07/01 Links Pt2: How Blindness to Anti-Semitism Threatens Parties and Movements; Why does ‘The Forward’ continue to promote falsehoods about Israel? ~ EoZ

From Ian:

How Blindness to Anti-Semitism Threatens Parties and Movements

It is this modern politicization of anti-Semitism that ensured that Rebecca Long-Bailey, who would have been instantly awake to a racist jibe directed at any other minority group, could mistake the anti-Semitism in the interview for benign criticism of a state she doesn't much care for.

The belief that every injustice can be traced to Israeli evil was perhaps best demonstrated by another British Labour politician (now mercifully retired), Clare Short, who claimed during a pro-Palestinian conference in Brussels in 2007 that not only was Israel "much worse than the original apartheid state," but that it "undermines the international community's reaction to global warming." Given Short's conclusion that global warming could "end the human race," one can readily connect the dots about how loathsome and threatening Israel must be, and what should be done with it. For good measure, Israel has also been accused of causing domestic violence in Gaza.

More recently, Black Lives Matter, a group ostensibly formed to combat racism, adopted in 2016 a manifesto that, amidst the discourse on incarceration rates, police conduct and racial profiling, also accuses Israel of being an "apartheid state" and committing "genocide" of the Palestinians—whose population throughout the Holy Land has undergone a continuous and spectacular increase since the advent of modern Zionism in the 19th century. The British arm of the movement then paused its tweets on black lives in order to shoot off an anti-Israel medley, including offering its weighty legal opinion that Israel is in breach of international law and lamenting the "gagging" of attacks on Zionism.

The campaign to attach Zionism to every grievance and injustice has its origins in Stalin's deteriorating mind during the last years of his reign. It became the basis for official Soviet anti-Zionism and remains as a vestige in far-left political movements today. But in a sense, it runs even deeper than that. It is the hallmark of an irrational, fanatical mind, incapable of grasping the nuance and complexity of life. Just as traditional anti-Semitism brought ruin and misery, anti-Zionism will corrupt noble movements and worthy causes unless it is finally stamped out.

Why does ‘The Forward’ continue to promote falsehoods about Israel?

CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, recently prompted three corrections from The Forward. All involved one of the publication’s contributing columnists, Muhammad Shehada.

In one case, he had falsely claimed that, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, officials in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip “have a shortage of the chemicals necessary to make disinfectants, including hydrogen peroxide and chlorine,” because “Israel bans both from entering Gaza under the pretext of ‘dual-use’ items—items they say can also be used for building weapons.”

The correction noted that “an earlier version of this piece stated that Israel bans hydrogen peroxide and chlorine. Israel does not ban either; it restricts hydrogen peroxide. We sincerely regret the error.”

Two other corrections that were made just this month pertained to factual misstatements made nearly a year ago in an August 28, 2019 opinion column. In those cases, notably, the publication did not even indicate that they had made any changes.

But these were just a few of the many false claims that Shehada has made over time in The Forward, a national Jewish media outlet that began publication at the end of the 19th century as a Yiddish-language socialist newspaper. And, as described below, some of those that remain uncorrected were of far greater magnitude.

Shehada is on the leadership team at the NGO EuroMediterranean Human Rights Monitor, an organization whose board of trustees is chaired by Richard Falk. Falk was condemned in 2011 by then-British Prime Minister David Cameron for publishing an anti-Semitic cartoon, and in 2012 by the U.K. Foreign Office “for providing a cover endorsement for an anti-Semitic tract called ‘The Wandering Who’ that compared Jews to Nazis.”

Falk has also embraced 9/11 conspiracy theories. In addition to writing for The Forward, which he has been doing regularly since January 2018, Shehada has written for The New Arab, Al Jazeera, Vice and others.

Douglas Murray: Britain’s woke police forces have lost their way

In the last few weeks, around 140 police officers have been injured in this country; 27 in just one night last week in Brixton. A day later, the force’s LGBT+ network could be found tweeting their support for asexual people. Perhaps the thugs who assaulted their colleagues in Brixton would have been mollified had they known how supportive the constabulary is of the asexuals in their midst? Or perhaps – and I simply put the possibility out there – such efforts by all branches of the British police do not in fact show how much the police have got with the beat, but just makes things harder for the policemen and women on the actual beat?

When you cast your mind back across recent months what are your most distinctive memories of the British constabulary? Dancing for public likes in TikTok videos? Skateboarding down major London thoroughfares closed down by climate extremists? Officers “taking the knee” before Black Lives Matter activists shortly before some of those same officers had to flee from the protesters who had turned violent?

All of these sights are indelibly linked in the minds of everybody who has seen them. But in the minds of a portion of the public they meld with another vision of the British police. A vision which numerous commentators and politicians have helped to exaggerate in recent weeks.

In the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minnesota, politicians and Left-wing pundits in the UK as much as in the US sought to make some grand strategic play off the back of that appalling incident. In the US, various commentators argued that the Minnesota incident was not isolated, but part of a broader problem of US policing and of American society as a whole. There is a debate to be had about certain aspects of US policing, certainly. But inevitably there were those in our own country who tried to make political gains by claiming the same situation exists here. These people – not least the organisers of BLM UK – wish to present the British police and the American police as being the same and the history of American racism synonymous with all British history.

It is a very dangerous game that such opportunists are playing. Some responsibility at least for the assaults on police officers that have occurred since the first BLM UK protests must be laid at their door. A week before the assault on police in Hackney, the Labour MP Dawn Butler stood in the House of Commons and told the Conservative government that it needed to “get its knee off the neck of the Black, African, Caribbean, Asian and minority ethnic community in this country.” It was a disgraceful intervention, that went off almost without censure.

An Urgent Call for American Jewish Self-Defense

More than anything else, however, Diaspora Zionism was a wake-up call: It asserted that the Jews must awake from their assimilationist slumber and abandon their desire for acceptance into the gentile middle class.

It is this desire, perhaps, that is the greatest obstacle to Jewish self-defense in the US. The century-old American Jewish dream of somehow becoming a middle-class WASP has castrated the possibility of Jewish empowerment. But this is no longer desirable or acceptable in the face of the sudden metastasizing of American antisemitism. If it is to survive as something other than a beleaguered minority dependent on the good will of others, American Jewry must awake from its domestication. It must foster a new ferocity of the soul.

We may be seeing the first seeds of such an awakening in the Jewish security organizations that protected synagogues during the recent riots, such as Magen Am. At the moment, however, these are small and local, and nearly all from the Orthodox community, which with its strong communal sense and tendency not to place middle-class comfort as its first priority, is more suited to collective action. But Jews of all denominations and secular Jews of none must embrace this awakening as well.

What is required, it seems, is a new league. A Zionist League that will unite these nascent self-defense groups into a national movement. One that rejects the sins and failings of its predecessors, but nonetheless insists on the right of American Jews to empower and protect themselves. In doing so, it will honor those who have died for the sanctification of the name, and ensure that no more will be forced to do so. Or at least, if there must be more, they will not have been taken from us without a fight.

Ice Cube is threatening to sue this journalist over the article “Ice Cube’s Long, Disturbing History if Anti-Semitism.” So whatever you do, do not read that article: https://t.co/Kc49nsD0st https://t.co/bfXyG4pn9j
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) July 1, 2020

Black Lives Matter Movement condemns “antisemitism slurs” against the separate entity, BLM UK, which claimed that Zionism “gagged” Britain

The Black Lives Matter Movement has condemned “antisemitism slurs” directed at BLM UK, a separate entity which claimed that Zionism “gagged” Britain.

Campaign Against Antisemitism criticised BLM UK, an entity of unknown provenance that exists only on Twitter and GoFundMe, after it claimed that “British politics is gagged of the right to critique Zionism” following the dismissal of Rebecca Long-Bailey from the Shadow Cabinet for sharing an article that contained the antisemitic trope that Israel is somehow to blame for the racist killing of George Floyd.

Now the Black Lives Matter Movement, which describes itself as having been “formed in London in 2016 and is not affiliated to BLMUK,” published an article on its website titled “BLMUK, Palestine and media antisemitism slurs”, which insisted that the Black Lives Matter Movement “support[s] the struggle against racism in all its forms” including antisemitism, called for action against racism against black women MPs in the Labour Party (with reference to a controversial internal leaked report), and called the criticism of BLM UK a “witch hunt” which “weakens the fight against all forms of racism” and that this is “the aim of much of the media and the right in this country”.

It was not clear why standing up to antisemitism by BLM UK could “weaken the fight against all forms of racism”.

Gary Lineker distances himself from BLM after it publishes antisemitic tweet

Gary Lineker has distanced himself from the Black Lives Matter movement after it published an antisemitic tweet accusing Zionism of having “gagged” Britain.

The footballer-turned-celebrity was asked by actor Laurence Fox on Twitter as to his views on the Black Lives Matter movement following the controversy this weekend, and he responded: “Why do you ask? I didn’t retweet it and wouldn’t dream of doing so, therefore I can’t really understand what your issue is.”

Meanwhile on Sky Sports, pundit Matt Le Tissier revealed that studio executives had required him to wear a badge supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and that he is reviewing doing so, while other sportsmen are also reconsidering their support for the movement following numerous controversies, distinguishing between their strongly-felt opposition to racism against the black community and their disenchantment with the Black Lives Matter movement itself.

Wow. They are still at it. Is the most important issue in the Black Lives Matter movement the Jews that this group is so obsessed with us? https://t.co/yPMVFaqD9V
— AZ עם ישראל חי (@americanzionism) June 30, 2020

London Shiite Scholar Ahmed Haneef: “Aryanist” Churchill and the British Are Guilty of the Same Crimes as the Nazis: What Hitler Tried to Do to Europe, Europe was Doing Elsewhere pic.twitter.com/7NHkreNRPE
— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) July 1, 2020

El Al grounds all passenger and cargo flights indefinitely

Israel's national airline – El Al – has canceled all its flights as a pilot labor dispute and the ongoing global economic hardships continue to bite.

"El Al CEO Gonen Usishkin has ordered that all aircraft should return to Israel, including those on cargo flights. El Al has stopped flying. The company has canceled two passenger flights and four cargo flights scheduled for today," according to a report in Globes.

The decision to cancel flights after negotiations between Pilots Committee Chairman Nir Reuveni and Usishkin ended without resolution on Tuesday evening.

Reuveni reportedly said that El Al was not upholding agreements that it came to with the pilot's union about a month ago and that the airline's management was unwilling to help the company deal with the ongoing crisis.

The economic downturn due to the coronavirus pandemic has hit airlines particularly hard and El Al is no exception. A company statement released Tuesday highlighted that the airline has hemorrhaged $140 million in the first quarter of 2020.

Israeli technology that can 'sniff out' COVID-19 infections begins trials

Israeli start-up Nanoscent is currently in trials with Sheba Medical Center, testing technology that can “smell” COVID-19 in less than 30 seconds.

Dozens of trial participants have already been successfully tested for coronavirus infections. In light of this success, Magen David Adom (MDA) has begun incorporating the testing method into their drive-thru testing stations located across the country. A number of hospitals have also followed suit, including the Sourasky Medical Center and the Poriya Medical Center.

With the technology, suspected coronavirus patients blow air through their nose into a plastic bag fitted with sensor chips that can electronically pick up on scents emitted by COVID-19 – diagnosing the patient in half a minute, allowing for early detection of the virus in a world where the current methods take hours at best.

Current testing methods in Israel incorporate the common PCR (polymerase chain reaction) approach, which takes several hours – causing bottlenecks in testing while hindering the government's ability to isolate and stymie the viral spread in hot spots and problem areas.
Nanoscent's method itself was previously and successfully tested by researchers at the Technion University in conjunction with medical researchers at the Rambam Health Care Campus back in mid-March.

Senators Propose Bilateral Program With Israel to Combat COVID-19

Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) discussed their legislative effort to establish a joint partnership with Israel against COVID-19 during the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) Advocacy Anywhere webinar on June 24.

Coons said that he and Cruz are looking to include an amendment in the upcoming National Defense Authorization Act that allocates $12 million toward a bilateral program with Israel to fight COVID-19 during fiscal years 2021-2023.

“The purpose of our amendment together is to invest in that partnership, to look for a partnership from Israel and investment by the people of the United States in joint work to develop the therapeutics, the vaccines and the responses to this pandemic that will contribute to the security of Israel and to the United States,” Coons said.

The amendment has 26 cosponsors — 13 Republicans and 13 Democrats.

Cruz said the amendment is important because it decreases the U.S.’ dependence on China for medical and pharmaceutical supplies. “The Chinese communist government has systematically targeted the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, working to drive U.S. manufacturers out of business,” Cruz said, adding, “We saw in the midst of this pandemic that one Chinese state-owned newspaper explicitly threatened to cut off lifesaving pharmaceuticals to the United States as a tool of economic warfare. That is a vulnerability that is deeply, deeply concerning.”

Melanie Phillips: Keir Starmer's magical thinking

I think we see a similar form of denial on the left over their support for the Palestinians. Having alighted on this cause as the signature motif of progressive conscience, they will not, cannot acknowledge that it is in fact an agenda of exterminating Israel based on profound, religious-based hatred of the Jewish people. Consequently, they just don’t see or hear the voluminous evidence of the demented, Nazi-style antisemitism that pours out of the so-called “moderate” Palestinian Authority in its educational materials or TV broadcasts; they don’t register at all the history of the region and the fact that the Jews are the only people with a legal, historical or moral right to the land; and they shut their minds to the evidence that the only people who have refused a Palestinian state over the past ninety years are the Palestinian Arabs themselves.

The point is that all these facts about these and other issues, all the evidence that is plain for all to see, all the inescapable logic of a situation, all of this is simply invisible to the dogmatic leftists who are so prevalent today. And that’s largely because of their great, overpowering fear that if they admit any of it, if they allow reality to chip away at any of their beliefs, their entire moral and political personality will be smashed to bits and they will become… right-wing.

No greater horror can there be. And so the the whole fantastic edifice of destructive, often vicious and sometimes murderous fantasies grows ever larger and more monstrous – while sad-eyed realists and truth-tellers are defamed, harassed, censored and fired, and the statues of a civilisation crash to the ground.

Divisive Corbyn aide Seumas Milne and Labour’s controversial complaints chief Thomas Gardiner reportedly both leave after years at centre of antisemitism crisis

Seumas Milne, Jeremy Corbyn’s divisive senior aide, and Thomas Gardiner, Labour’s Director of Governance and Legal Affairs, have both quit their employment with the Party.

Mr Milne, who has a record of espousing extreme political views, served as Executive Director of Strategy and Communications under Jeremy Corbyn. As a political appointee, his departure following the election of Sir Keir Starmer as Leader of the Party was widely considered inevitable.

Thomas Gardiner’s role in Labour Headquarters involved overseeing the catastrophic complaints process, and became known for his decision that a meme showing an alien crustacean with a Star of David emblazoned on its back sucking the life out of the Statue of Liberty was somehow not antisemitic.

Mr Gardiner’s departure represents the next stage of the clearout of controversial Labour staff by the new General-Secretary, David Evans, who replaced Corbyn ally Jennie Formby.

Mr Gardiner is being replaced by Alex Barros-Curtis, an aide of Sir Keir, on a temporary basis.

While the removal of tainted staff is a welcome development, the promised independent disciplinary process has yet to materialise.

StandWithUs And IAJF Counter Anti-Israel Hate Groups With Truck Ads and Video

StandWithUs (SWU), in cooperation with the Iranian American Jewish Federation (IAJF) are using truck ads to fight back against vicious anti-Israel and antisemitic hate groups holding rallies and "caravans" in seven cities across the US and Canada. The trucks will drive around the vicinity of these events in Los Angeles (July 1), San Diego (July 1), San Francisco (July 1), New York (July 1), Chicago (July 1) Miami (July 2), and Toronto (July 4).

"Al-Awda and other hate groups that organized these rallies are dedicated to ending Israel's existence and promoting antisemitic propaganda," said Roz Rothstein, CEO of StandWithUs. "While there is nothing wrong with having an open and vigorous debate about Israeli policies, that is not what these events are really about. We are answering hate with a message highlighting the urgent need for Palestinian leaders to choose peace negotiations over hatred and violence."

Importantly, these ads do not signal a position on Israel potentially applying sovereignty to/annexing parts of the West Bank/Judea & Samaria. StandWithUs will release educational materials about the many sides of this issue when a decision is made one way or another by Israel's democratically elected government.

Concerned members of the public are strongly urged NOT to drive to the locations where these hateful "caravans" are being held, to avoid a chaotic situation where it may be extremely difficult to ensure public safety. Especially given the heightened political polarization in our communities in general, we do not want to see opposing groups in cars protesting each other in the middle of the road. Nor do we encourage groups of people to gather in a way that risks the spread of COVID-19. This is precisely why we chose to use truck ads as a platform to express our opposition to hate and violence against Israel.

In order to fracture the Jewish community, Anti-Israel orgs like @IfNotNowOrg & @jvplive have been attacking stalwart Jewish orgs @ADL & @AJCongress portraying them as right wing betrayers of Jews & Jewish values.

Who cares more about Jews?

Please watch this important video... pic.twitter.com/P2dp6uYqFo
— AZ עם ישראל חי (@americanzionism) June 30, 2020

Here’s Jenny Manson of JVL openly saying she CHOSE to identify as a Jew to attack Israel better. Like you we should all be comfortable & have common sense to call out BS, ignoring bad faith sophistry that we have no right to question this sort of stuff pic.twitter.com/tvYSpbX81b
— leekern (@leekern13) June 30, 2020

After CAA exposes journalist’s record of inflammatory social media posts he is no longer featured as writer at online magazine for teenagers

Just days after Campaign Against Antisemitism exposed a journalist’s record of inflammatory social media posts, he is no longer featured as a writer at the online magazine for teenagers.

Toby Maxtone-Smith, who worked at The Day, responded to a report about antisemitic Chelsea fans performing Nazi salutes, singing about ‘Yids’ and imitating a gas chamber by complaining on Twitter about “snide journos [journalists] desperate to make a quick buck ruining someone’s life for behaving like a d***head while pissed”.

He also made jokes about foreskins and claimed that the reason the Labour Party’s antisemitism scandal was covered by the media supposedly to an extent greater than Jeremy Corbyn’s vote against the Falklands War was because “Jews are over-represented among the kind of people journalists know. The media is very bad at checking its own biases.”

Mr Maxtone-Smith has made further worrying comments on a different Twitter account, and he has also made derogatory comments about Chinese people and Roma, as well as women.

CBC Report Falsely Claims Israel is “Annexing Parts of the Palestinian Territories”

With Israel’s pending decision to apply sovereignty to Judea and Samaria, Canadian media outlets devoted considerable coverage, much of it was misleading and lacked context, while some reports contained outright falsehoods.

Case in point, on June 24, CBC Radio’s flagship World at Six program aired a feature-length segment by former Mideast Bureau Chief, Margaret Evans, which was replete with errors and which lacked vital context about Israel’s plans.

CBC Anchor Susan Bonner introduced the report by erroneously saying the following:
Israel is facing heavy diplomatic over its plan to start annexing parts of the Palestinian territories in the occupied west bank. Something it may start doing as early as next week. Today, the United Nations Secretary General condemned the proposal, so did more than 1,000 prominent lawmakers in Europe. Much of the world regards the land as illegally occupied and annexation could further destabilize the Mideast. Margaret Evans reports.”

As is commonly known, the status of the territories (which Israel regards as Judea and Samaria) is in dispute and the Palestinians have never had sovereignty over these areas. For this report to claim that Israel is making a de facto land grab of sovereign Palestinian territory is without foundation.

Secondly, while indeed much of the world regards Israel’s presence as “illegal”, Israel strenuously disputes this and Ms. Evans’s report should have acknowledged that. Secondly, the United States (the most important nation in the world arguably on this file) no longer views the settlements as being illegal, a fact omitted by Ms. Evans.

Facebook Weighing Ban on Anything Related to Israel-Palestine Conflict (satire)

Citing server problems and widespread user ignorance, Facebook Tsar Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly contemplating a ‘total ban’ on anything related to the polarizing Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

“Look, I’m a billionaire genius and I didn’t build this social media platform for Israelis and Palestinians to hate-post as if they’re all suffering from OCD, and certainly not for a bunch of white people outside the region who know fuck all about the conflict,” Zuckerberg reportedly said. “All of these Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, and individual comments on timelines are really screwing up our system…except for The Mideast Beast. We’re all kind of fine with those idiots.”

Such a ban would mark a significant escalation in the social media behemoth’s efforts to censor user activity. As The Mideast Beast’s long-time reporter and full-time onanist Marcus Thunderbolt reported, Facebook has also previously mulled introducing a ‘minimum postgraduate education requirement for commenting’ on Israel and Hamas’ repeated military confrontations, as well as the Arab-Israeli Conflict in general.

However, despite Zuckerberg’s enthusiasm, the proposed ban on ‘anything related to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’ is unlikely to be enforced. “We’re struggling with a concept widely known as ‘Freedom of Speech,’” said a Facebook legal expert. “I won’t lie, sometimes I wish it was known as a ‘privilege’ rather than a ‘freedom’ or a ‘right’ – kind of like having a driver’s license or health insurance in the U.S.”

Zuckerberg, who is Jewish, insisted that his heritage had nothing to do with the proposed ban. “Are you kidding me? I love Arabs. They gave us the number zero, and I could never have built Facebook and become a billionaire without it.”

Oklahoma Man With Nazi Fixation Arrested After Shooting Woman Who Attempted Removal of Swastika Flag

An Oklahoma man with a penchant for flying swastika flags and wearing Nazi uniforms remained in police custody on Wednesday, following an incident last Sunday in which he shot a woman who was attempting to remove one of the offending flags on display outside his home.

Alexander Feaster, 44, has been charged with assault and battery with a deadly weapon, and shooting with intent to kill, and is due to appear in court on July 9.

Police officers in the town of Hunter, about 90 miles north of Oklahoma City, found the woman — identified as 28-year-old Kyndal McVey — lying in a ditch after she had been shot in the back by Feaster between three and five times with a 5.56mm rifle, Garfield County Sheriff Jody Helm said.

According to a police affidavit, McVey was approaching Feaster’s porch where a Nazi flag was hanging when he appeared brandishing a Colt AR-15 A2 assault rifle.

“Without warning, Feaster opened fire on Kyndal as she was running away from the residence,” the affidavit said. “On the video footage, it appeared that Feaster fired approximately 7-8 shots very rapidly, several of these rounds striking Kyndal. It is important to note that Kyndal did not appear to be in any way a threat to Feaster due to her obviously running away from his residence with only a flag in her hand.”

McVey is presently in hospital and is expected to recover from her wounds.

According to the police affidavit, she had been attending a party across the street from Feaster’s residence prior to the shooting incident.

Swastika spray-painted outside synagogue in Maine

A swastika was spray-painted in white on the sidewalk in front of a synagogue in Bangor, Maine.

Bangor police are investigating the incident, which occurred Thursday night. Security camera footage taken by Congregation Beth Israel captured clear images of the teenagers who drew the swastika.

“I do hope, rather than criminal mischief or vandalism charges, we can rope these kids into some kind of restorative justice,” Beth Israel President Brian Kresge said in a post on the congregation’s Facebook page.

Kresge used black spray-paint to cover the swastika before the start of the synagogue’s services on Friday evening, which are being held outdoors due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The synagogue installed security cameras in 2012 after antisemitic graffiti was spray-painted on the front of the synagogue building.

Blowing bubbles, Israeli physicists accidentally make breakthrough on light

In an accidental breakthrough made while blowing kids’ soap bubbles, Israeli scientists have observed light behaving in a “beautiful” manner never before seen by the human eye.

They captured the process on camera and wrote an academic paper declaring themselves the first people to see a physical phenomenon called “branched flow” in action, which will be the cover story in Thursday’s edition of the renowned journal Nature.

“There is nothing more exciting than discovering something new, and this is the first demonstration of this phenomenon with light waves,” said Uri Sivan, president of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Anatoly Patsyk, a PhD student involved in the discovery, called it “another one of nature’s surprises.”

Technion physics professor Moti Segev told The Times of Israel that he had no idea, at first, what he was looking at.

“We were shining light into bubbles, and started to notice a very pretty and peculiar scattering process, in which the light splits into branches, like branches of a tree,” he said.

They had no idea why this was happening.

“I thought maybe it’s accidental, but little by little we unraveled the physics and then saw it was related to branched flow,” said Segev.

This process was discovered in 2001, but the closest scientists got to witnessing it was through an electron microscope, which doesn’t provide an actual view of the target being examined, but rather uses electrons to probe the target and construct an image of what is happening. Only limited scientific exploration is possible from this image.

Soap bubbles used by the scientists in order to see branched flow, illuminated with white light, as observed in the microscope (courtesy of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology)

Segev said his lab team was amazed when it dawned on them that what they were looking at — mostly through a magnifying glass or microscope, but also visible to a point through the naked eye — was branched flow.

Israeli AI-based tech to help UK pathologists better detect prostate cancer

Ibex Medical Analytics, a maker of cancer diagnostic software, in collaboration with UK’s LDPath, a provider of digital pathology services to England’s National Health Service (NHS), has started rolling out its clinical grade applications for prostate cancer detection in pathology for the first time in the UK.

Traditional pathology involves manual processes that have remained unchanged for years, with slides analyzed by pathologists using microscopes, and reporting often carried out on pieces of paper. But even as cancer rates have increased over the years, the number of pathologists globally is in decline.

The number of active pathologists in the US, for example, has plunged by some 17.5% between 2007 and 2017, putting the nation at a shortage, and a smaller workforce needs to handle a bigger workload, according to aMay 2019 study published in JAMA Network Open.

A shortage of pathologists in the UK has led to up to six-week waits in cancer diagnosis and, together with increased demand, is exerting tremendous pressure on pathology departments while raising concerns about diagnostic accuracy, Ibex said in a statement on Tuesday.

LDPath, which provides histopathological imaging and reporting services to 24 NHS trusts throughout the UK, including large teaching hospitals and district general hospitals, will integrate Ibex’s prostate solution into its digital pathology workflow.

Israeli Military Launches Radical New Google Maps Alternative

“Imagine a tourist arriving in a foreign city,” the Israeli intel officer tells me, “the first thing they do is open Google Maps and look for a restaurant. Google helps them find a place. Helps them navigate. Helps them get there on time. We do the same.” Well, not exactly. The augmented reality mapping application Lieutenant-Colonel “N” is describing is designed to find hidden terrorists, not restaurants. “Mistakes can be fatal,” he tells me, “we need to get the right house on the right street.”

Welcome to the battlefield of the future—artificial intelligence, multi-source data fusion, augmented reality. Everything edge-based and real-time. Except this isn’t really a battlefield, as such. “What happened to us,” the officer tells me, “is that our enemies have adopted a technique to merge into urban areas populated with civilians, we need to unveil the enemy, precisely, and stop the threat.”

So, now you start to get the picture. Think Google Street View—except it’s not Google. And an augmented reality overlay that comes from the fusion of multiple sources of highly classified intelligence not big tech’s cloud servers And if that isn't enough, there’s also AI running pattern analytics on prior enemy tactics, techniques and procedures to infer what a hidden enemy is likely to do next, in real time.

This is military augmented reality and it’s not unique—such systems are under development, gaming-style headsets overlaying friendlies and likely combatants, helping targeting and the avoidance of blue on blue. Israel’s new system is different, though. The augmented reality comes from the fusion of multiple intel sources, the intent is not to present ground troops with an advanced gaming-style view of the battlefield, but to use live data to infer where actual targets are hiding.

Picture this Street View lookalike again—no screenshots, I’m afraid, it’s classified. Arrows and graphics explain to a soldier on the ground why the third-floor apartment with the wrought iron balcony is deemed a hostile environment, why anyone exiting the building can be considered a combatant. The intent is to root out threats, but also to keep others safe, to avoid collateral damage. “We need to make sure we only target the aggressor and not any civilians,” Lt-Col “N” tells me.

My Father and the Jews of Iraq

The story that I am about to tell is that of my late father, Yahya Qassim, the owner and editor of Al-Sha’b—a newspaper published from 1945 to 1958, when Iraq was under the rule of the Hashemite monarchy. The story is focused on Qassim’s defense of Iraqi Jewry in the tremendous ordeal that the Iraqi Jewish community faced immediately before and after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. This story almost certainly would have been forgotten had it not been recounted by professor Orit Bashkin in her 2012 book New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq.

The Jews of Iraq occupy an important place in Judaism, as the country was home to the oldest and second-largest Jewish community in the Arab world. As with other Jewish communities in various parts of the world, Iraqi Jewry suffered from varying forms and different degrees of repression, persecution, and pogroms throughout history—spanning biblical Babylonia, the Islamic Caliphate, the Mongol invasion, the Ottoman Empire, and modern Iraq in the 20th century. Prior to discussing the events of 1947-1953 in relation to the ordeal faced by the Jewish community in Iraq at the time of the creation of the State of Israel, it is interesting to highlight the major phases of the history of the Iraqi Jewish community in the modern era.

What is known today as Iraq consisted under Ottoman rule (1533-1917) of three provinces (Wilayats in Turkish): Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra, corresponding to the northern, central, and southern regions of present day Iraq. During this period, the Jewish community in Iraq had been generally treated fairly. This was one more point in the similarity between the Ottoman and the Austrian empires: Both were multiethnic and relatively benign toward their constituent ethnicities; both entered WWI on the same (eventually) losing side along with the German Empire; and both met the same fate, namely collapse and dissolution at the end of the Great War.

The Iraqi Jewish community, along with the rest of the population in Iraq, suffered great hardships during WWI, but under the British occupation that followed, Iraqi Jews enjoyed greater security and prosperity. Then came the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq (1921-1958). Under Hashemite rule, a pluralist Iraqi identity was created, forged, and nourished, and Jews were increasingly integrated into Iraqi society as a whole. However, this trend suffered a major interruption in April 1941, when an anti-British and pro-Nazi group of Iraqi army officers, supported by civilians, staged a coup d’etat and installed a short-lived dictatorship. Immediately after the dictatorship was ousted in late May, the Jewish communities in Baghdad and Basra suffered a pogrom at the hands of street mobs in an incident known as the Farhud (Arabic for pogrom). Rioters killed around 200 Jews and injured 1,000, raped an unknown number of Jewish women, and looted around 1,500 Jewish stores and homes. However, after the restoration of the Hashemite monarchy, the Iraqi Jewish community’s stability and prosperity not only began to recover, but also showed clear signs of growth.

Returning to the core of my story—Al-Sha’b (the people in Arabic) was launched in 1945 by Yahya Qassim with the aim of using the editorials he penned to advocate daily and emphatically for a pluralist, democratic Iraq, where citizens—whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or of any other set of personal faiths and beliefs—are considered fully equal under the rule of law. In less than a year, Al-Sha’b rose to become the leading newspaper in Iraq in terms of its circulation, its liberal editorial policy, and its independence from any political party or group. True to Qassim’s pluralist principles, there were several Jewish professionals working at Al-Sha’b alongside Muslims and Christians, both as journalists and in administrative positions.

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