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Reporting on the Middle East, Science, and Education for February 29, 2008 - כ"ג אדר א' תשס"ח
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By SHELDON KIRSHNER, Staff Reporter, Canadian Jewish News, Feb. 28, 2008
TORONTO — The former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, R. James Woolsey, Jr., right, says a two-state solution to resolve Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians is out of reach for now.
Visiting Toronto recently as a guest of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, he said that Iran, contrary to a recent report, has not halted its nuclear weapons program.
Woolsey, as well, declared that a precipitous American withdrawal from Iraq would be disastrous for the United States and Israel.
At a press conference, Woolsey – the CIA’s director from 1993 to 1995 – said that a two-state solution will be unattainable until the Palestinian school system in the West Bank and Gaza is reformed and overhauled.
He charged that Palestinian educators, having fallen under the sway of a radical strain of Saudi Arabian Islam known as Wahhabism, demonize Israel, oppose coexistence and churn out suicide bombers.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Middle East Report, Opinion, Recent Posts on February 29, 2008 - כ"ג אדר א' תשס"ח at 7:50 pm
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Editorial, THE JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 27, 2008
Roni Yihye, 47, a father of four, was murdered on Wednesday in the latest rocket assault from the Gaza Strip.
His death came a day after the 80th birthday of Ariel Sharon, the general and politician who ended a long career of outmaneuvering hostile Arab forces by withdrawing completely from the Gaza Strip. And it followed the latest anti-Israel broadside from the UN’s Human Rights Council, whose rapporteur John Dugard wrote earlier this week that “a distinction must be drawn between acts of mindless terror, such as acts committed by al-Qaida, and acts committed in the course of a war of national liberation against colonialism, apartheid or military occupation… As long as there is occupation, there will be terrorism.”
The combination of Yihye’s murder, Sharon’s birthday and Dugard’s misguided report brings the current untenable reality apropos Gaza into sharp focus.
Led by Sharon, more than two years ago, Israel wrenched its settlers and withdrew its soldiers from the Gaza Strip. It left behind an unprecedented opportunity for Palestinian state-building and an international commitment to create a Singapore in the impoverished Strip, not to mention millions of dollars in farming equipment, including a world-famous complex of greenhouses. All these were wasted.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Middle East Report, Opinion, Recent Posts on February 28, 2008 - כ"ב אדר א' תשס"ח at 2:36 pm
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By Daniel Williams, Bloomberg, Feb. 26, 2008
Feb. 26 (Bloomberg) — The stone walls of St. Porphyrius church in Gaza were raised in the fourth century, a reminder of Christianity’s long role in the Mediterranean city’s history.
The saga may be coming to an end. Christians, a minority of 3,000 among the Gaza Strip’s 1.2 million Muslims, are increasingly menaced by Islamic fundamentalists in this besieged Palestinian territory. Christians say they are on the verge of being driven out.
“Never in Palestinian history did we feel endangered until now,” said Archimandrite Artemios, the Greek Orthodox priest who heads St. Porphyrius. “We face the question of whether we are part of this community or not.”
Insecurity intensified last June when Hamas, the Muslim-based party at war with Israel, ousted the secular Fatah party, which favors peace negotiations, from control of Gaza. Fatah continues to control the West Bank.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Christianity, Islam, Middle East Report, Monotheistic Religions on February 27, 2008 - כ"א אדר א' תשס"ח at 8:37 am
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BY E.B. SOLOMONT - NY Sun, February 25, 2008
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/71782
The latest project of an Upper East Side billionaire famous for his colossal Hamptons mansion is a 20-volume encyclopedia of all 613 commandments in Judaism. The “Encyclopedia of the Taryag Mitzvoth,” funded by the industrialist Ira Rennert, lists and explains each commandment in the Torah, such as the 25th commandment, to believe in God, and the 33rd, to respect and honor your parents.
A companion curriculum, geared toward middle school students, has been adopted by 500 schools worldwide and 30 in the New York area, including the Ramaz Middle School, Manhattan Day School, and the Yeshiva of Flatbush in Brooklyn.
Mr. Rennert, the chairman of the mining and metals conglomerate Renco Group Inc., donated $5 million to fund the encyclopedia and curriculum, called Project Taryag. The word taryag refers to the 613 Torah commandments, the basis for Jewish law.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Judaism, Monotheistic Religions, Recent Posts on February 25, 2008 - י"ט אדר א' תשס"ח at 8:18 am
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By Brandon Keim 
, Wired, February 22, 2008 | Education, Evolution
Famed microbiologist Carl Woese has a unique suggestion for teaching evolution to schoolchildren: don’t do it.
I recently talked to Woese, best known for rearranging the organismal kingdom from five branches to three, while reporting on an upcoming story about the union of complexity theory and evolutionary biology.
For decades Woese has argued — and many other scientists agree — that genetic mutations and natural selection don’t provide a complete explanation for Earthly life. He believes these mechanisms to be part of a grander phenomenon of evolution, in which jumps of extraordinary complexity — from single-celled to multicellular organisms, from organism to ecosystem — are non-linear emergent phenomena, a function of networked interactions obeying a variant on the second law of thermodynamics.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Evolutionary Biology, Science and Technology on February 24, 2008 - י"ח אדר א' תשס"ח at 12:52 pm
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By Isi Leibler , THE JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 23, 2008
Almost 300 parliamentarians, academicians, human rights activists and Jewish leaders from all corners of the globe are participating in the Global Forum against Anti Semitism, held under the auspices of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry for Diaspora Affairs. More importantly, at least 45 governments are represented and have pledged meaningful cooperation with Israel to combat the world’s oldest hatred.
This commitment, combined with the record number of high-caliber participants, reflects a growing concern about a mushrooming of Judeophobia which would have been deemed inconceivable just over a decade ago, when anti-Semites were considered an almost extinct species. Today the intensity of the hatred has become so fierce that it is ominously reminiscent of previous occasions when demonization preceded Jewish catastrophes.
Paradoxically, setting aside the Arab world, this anti-Semitic tsunami is taking place at a time when Jews have achieved a unique level of equality, freedom and affluence, and annual Holocaust memorials have been institutionalized and elevated to unprecedented status.
Yet it should also be noted that in the post-Holocaust era, overt anti-Semitism tended to rise and decline in tandem with perceptions of strength or weakness on the part of Israel. Anti-Semitism sank to its lowest levels in the wake of the Six Day War, and experienced an exponential increase after the Second Lebanon War, when Israel was perceived as weak.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Judaism, Middle East Report, Monotheistic Religions, Recent Posts on February 24, 2008 - י"ח אדר א' תשס"ח at 12:08 am
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By Arlene Kushner, Senior Policy Research Analyst,
Center for Near East Policy Research Ltd.
The American Jewish Committee, in cooperation with The Institute for Monitoring the Impact of Peace and Tolerance in School Education (formerly known as CMIP), will soon release a cutting edge report on Palestinian Authority textbooks most recently published. The findings, based on a detailed analysis of the textbooks, has particular relevance in light of on-going negotiations between Israel and the PA.
In interview, Dr. Arnon Groiss, Director of Research for the Institute, has provided an advance view of the material that will be offered in the report, as well as an over-view of the Institute’s findings regarding all of the textbooks previously reviewed.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Education Report, Middle East Report, News Articles, Recent Posts on February 22, 2008 - ט"ז אדר א' תשס"ח at 9:44 am
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By Brandon Keim 
Wired, February 21, 2008
Lampreys, jawless fish closely related to the first vertebrates, possess 41 types of a little-known genetic regulator called microRNA. Some biologists say microRNA answers the mystery of how backbones evolved.
Image: WikiMedia Commons
Why aren’t you a spineless sack of protoplasm?
Because of a little-known molecule called microRNA, say Dartmouth College biologists.
In a study published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, researchers found 41 types of microRNA — a molecular “off” signal for genes — that are unique to vertebrates.
The difference may explain the as-yet-unknown origins of creatures with backbones. When pressed for an explanation of the appearance of vertebrates, evolutionary biologists have thus far been able to do little more than say that it happened.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Evolutionary Biology, Science on February 22, 2008 - ט"ז אדר א' תשס"ח at 8:59 am
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Father Raymond J. De Souza, National Post, February 19, 2008
JERUSALEM -Here with an item from last week’s news that you might not have heard about: Unidentified gunmen blew up the YMCA library in the Gaza Strip on Friday morning. While no one was hurt, two guards were temporarily kidnapped while the offices were looted, a vehicle stolen and all 8,000 books destroyed. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, although Fatah accused Hamas of being behind it. Hamas, for its part, strongly denied any responsibility and condemned the attack. Meanwhile, confidential sources in Gaza told the Jerusalem Post that the attack was in response to the reprinting of the Muhammad cartoons in Danish newspapers last week.
The supposed motivation for the attack, and the fact that it was not big news, illustrates the dire situation faced by many Christians living in the Palestinian territories.
There are only some 3,500 Christians, mostly Greek Orthodox, in Gaza. Over the past two years, al-Qaeda-affiliated groups have claimed responsibility for attacks against Christian figures and institutions with the stated goal of driving Christians out of Gaza.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Christianity, Islam, Middle East Report, Monotheistic Religions, News Articles on February 20, 2008 - י"ד אדר א' תשס"ח at 7:21 am
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By Gil Troy, Israel Insider, February 18, 2008
In early February, I wandered into a coffee shop directly across from Concordia University’s main building in downtown Montreal. As I entered, I saw a big poster that read “End Israeli Apartheid,” which detailed all of Israel’s alleged crimes from its founding to the Second Lebanon War.
As usual, the charges were distorted, hysterical, one-sided and completely wrenched out of context. Moreover, the main accusation falsely linking Israel (and Zionism) with the South African crime of apartheid not only misrepresents today’s realities, it robs South Africans of their own authentic historical experience — and suffering. South Africa’s apartheid system in South Africa treated blacks as biologically and legally inferior to whites. To equate the resulting South African crimes against humanity with the fallout from a nationalist clash between Jews and Palestinians turns history on its head and minimizes South Africa’s real evil.
This time, I was also struck by the nihilism of Palestinian nationalism. There was nothing positive about Palestinian identity in the poster. It was only a bill of indictment against Israel. And it’s not just one poster. Examine the websites promoting what I call “Let’s make a false equation between Israel and the racist South African Apartheid regime Week.” Program after program bashes Israel, demonizes Zionism, and bemoans Palestinian suffering.
Compare that hurricane of hate to the websites celebrating Israel’s 60th anniversary. If anything, those websites could be accused of barely acknowledging the complexity in Israel’s history — actually, in any country’s history. But ask yourself, with which movement would you rather associate — and which has a greater chance of success?
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Islam, Judaism, Middle East Report, Opinion, Recent Posts on February 19, 2008 - י"ג אדר א' תשס"ח at 9:10 pm
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