close ties with “child-killer” Israel and non-democratic states in the region.
“They (the US) support the child-killer Zionist regime and regional allies that aren’t familiar with and don’t understand elections at all,” he said, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.
American support for Saudi Arabia, which is bombing Iran-backed rebels in Yemen, was also harshly criticized by Khamenei.
“They don’t shy away from backing those behind the ongoing state terrorism against the defenseless people of Yemen,” Khamenei told hundreds of air force staff and officers.

Iran Reiterates ‘Principled Policy’ to Back ‘Anti-Israel Resistance,’ Denies Halting Funds to Hamas

Tehran has a “principled policy” to support anti-Israel groups, including Hamas, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Monday, Iran’s regime-aligned Tasnim New Agency reported.
Hossein Jaber Ansari made this statement during his weekly press conference, where he also denied recent reports according to which Hamas complained that it had not received financial aid from Iran since 2009.
“Since the victory of the Islamic Revolution (in 1979), the Islamic Republic of Iran has declared that supporting the Palestinian nation and the Palestinian Resistance Movement is among its fixed policies and has continuously taken some measures on this path,” he said, reiterating that Hamas is part and parcel of this movement.

Press TV reporter records sexual harassment by boss, flees Iran

After releasing recordings of the news editor sexually harassing her over the phone, Sheena Shirani– a reporter for the Iranian-state propaganda channel Press TV– has fled the country.
This is not the first time that Hamid Reza Emadi [the news editor] has made news headlines. In March 2013, the European Union blacklisted him and his boss Mohammad Sarafraz, who is head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting company (IRIB), for their role in broadcasting the forced confessions of political prisoners.
According to the Official Journal of the European Union, they worked “…with the Iranian security services and prosecutors to broadcast forced confessions of detainees, including that of Iranian-Canadian journalist and filmmaker Maziar Bahari.” Bahari is the founder and editor-in-chief of IranWire.
Press TV covered Bahari’s “confession” in July 2009. He was released in October after international pressure.
The New York Times reports that two Press TV executives have been suspended.
Press TV, in a statement on its website in Persian, did not identify the two suspended officials. Sexual harassment is not mentioned, and the statement stresses that the release of the recording “with cooperation of the regime’s opposition” was done in order to damage Iran’s political system.

Michael Totten: Hezbollah Devours Lebanon

Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah declared victory last week in Lebanon.
He has made plenty of empty bombastic victory boasts in the past, most notoriously after the Israelis served his own ass to him on a kabob skewer during the 2006 war, but this time, thanks to the now-unchecked rise of Iranian power, Hezbollah really is winning.
“Iran can do anything it wants in Lebanon without any political opposition or challenges,” Hanin Ghaddar writes in NOW Lebanon. “And now Iran can focus to win what it needs in Syria, while everyone is busy making business deals with the ‘new Iran.’ Lebanon, on the other hand, is going to pay a very high price for all these deals and compromises, more so as Iran, Russia and the Assad regime are scoring more gains in Syria.”
Before Osama bin Laden destroyed the World Trade Center in 2001, Hezbollah killed more Americans than any other terrorist organization in the world. Its killing spree began, not long after the Iranian hostage crisis, in 1983 with the destruction of the US Embassy in Beirut and the Marine barracks near the international airport with suicide truck bombers.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps created Hezbollah from scratch during the chaos of Lebanon’s civil war in 1982, and the so-called Party of God has been the most successful export of the Iranian revolution ever since. Hezbollah is, in effect, the Lebanese branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps. It answers to “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei and their flags are almost identical.
Iran spent roughly 100 million dollars a year on Hezbollah before the war in Syria started. Now that the nuclear deal between Washington and Tehran is going into effect, the Iranian government has 100 billion dollars worth of previously frozen assets to play with. That’s a thousand times as much as its baseline Hezbollah budget.

Jewish groups blast Ted Nugent for anti-Semitic gun control post

Rocker and gun rights activist Ted Nugent took flak from Jewish groups on Monday for a Facebook post labeling Jewish politicians with Israeli flags and singling them out for their position on gun control.
Nugent shared a graphic on his Facebook account Monday showing a number of American Jewish politicians, including Senators Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, branded with Israeli flags beneath the words: “So who is really behind gun control?” The graphic has previously appeared on anti-Semitic websites.
“Know these punks,” Nugent wrote. “They hate freedom, they hate good over evil, they would deny us the basic human right to self defense & to KEEP & BEAR ARMS while many of them have tax paid hired ARMED security! Know them well. Tell every1 you know how evil they are. Let us raise maximum hell to shut them down!”

U. of Illinois menorah vandalized for 3rd time in a year

A menorah outside the Chabad house at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was vandalized for the third time in 10 months.
A surveillance video released by the University of Illinois Police Department shows the vandalism took place early Sunday morning outside the Chabad Center for Jewish Life, the Daily Illini student newspaper reported.
The video showed a man and a woman breaking an arm off the 9-foot menorah. The woman has been arrested, according to a Facebook post Monday night by Illini Chabad director Rabbi Dovid Tiechtel.
“Thank you all for the tremendous outpouring of love and concern. It’s heartwarming to see the strength of our entire community,” Tiechtel wrote in the post. “We must not allow these things to happen on campus or anywhere. No matter in what state of mind you are, your actions count and matter.”

Japan weighs change to swastika-like temple symbol

As Japan gears up to host the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and caters to a surging influx of foreign visitors, the country faces a cultural dilemma: Should it stop identifying Buddhist temples on maps with the traditional “manji” symbol that is often confused with a Nazi swastika?
The symbol, from ancient Sanskrit, means happiness and prosperity. It has been used for centuries by Hindus and Buddhists, and has turned up in archaeological digs in Europe. But many Western tourists associate it with anti-Semitism and the Holocaust because the emblem was adopted by Nazi Germany to try to enhance a sense of ancient lineage.
The swastika in Japan — which usually points counter-clockwise, the reverse of the Nazi symbol — has been used for centuries in Buddhist decorations and to denote Buddhist temples on maps.
At Sensoji Temple, a top tourist destination in Tokyo, a big gold “manji” emblem appears on a pair of lotus-shaped bronze ornaments, while smaller, more subtle ones decorate roof tiles. It’s even an official emblem for Hirosaki, a city in northern Japan.

Technion Develops Small Portable Ultrasound

Prof. Yonina Eldar’s lab at the Technion Faculty of Electrical Engineering is developing a small, portable, efficient, innovative ultrasound system that transmits scans to the treating physician immediately. With such a system, ultrasound scans can be performed in disaster areas, road accidents, and in developing countries where the medical infrastructure is limited.
Prof. Eldar’s lab has developed an advanced probe that eliminates the need for the large ultrasound devices that we know from clinics and hospitals. The probe acquires only the relevant data, which is transmitted to a remote processing unit or cloud. The resulting image is then transferred to the treating physician’s smartphone or tablet.
Dr. Shai Tejman-Yarden, a cardiologist at Sheba Medical Center, explained that in the case of injuries, “The new device will provide a doctor who is not at the scene with information in real time, enabling them to instruct the paramedic at the scene.”

Start-up’s sealant for collapsed lungs nabs prize at Innovex

The makers of a system that can seal wounds, internal and external, without suturing, bandages, or tape is set to get a million dollars from crowdfunding and was named Israel’s most innovative company by Ofir Akunis, minster of science, technology and space.
Akunis named Vigor Medical Technologies as winner of the Innovex Disrupt contest at this year’s Innovex2016 conference, which took place in Tel Aviv last Thursday. Vigor is now set to receive a million dollars in funding from investors via crowdfunding, in a special raise for the company by Google and Israeli crowdfunding firm OurCrowd.
Over 1,200 of the tech industry’s top leaders from Israel and abroad attended this year’s Innovex event, where visitors heard about issues like entrepreneurship, cyber-security, creativity, Internet of Things, medical technology, nano-technology, China’s economy and its impact on tech, and cloud computing. Speakers included such Israeli tech figures as Economy Ministry Chief Scientist Avi Hasson, top executives from EMC, Microsoft, Flex, and other international tech giants, and researchers from universities and international firms.

Medical Breakthrough: Israeli Scientist Heading Int’l Research Team Reverses Alzheimer’s Symptoms in Mice

An Israeli research professor, heading an international team of scientists, has discovered a way to inhibit the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, the Hebrew news site Walla reported on Monday.
Dr. Shira Knafo, head of the Molecular Cognition Laboratory at BioCruces Health Research Institute in the Basque country, was able to do this by studying the plasticity of the brain, fundamental to learning and memory.
According to a paper she and her team published last month in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Knafo discovered that the synapses of the brain can be made more plastic using a certain small protein, which inhibits the processes normally associated with impairment, from depression to full-fledged cognitive disability. Brain-impaired mice administered the protein were reportedly restored to full cognitive function.

Israeli software extends battery life in 150 million phones

The ideal smartphone would be thin, light and affordable, and it would have an ultra-long-lasting battery. Unfortunately, we cannot have it all — at least not until a cheap, long-lasting, featherweight battery is invented.
In the meantime, Lucidlogix Technologies is solving this paradox with a software solution called PowerXtend.
Debuted in 2013 and already built into more than 150 million licensed Android devices, PowerXtend makes your phone battery last up to 20 percent longer when you’re using the most battery-draining graphical applications: chatting, gaming, multimedia browsing and navigating.
Specific software suites for each of those four activities work transparently whenever the display of the mobile device is activated.
In addition to extending battery life, PowerXtend also reduces the amount of heat released from the device during graphics-heavy uses like Waze, says Lucidlogix CEO and Chairperson Adina Shorr, speaking to ISRAEL21c from the company’s Netanya headquarters.
She emphasizes that PowerXtend is neither an app nor a chip, and is different than any other battery-extending solution currently available.

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