CHELM-ON-THE-MED©, November 2015 COLUMN 1
The ‘Jihadi Terror Wave’
a mixed bag of piquant
BACKPAGE NEWS FROM THE FRONT
GLEANED FROM ISRAEL’S HEBREW MEDIA
October 29, 2015 – November 5, 2015
WHAT’S NEXT?
With an excellent shot at the 2015 Chelm Award for Chutzpa (to be announced in January 2016), a Palestinian cartoon posted by Fatah* labeled “Shoot…Add a Knife…Take a Photo” shows the IDF shooting Palestinians at random on the streets of Israel and planting knives by their sides… (Fatah twitter account)
* Fatah: the PLO faction founded by Yassar Arafat, and headed by PA president Mahmoud Abbas.
CALL A SPAYED A SPAYED
Minister of Agriculture Uri Ariel (Jewish Home party) declared he intended to redirect 4.5 M NIS ($1.2 M), budgeted annually to keep the street cat population within check and healthy. Where?
The budget would be earmarked for purchasing one-way tickets abroad to ‘transfer’ stray cats (and dogs) of a single gender (all the males or all the females) to any country prepared to accept them, in lieu of spaying/neutering stray animals. Sterilization, claimed Ariel, ran counter to halacha or Jewish law* because all creatures were blessed by the Creator to “be fruitful and multiply.”
Politicians had a field day with the proposal: Dozens of MKs such as MK Shelly Yachimovich (The Zionist Camp) posting testimony from their house cats on the parliamentarians’ Facebook accounts protesting any notion of a ‘forced transfer’. The animal rights NGO “Let Animals Live” chimed in filing a High Court of Justice petition against the Minister demanding the Supreme Court step in to protect such native sons and daughters from deportation, and veterinarian Rafi Kishon (the son of humorist Ephraim Kishon) warned that there would be dire health ramifications in store if Israel’s street cat population would be denuded.** (Yediot)
* In fact, Orthodox rabbis have ruled that the sterilization campaign is kosher because it prevents suffering created by overpopulation. Chelm-on-the-Med already reported (see Special Needs Populations)how a law is under consideration that will require municipalities to provide drinking fountains for stray animals.
** When Holland and South Korea eliminated their feral cat populations – viewed as a nuisance and a health problem – both countries found themselves facing a mice and rat population of epidemic proportion and had to ‘import’ cats to reestablish an ecological balance.
KINKY DEVICE
Just when frizzy ‘Jewish hair’ - dubbed in some circles the Jewfro - has finally become fashionable (four decades* too late), electrical engineer Sharon Rabi has rolled out a hairbrush called Dafni that straightens hair in five minutes – without a hair dryer, an iron or a hairdresser. (Yediot)
It took 7 years and 3 million dollars of R&D to perfect the 649 NIS solution.
DAMAGE CONTROL
After a fire broke out in Oshrat Karuz’s apartment, the owner - a young widow whose 27 year-old husband had died of a terminal disease - looked on in tears as fire inspectors from the local Kiryat Bialik and Haifa Bay fire stations investigated the source of the fire. Her eight year-old son, it turned out, had dropped his blanket on a night light when he woke up and crawled into her bed. While Karuz counted her blessings that both of them had escaped the apartment unscathed, the kid’s bedroom had gone up in smoke and the rest of the flat suffered extensive smoke damage.
Rather than finish their paper work and call it a day, the two station chiefs Herzl Aharon and Yossi Yifrach took one look at the teary single mom and re-sounded the alarm: Overnight, the men at the station went to work – one fire fighter repairing the electricity, another two repainting the apartment and a third donating new children’s furniture. (Yediot)
HAIR-RAISING FLIGHT
Arik Zendoa, an Israeli national and father of five from Pardes Hana, was traveling from Chad to Ethiopia on business on Ethiopian Airlines when he was assaulted by a Sudani passenger who grabbed him by the throat and tried to strangle Zenoda to death yelling Etbach el Yahud (‘Slaughter the Jew’) and Allah Achbar (‘Allah is Great’).
Luckily air crew and other passengers were able to free the Israeli from the grasp of his 1.9 meter-tall assailant. Authorities in Addis Ababa took the Sudanese into custody upon landing, while Ethiopian Airlines argued they had no way of foreseeing such a scenario, stressing they’d placed the Sudanese on their ‘no fly list’… (Israel HaYom)
A SIMPLE BLOOD TEST
When Professor Varda Shalev failed to diagnose a case of colon cancer in time to save one of her patients, the Maccabi Health Services physician was determined to find out where she had gone wrong. She found the patient had no pain or other clinical signs that would set off alarm bells – adding to her frustration. But, in reviewing the deceased’s annual blood work over the years, Shalev noticed his hemoglobin count had dropped slightly over three-and-a-half years – although well within the norm. A statistical survey of other colon cancer patients revealed a similar pattern, suggesting a simple blood test might be used as a ‘smoking gun’.
A computer program now scans routine lab work results in Israel, comparing new ones to old ones and notifying family doctors when such a pattern begins to appear among persons-at-risk (i.e. those over 50 - 30 percent of whom have avoided the existing diagnostic tests). While the ‘smoking gun’ doesn’t mean the patient is pre-cancerous or has early stage colon cancer, it does indicate personal physicians should recommend a colonoscopy…pronto, to rule out colon cancer. (Yediot)
EVENING THE SCORES
Young people laugh at the difficulty seniors have with new-fangled digital devices, but give some 4th to 6th grade kids from Ramat Gan a typewriter and it will take them ten minutes to figure out how to ‘load’ a sheet of paper (forget about finding the carriage release). Or ask them to figure out what a phonograph is for (and to connect it to a black vinyl disc inside a sleeve marked in English “Mozart / Serenade for 13 Wind Instruments” on the table)
The kids were documented scratching their heads as they viewed a host of strange 20th century gadgets; at regular workshops, they learn to operate all the features of a typewriter, phonograph and a Walkman with the help of an 85 year-old geezer.
The hands-on experiment is part of a bridge-the-gap program devised by the Kol HaDorot (Voice of the Generations) forum to nurture understanding, appreciation and interaction between kids and seniors. Among the Forum’s follow-up programs is a buddy program called ‘Adopt a Grandpa’ designed to deepen the intergenerational dialogue. (Yediot)
REALITY CHECK
According to Sky News, the Gulf States - the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait as well as Saudi Arabia (who don’t even recognize Israel’s right to exist) have the chutzpa to make discreet inquires through American middlemen whether the Jewish state would be willing to sell them Iron Dome systems. The news outlet claims they’ve put Israel’s long-range interception systems such as David's Sling and Arrow missiles also on their wish list.
How do you say kish mein toches* in Arabic? (Ynet)
* kiss my ass in Yiddish