CHELM-ON-THE-MED©, APRIL 2013 COLUMN 1

STOCKHOLM SYNDROME

            Sweden’s fear of angering Arab has reached new heights.  Stockholm announced that it was canceling plans for an exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, saying they could not protect the rare artifacts. 

            What was the threat? Lawfare*.

            The Swedish told the Shrine of the Book they were powerless to prevent Palestinians from filing suit in a Swedish court to receive possession of the Dead Sea Scrolls claiming they had been ‘stolen’ from Palestinian territory by the Israelis.* Such a suit could prevent the return of the scrolls to Israel after the exhibition, as promised.

            Next thing you known, in addition to claiming they are the descendents of the Philistines (who originate in the Aegean Sea,  not the Arabian Peninsula) therefore, ‘Palestinians were uprooted by the Jewish People twice – once by the Israelites, once by the Israelis,’ Palestinians – will be claiming they wrote the Bible...

* a new form of unconventional warfare against Israel.

**  The scrolls discovered in 1947 in a cave in the Judea Desert overlooking the Dead Sea,  include the earliest known surviving manuscripts of works later included in the Hebrew Bible, including parts of Psalms and the book of Isaiah, parchments believed to have belonged to a Jewish ascetic sect called Essenes,

AGAINST ALL ODDS

They say ‘personal medicine’ is the wave of the future, but Hadassh Professor Orly El-Peleg is already practicing it.  After four year-old Tohar Mimon’s brother Ro’i died of a rare genetic mutation that paralyzes its carriers, the geneticist embarked on a personal mission to save Tohar when the first signs that she suffered from the same metabolic disease began to surface.

            Six days of deep sequencing DNA samples to find a common link, El-Peleg hit the jackpot although statistically there was only a one to thirty million chance of running into the defective gene common to the two Mimon children and three other Israeli youngsters with the same rare disease that is found among Mizrachi Jews.  But that was only half the battle. 

            Her colleague Professor Dror Mivurach who heads Hadassah’s Rheumatology and Internal Medicine Research Center has convinced an American pharmaceutical firm to underwrite and develop a suitable drug for the kids, but they’re not entirely out of the woods:  Treatment will run in the vicinity of 20,000 Euro a month, if there are any takers out there.     

MOMMA’S BOYS

Chelm-on-the-Med has reported time-and-again the unbreakable bond between Israeli soldiers and their moms*, epitomized by the unforgettable item about a fresh IDF recruit who was afraid of the dark and asked his mom to secretly sneak into camp to accompany him on patrol every time he drew nighttime guard duty...  Thus, it should really come as no surprise that when F-16 pilot Nir Yarkoni ‘hung up his wings’ at age 55, his last flight was marked according to an old only-in-Israel tradition:  His parents – Yehudit (86) and Musa (85) were in the control tower and Yehudit gave her son permission to take off…while his wife Dalit gave him permission to land.  

* engaging parents in their offspring’s military service is encouraged by the IDF as a motivation enhancer.  

GETAWAY CAR

Could terrorists inject code via radio waves to your car stereo to 'take over' your vehicle on the highway...a hijacking scenario that makes Hollywood's wildest terrorist scenarios look like child's play? 

            Yes says Arilou, a high-tech company founded by three veterans of the IDF encryption unit, who have already come up with a way to protect today’s increasingly-computer-driven cars falling victim to cyber attacks, a billion dollar business, they believe.

SHABBOS! SHABBOS!

Most ‘Sabbath clocks’ are designed to allow the observant to enjoy the amenities of modern life by turning the lights (or the air conditioner) on and off automatically at set times during the Sabbath. But not Holy Clock.

             Working on reverse logic, Holy Clock is offering websites operated by religiously-observant Jews a way to automatically ‘lock out’ Sabbath-breaking surfers. Why? Technically, website owners are ‘accomplices’ to the sin of Sabbath-breaking surfers by keeping their websites up 24/7 365 days a year. Furthermore, if the website has a commercial dimension, “making profit on Shabbat is forbidden, either by displaying ads or selling services on your website ” claim the developers.

            The free program pinpoints the location of the surfer’s server and cross references the input with time zones around the world to prevent visitors…Jews and gentiles alike, from entering the site from Friday at sundown to Saturday night, as well as Jewish holy days.

NOTHING TO DECLARE???

Customs agents routinely encounter all sorts of items that exceed the duty-free limit, but a tourist who arrived in Israel from Paris by El-Al – a connecting flight from Mexico, was a true first. Pulled aside to have his luggage x-rayed in a routine random search for iPads or commercial quantities of French perfume or contraband, agents were astonished to find two disassembled unmanned military class aircraft.

            Inquiries with the Israeli manufacturer (and documents from the Mexico Federal Police who owned the UAVs*) authenticated that the pricy $300-470,000-a-pop Orbiter drones were being personally-escorted to the manufacturer for repairs, but other officials at Ben-Gurion Airport are asking how the courier’s unusual cargo** didn’t ring alarm bells when his bags went through security in Paris. (Yediot and UAV websites)

*   Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

** Recently I was pulled aside by security at Ben-Gurion Airport to have my suitcase more closely examined first-hand due to two suspicious-looking packets containing…Ahava Dead Sea mud .