Israellycool

As the “road to Annapolis” (as all the TV news broadcasts here in Israel have been subtitled for the last few weeks) marches to it’s sorry end, I bring you something that Winston Churchill wrote while furiously warning that letting a militaristic Germany re-arm was global suicide:

“Virtuous motives, trammelled by inertia and timidity, are no match for armed and resolute wickedness. A sincere love of peace is no excuse for muddling hundreds of millions of humble folks into total war. The cheers of weak, well-meaning assemblies soon cease to echo, and their votes soon cease to count. Doom marches on.”

Do I need to labour the point?

And on a lighter note,

Giant Israeli flag breaks world record for largest in world

Filipino entrepreneur and evangelical Christian Grace Galindez-Gupana said she decided two years ago to produce a giant Israeli flag as a testament to her love for Israel and the Jewish people, and as a celebration of 50 years of diplomatic relations between the Philippines and Israel.

“God spoke to me in thunder and lightening,” Galindez-Gupana said. “The Lord said, ‘Make the flag of Israel, the standard of my people.’”

From Gulf Daily News:

MPs demanded an apology yesterday after Foreign Minister Shaikh Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa accused them of having Palestinian blood on their hands. An MP, who urged the minister to wash his hands after meeting Israel Foreign Minister Tzipora “Tzipi” Livni, later backtracked saying he was only suggesting that Ms Livni was “dirty”.

“I meant Tzipi is dirty and Shaikh Khalid, who is clean, should purify his hands,” said MP Nasser Al Fadhala in a statement.

But I thought Arabs liked their Jewish girls dirty:

What was supposed to be just a night out for two young girls turned into a brutal nightmare. Six young men from the Arab-Israeli towns of Qalansawa, Lod and Taybe stand accused of raping an intoxicated 16-year-old girl in Netanya two weeks ago. Throughout the rape they swore “dirty Jew” and beat her.

h/t Gateway Pundit via News for Members of the Tribe, crossposted on Elder of Ziyon

Aussie Dave says: They’re such clean freaks.

Reading The West Australian this morning, I was struck by this image of two high profile Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) members who are no longer part of the state Labor party (the drongo on the left was expelled last month following remarks he made about then Prime Minister John Howard, while the drongo on the right resigned following his wife’s resignation after revelations she lied to a parliamentary inquiry).

It wasn’t their beer bellies that attracted my attention but rather the Che shirt on drongo #2 (named Kevin Reynolds, for those who are interested).

Granted it’s been a while since I lived in Australia, and my knowledge of Australian politics is not what it used to be, but given the unions’ power in the Australian Labor Party, with people like this calling the shots, there is cause for concern.

Note: Australia’s new Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, is a former trade union lawyer.

This week my usual gig, Shire Network News, is hosted completely by Tom Paine, it’s original host. I’ve been too busy this week. I have to say that gives me the rare pleasure of listening to the show just for fun and I can safely say (because I’m not on it) that it sounds great this week.

If you’ve never listened, give it a go, you might find some of the things we talk about coincide with your interests as a reader of Israellycool.

Podcast joins the Army

Shire Network News, the Anglosphere’s premier anti-Jihadi podcast is back, and this week we take a uniquely personal look at how one person has decided to take action.

Reut Cohen, a previous guest on SNN, has decided she is joining the US Army, much to the shock of some of her friends. She speaks to us about the reasons for her decision, and the reactions she’s received - not all of them positive.

We’ll also hear from Meryl Yourish about a new theory of political discourse she’s come up with that seems to have something to do with Dennis Leary.

And Doug Payton shows us how to combat Global Warming by eating kangaroos. Or something. I wasn’t really paying attention, you know, being up on this roof scanning the horizon for the rescue choppers coming to carry me and the rest of the Secret Zionist Neo-Con agents of AmeriKKKan imperialist hegemony to safety in the wake of the Australian election result.

You DID remember to have Pacific Command send a carrier battle group to pick me up in case John Howard lost the election, didn’t you?

There’s also plenty of Blog News, featuring rioting Muslim extremists, Jihadi bombers, Chuck Norris guarding the US Mexican border and (shudder) Helen Thomas. Isn’t she dead yet?

Mahmoud’s Rant

Bill’s Confession

Israeli President Shimon Peres meets visiting American comedian Jerry Seinfeld.

Shimon Peres: “No, really. I did win the Presidency.”

Related: Cosmo Peres

Updated throughout the day

• Israel’s diplomatic team of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, has left for the inevitably disastrous Annapolis conference. In other news, Israel mysteriously experienced 3 earthquakes this week. Just saying.
• Hamas say they are shocked - shocked, I tell you - that Arab foreign ministers are participating in the Annapolis conference. And they seem to be dealing with this shock by threatening to make deadlier Qassam rockets.
• What’s the deal with Jerry Seinfeld being in Israel?

From Ma’an (Arabic):

The commander of the [Fatah-based] Ahmed Abu Rish Martyr Brigades yesterday claimed responsibility for the bombing of the Sufa three military-type missiles Amr 2.

The battalions in a press release wrote: “This operation came in a series Covenant and fulfill the spirit of the martyr leader Yasser Arafat, the symbol, stressing adherence to the approach of resistance as a strategic choice”.

There are multiple daily bombing and rocket attacks attacks against crossings between Gaza and Israel, so this would hardly be noteworthy if it wasn’t for this:

Israel will allow the opening of the Sufa crossing for the passage of agricultural produce, beginning with strawberries and flowers and then expanding to include other produce, [Agriculture Minister Shalom] Simchon told Israel Radio.

For the first time in weeks, the crossing was opened Tuesday for two hours to allow the passage into the Gaza Strip of 200 calves, the radio said.

So the “militants” are doing everything necessary to shut down Gaza’s lifeline.

In the unparalleled logic of Palestinian Arab leaders and their apologists, hurting thousands of PalArabs is a strategic long-term goal because the perceived benefit - that forcing their people to suffer helps their public relations - far outweighs the misery that they inflict on their own people.

The funny thing is that events like this gain next to no coverage in the Western media, and Hamas certainly doesn’t dare condemn such acts of “resistance,” so in a perverse way it works. People see Gaza suffering, no one sees how much of it is inflicted by Gazan “leaders” themselves.

Tomorrow is election day here in Australia, and if the polls are to be believed, John Howard and his Liberal party are going to be voted out of office, with Kevin “Mmm..earwax” Rudd likely to be Australia’s new Prime Minister. While one late poll indicates the election may be closer than first thought, chances are the man I believe to be Australia’s greatest ever Prime Minister will tomorrow be Australia’s greatest ever ex-Prime Minister.

There will be no election live-blogging or podcasting from me since tomorrow is the Jewish Sabbath. So the next time you hear from me, I will either be lamenting the results or expressing my gratitude for the miracle that occurred.

Ynet reports:

Greenpeace activists who arrived Thursday morning at a conference on the nuclear issue at Tel Aviv University stripped in protest a few moments before the start of a speech by President Shimon Peres.

The protestors carried leaflets bearing the messages “strip the Middle East of nuclear programs” and “a new Middle East = clean from nuclear programs.” They were briskly removed from the hall by security guards.

The protestors carried leaflets bearing the messages “strip the Middle East of nuclear programs” and “a new Middle East = clean from nuclear programs.” They were briskly removed from the hall by security guards.

After finally beginning his address, Peres addressed the unusual protest, saying: “The air conditioning here has to be turned down, I was concerned for their health.” On a more serious note, the president added that “it would be more correct to hold the protests in Tehran, not in Israel.”

The activists, some of whom wore bathing suits and underwear only, sought to protest what they said was the “lack of balance” in the conference, which they said “forms encouragement to the presence of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East”.

Most of the protestors’ ire was directed at the conference organizers, who held their meeting under the banner “the nuclear challenge in the Middle East.” The protestors said alternative views were not represented, such as the stance which doubts that there is a need for nuclear weapons in the area.

“We first asked the conference organizers to present a balanced panel, which will hold a real discussion on the nuclear issue, instead of speakers who all justify the need for nuclear technology,” Sharon Dolev, head of the Greenpeace campaign against nuclear programs, said.

The Ynet article also has a picture of one of the protesters. who would look more at home at a Save the Whales protest - as the whale.

Which begs the question - why is it that these “anti-war” protesters always feel the need to take off their clothes? Do they believe that showing us their untoned, flabby bodies will somehow scare us into agreement?

Those women are just lucky Moshe Katsav is not still President.

The Jerusalem Post reports:

Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio Thursday that any future agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is dependent on the Palestinians implementing their obligations in the first phase of the Road Map: to disarm all terror organizations.

Now I’m confused. Weren’t all past agreements between Israel and the palestinians predicated on this?

It’s like freakin’ Groundhog Day, except Punxsutawney Phil is strapping explosives to his body, instead of looking for his shadow.

While our neighbors have long been using terror cells to murder innocent people, Israeli doctors are using adult stem cells to try improve the lives of many.

Neurologists at Jerusalem’s Hadassah-University Hospital, Ein Kerem, are the first in the world to help multiple sclerosis (MS) and amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients by injecting their spinal columns with large numbers of adult stem cells taken from their bone marrow and multiplied in culture.

The clinical trial, while “encouraging” and “promising,” remains highly experimental, as all the patients have undergone a single injection with no untreated control group for comparison. With the first patients having received it two years ago, it is too early to know how successful it will be in the long term.

Prof. Dimitrios Karousis, a senior Greek-born neurologist at Hadassah for the past 19 years, told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday that the clinical trial was “the first in the world with this type of stem cells.” There have been, though, unproven and much-criticized claims of the doubtful scientific value of stem cell injections in desperate MS patients at private clinics in Russia and China.

Karousis added that a hospital in England recently announced that it would soon launch a program for stem cell injections similar to Hadassah’s.

Among his collaborators were Prof. Shimon Slavin, the world-renowned stem cell expert at Hadassah who has just retired and moved to Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, and Hadassah neurology department head Prof. Tamir Ben-Hur. The team first experimented on lab mice with a model of MS and found that after a month or two (a year or two in human time), 90 percent of their neurons remained intact without any breakdown of their myelin sheath, despite the disease.

MS and ALS are incurable. One can live with MS for decades, but with growing disability; ALS, however, is usually fatal within a few years.

The researchers received official permission to conduct a small study with 25 patients - nine with MS and 16 with ALS, none of whom responded to conventional drug treatments - from the hospital’s Helsinki Committee on Human Medical Experimentation. They are waiting for permission from the Health Ministry’s Supreme Helsinki Committee to conduct a much larger study, Karousis said.

The ministry is asking a lot of questions, such as exactly what elements are in the culture medium, he added.

In addition to Israelis from various parts of the country, the patients in the trial have come from as far away as the US, South Africa and Italy to get the treatment.

“It is a Phase 1-2 trial, aimed at testing to see how safe it is. While most of the patients’ conditions are improved or are stabilized, it’s impossible to know how long it will last or how significant the improvement is, as there was no control group,” Karousis said. “Yet we are encouraged, as these are patients with advanced cases, many of them in wheelchairs. There were no side effects so far except for a passing fever or headache.”

One “dose” of adult stem cells is removed by a needle from the hip bone, then processed and “cleaned” and grown in a special culture. After two months, pure adult stem cells numbering some 50 million are produced and injected into the patient’s spinal column. The spinal injection is given only once.

“We are optimistic,” said Karousis, “as the use of stem cells is not far into the future. They have already shown some promise in the treatment of joint and bone diseases, immune conditions and ischemia of the heart.”

And here you were thinking we were only good at inventing sneaky Zionist weapons.