Amnesty International’s Obsessive Fixation with Israel

 Video Of The Week -Whoopi Gets Whipped -  https://tinyurl.com/ytp45dpa      

For the full article from JCPA by Alan Baker, go to https://tinyurl.com/ha2mppcz

·       The January 2022 Amnesty International report alleging that Israel practices apartheid against the Palestinians reveals a bitter fixation,  extreme prejudice, and blatant hatred of Israel, even to the extent of questioning Israel’s very legitimacy and right to exist.

·       The Amnesty report willfully and deliberately distorts and misrepresents the circumstances surrounding the historic development of the State of Israel. Moreover, it ignores, sidelines, and downplays the existential dangers that Israel continues to face from its neighbors since its establishment, including ongoing Palestinian terror directed against Israel’s civilian population and territory.

·        Amnesty alleges that Israel “coerces Palestinians into enclaves within the State of Israel…and in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.” In every multicultural society throughout the world, people of shared cultures and languages live together in their own communities as part of their national whole. This is a natural, social inclination and such social fragmentation is not apartheid.

·        Amnesty deliberately misled its readers by claiming that Israel was “forcefully evicting Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem in order to transfer Jewish settlers.” The issue is a long-running, civil real-estate litigation that has been under scrutiny in Israel’s courts since 1972. It involves competing property claims by Jewish owners and Palestinian tenants and squatters.

·        The Amnesty report presents the flawed claim that six “prominent Palestinian civil society organizations” are innocent human rights organizations, manipulating readers into believing that Israel randomly and illegally outlawed such organizations. Yet the Israeli decision to outlaw NGOs with direct connections to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror organization was in full accordance with international law and obligations set out in international counter-terrorism conventions.

·        South African Judge Richard L. Goldstone, who headed a UN Human Rights Council investigation of the 2008-2009 Gaza War, wrote in an article in the New York Times on October 31, 2011, entitled “Israel and the Apartheid Slander”: “In Israel, there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the Rome Statute.” The central elements of apartheid, and specifically the “intent to maintain an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group,” simply do not exist.

·        The Amnesty report repeats the phrase “occupied Palestinian territory (OPT)” as a given, ignoring the historical and legal claim by Israel and the Jewish People to the territory. Yet the “West Bank” territory of Judea and Samaria has never been determined by any authoritative and binding legal document, treaty, resolution, or declaration to be “Palestinian.” On the contrary, the territory is subject to a dispute, the settlement of which is to be negotiated between the parties.

To SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE  the BIG mailing list please click HERE NEW ,VIEW OUR WEBSITE WWW.BRITISHISRAELGROUP.WEEBLY.COM

Robots Eye the Spine

 Video Of The Week -  President Isaac Herzog in UAE  ttps://tinyurl.com/2p9ecef4

For the full article By Avi Jorisch go to: https://tinyurl.com/54xvx4kn

Medtronic, an Irish-American medical device company, announced last Friday that it was purchasing Israel’s Mazor Robotics for a hefty $1.64 billion, the biggest exit ever for an Israeli biotech company. Mazor’s signature piece of technology, a robotic-assisted procedure, represents the future gold standard of spine surgery, which is now poised to be implemented globally. Israeli innovations are improving the lives of millions of Americans and other people around the world, and this technology’s proven track record should encourage more American hospitals to adopt it.

Until about 15 years ago, spinal surgery was a lot like grasping in the dark. In order to even understand what procedure was necessary, doctors had to open up the spine. But a leading Israeli robotics professor, in conjunction with the Cleveland Clinic, developed a procedure that uses advanced artificial intelligence to help doctors perform previously unthinkable surgeries. 

Prof. Moshe Shoham teaches at the Technion, the so-called MIT of Israel. In the late 1990s, Shoham began studying the spine because of its critical role in human mechanics, with the idea that the latest robotic technology could help doctors in the operating room. One of the first things he learned about spinal surgery is that it can be a nerve-racking experience not only for patients, but also for doctors, who often place large screws into small slots in the vertebrae by hand. If the doctor is slightly off, there is a high risk that the patient will be paralyzed for life. These types of procedures often require extensive tissue dissection and can result in blood loss and infection.

But Shoham believed that if a more accurate procedure could be developed, the probability of swift recovery would increase. While researching the issue, he was shocked to discover that during about two to three percent of spinal surgeries patients suffered nerve damage, which can result in weakness, muscle atrophy, twitching and paralysis. To his mind, that was unacceptably high.

In 2000, Shoham approached the Technion’s incubator – whose mission is to provide startups with operational support, management training and office space – and started a company, today known as Mazor Robotics. After four years of research and development, he began testing a robot capable of assisting surgeons in the operating room. He started with cadavers at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel and the Cleveland Clinic in the United States. Shoham and his team set out to prove that their invention could reduce operating-room time, minimize invasive surgeries, reduce the risk of infection and blood loss, and expedite recovery. The system wasn’t meant to replace surgeons, but to help them achieve better results.

By the end of 2004, not only did Mazor have a fully working product called SpineAssist, but it had been approved for sale by health authorities in Europe and the United States. “I was really astonished,” says Sho - ham. “We got it quite early.”

SHOHAM AND HIS PARTNERS created a unique imaging system. Prior to surgery, the patient undergoes a CT scan of the spine. On the day of the procedure, doctors take another two X-rays of the spinal column, one from the back and another from the side. A technician then merges the two sets of images using SpineAssist’s algorithms to create a three-dimensional blueprint. This allows surgeons to accurately see the spine in a way that was never possible before. After examining and approving the system’s recommendations, the doctor implants the screws using Shoham’s robot, which can accurately insert a spinal implant and reduce the danger of damaging nerves and vital organs. Finally, the system directs surgeons to the exact spot where they need to operate.

The holes for the screws can be placed within one millimeter of the desired location – about one-fifth the width of a human hair. This accuracy enables surgeons to reduce the chances of damage to the spinal cord and blood vessels during the operation. “With the robot we can be very precise,” says Dr. Andrew Cannestra, a neurosurgeon at Baptist Health in Jacksonville, Florida, who specializes in minimally invasive procedures. “It’s difficult to get the screws into the bone because there’s just not that much real estate... The robot allows us to put the largest screw possible into the smallest space.”

The system also has the added benefit of lowering radiation exposure during surgery for both patients and surgical teams. According to Mazor, use of the robot means that surgeons can now carry out procedures they would previously never have attempted – from spinal fusion to biopsies for suspected tumors. Medical procedures will never be the same.

Mazor has continued to win over doctors and patients, one procedure at a time. More than a decade after it received permission to sell its product in the United States and Europe, surgeons around the world are performing over a hundred operations a week using its technology. And not one patient who has undergone a procedure with Mazor’s robot has been crippled or experienced any kind of nerve damage.

There are currently just under 100 US hospitals utilizing Mazor’s artificial intelligence. The robot’s success speaks for itself, and every major medical center that performs spine surgery would be wise to integrate the technology as quickly as possible.

To SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE  the BIG mailing list please click HERE NEW ,VIEW OUR WEBSITE WWW.BRITISHISRAELGROUP.WEEBLY.COM

Ignoring Violence against Israelis

 Video Of The Week-Palestinian Peace Activist Speaks - https://tinyurl.com/4xmr2r7k

For the full article from Yisrael Hayom by David M. Weinberg go to; https://tinyurl.com/8vw2rntc

There has been a lot of kerfuffle lately about "settler violence" in Judea and Samaria, focusing on recent "settler rampages" in Huwara and Burin (south of Nablus) and attacks on Palestinians harvesting their olive crop.  The UN has an entire bureaucracy (the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA) devoted to cataloging the "precipitous rise in settler violence." It has a "Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967" who harps on "settler violence" non-stop, as well. The UN says that in the first ten months of 2021 (latest statistics available) there were 410 attacks by settlers against Palestinians – 302 attacks against property and 108 against individuals.

American Jewish groups have now joined the outcry against "settler violence" too, with the Anti-Defamation League, Central Conference of American Rabbis, Israel Policy Forum, National Council of Jewish Women, Rabbinical Assembly, Union for Reform Judaism, and United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism writing recently to Prime Minister Bennett and his foreign and defense ministers to condemn these attacks. The seven groups called the attacks "terrorism and political violence" committed by Jewish Israeli extremists.

As Bennett said to The Jerusalem Post last week, "In my view, this violence by Jews, which does not reflect the half million normative Israeli citizens in Judea and Samaria, is shameful, and whoever does it wants to dismantle Israeli statehood… I will not allow this to continue." Indeed, in December he convened Israeli security chiefs and ordered them to use all the tools necessary to put an end to such violence.

Foreign Minister Lapid responded this week to the Jewish organizations, also assuring them that Israel is cracking down on violence against Palestinians. At the same time, Lapid warned that "we should not allow (reports of such violence) to be abused to tarnish the entire State of Israel or to be manipulated by those who seek to delegitimize the State of Israel."

According to an important new study published this week – which unsurprisingly was ignored by the global media, by the UN, by "human rights" NGOs, and even by American Jewish organizations – over the past year there were over 4,000 rock and bomb throwing incidents in Judea and Samaria, perpetrated by Palestinian extremists and terrorists against Israeli Jews.

These attacks included over 500 Molotov cocktail attacks (firebombs), leading to the injury of more than 150 Israelis. There was a 210% rise in rock throwing incidents in 2021 over 2020, and a 156% rise in bomb throwing incidents in 2021 over 2020.

Worse still – according to the study authors, Lt. Col. (res.) Yaron Buskila and Lt. Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch of "Habithonistim: Israel's Defense and Security Forum" – is that the Israeli prosecution and courts have done much too little to deter and punish Palestinian perpetrators of violence.

In 95% of the rock and bomb throwing cases brought before Israeli civilian and military courts in 2019-2020, the sentences handed down against perpetrators were far below the maximum sentences possible in Israeli law. Some sentences were miniscule, amounting only to days of incarceration.

Worse yet still is that not all Palestinian attackers were prosecuted. In 2020, only 21% of rock throwers (in reported and documented incidents) were indicted and prosecuted, and only 33% of bomb throwers were indicted and prosecuted.

Col. Hirsch, who was head of IDF military prosecution in Judea and Samaria until 2016, adds that Palestinian terrorists are incentivized twice over to commit acts of violence: once by weak Israeli prosecution, and once again by the Palestinian Authority's pay-for-slay program, which provides NIS 600 million a year in salaries for jailed terrorists and their families.

Col. (res.) Amir Avivi, CEO of Habithonistim, believes that the entire issue of "settler violence" has been blown out of proportion by ill-meaning NGOs and European governments, and this certainly this is true when compared to Palestinian attacks on Israelis. "Without meaning to diminish the ugliness of extremist attacks on Palestinians," he says, "300 or so attacks a year against Palestinian property and 100 attacks against individuals pales in comparison to 4,000 Palestinian rock and bomb attacks a year aimed at killing Israeli civilians!"

"And 300 attacks on property and 100 attacks against individuals committed by a few extremists at the fringes of a half-million-person strong and peaceful community of Israelis who live over the Green Line calculates to a level of violence that is lower than the level of violence (by Israelis against Israelis) that afflicts greater Tel Aviv."

Given such dangerous and escalating Palestinian violence, and given Israel's weak response to such violence, one would expect to hear (but disappointedly cannot hear) a call from American Jewish organizations for an Israeli crackdown.

In this vein, it is not late for liberal American Jewish organizations to pen another, more loving public letter to Israeli leaders. They might also want to write (and write first) to the American government, insisting that Washington use its aid levers to force an end to Palestinian attacks; so that Palestinian leaders terminate financial support for, and glorification of, terrorist attacks on Israelis.

To SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE  the BIG mailing list please click HERE NEW ,VIEW OUR WEBSITE WWW.BRITISHISRAELGROUP.WEEBLY.COM

Amnesty International’s Bigoted Anti-Israel Report

 Video Of The Week - 98 Year Old Holocaust Survivor Speaks. https://tinyurl.com/2p887rxm 

For The Full Article go to “Camera” -  https://tinyurl.com/4zmets5v

Today Amnesty International released its new Report in which, following the lead of B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch, it attempts to make the case that Israel is an apartheid state. The report, titled “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: A Look Into Decades of Oppression and Domination,” had previously been distributed to journalists on an “embargo,” which expires today. Thus, we can expect to see multiple news outlets reporting on it today.

CAMERA was able to obtain an advance copy of the report, and has written a Detailed Article Debunking some of its many lies on our website. As we wrote there, the report repeatedly twists the facts to fit a preconceived and bigoted anti-Israel narrative, including by ignoring terror attacks against Israel that were the reason for the very security measures that Amnesty uses to malign Israel as apartheid.
 
In fact, the very first line of the report is a willful misquote of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Amnesty further distorts issues around land ownership in Mandatory Palestine, and even the nature of what it calls “mandate Palestine” itself. Amnesty even portrays Israel’s decision not to draft Israeli Arabs – who have a right to enlist in the IDF if they choose – as discriminatory.

Notably, in the originally circulated version of the report, Amnesty tipped its hand, writing, “this system of apartheid originated with the creation of Israel in May 1948…” and recommending the “dismantling this appalling system of apartheid.” After widespread condemnation, in the final English language version that was publicly released, Amnesty changed it to read, “this system of apartheid has been built and maintained over decades….” But the group’s meaning is still clear. Amnesty thinks the Jewish State needs to be dismantled.

To SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE  the BIG mailing list please click HERE NEW ,VIEW OUR WEBSITE WWW.BRITISHISRAELGROUP.WEEBLY.COM