Showing posts with label Daniel K. Eisenbud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Daniel K. Eisenbud. Show all posts

Monday, November 9, 2015

Jerusalem Post coverage of the address I gave on the threat of Radical Islam to the Jerusalem Leaders - Joel Rosenberg


Here’s the Jerusalem Post coverage of the address I gave on the threat of Radical Islam to the Jerusalem Leaders Summit.

by joelcrosenberg
JerusalemPost-logo2
Jerusalem Post reporter covered the address I gave last week to the Jerusalem Leaders Summit. Below is the article that was published.
I was also interviewed by two other Israeli reporters at the Summit. If those interviews are published, I will let you know. Please join me in praying that a growing number of U.S., European and Israeli government, business and religious leaders truly understand the threats we face and are committed to protecting their citizens from both Radical Islam and Apocalyptic Islam. Thanks so much.
By Daniel K. Eisenbud, Jerusalem Post, November 4, 2015
The gravest threat facing the world today is indisputably radical Islam, the American-Israeli New York Times best-selling author and former US and Israel political adviser, Joel Rosenberg, said at the Jerusalem Leadership Summit in the capital on Wednesday.
While he emphasized that the vast majority of Muslims are not radicals, Rosenberg, whose debut novel, The Last Jihad, published in 2002, was an international bestseller, contended that even at a fraction of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslim population, the extremists pose an imminent threat.
“If you look at some of the polling that’s been done about the attitudes in the Muslim world, you see that 90% or more are moderate, really peaceful people,” said Rosenberg, during his lecture at the Inbal Hotel, adding that only between 7%-10% of Muslims express approval of radical Islam.
“However, in a world of 1.6 billion Muslims, 10% is 160 million people. That’s half the population of the United States; if you grouped them in one country...you have one of the largest country’s on the planet.”
Therefore, Rosenberg said, he takes issue with US President Barack Obama’s contention that the fight against Muslim terrorists is not a “war against Islam.”
“You cannot say that those in the 160 million category are not driven by Islam,” he said.
“They say they are. You can call it a ‘perversion,’ but you have to understand why they would say that Islam motivates them? Whether that’s pure Islam or not, I’ll leave that to the Islamic scholars.”
Noting that the king of Jordan, Abdullah II, a descendant of Muhammad, has said that “the West is engaged in a third world war against Islamic terrorism,” Rosenberg said that Abdullah has conceded that Muslims themselves must do far more to fight the killers in their midst.
“At its core, King Abdullah says: ‘This is a Muslim problem...we need to take ownership of this. We Muslims need to stand up and say what is right and what is wrong,’” he said.
Moreover, Rosenberg cited Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as recently warning religious leaders at Al-Azhar University that the fight against radical Islam must be fought by moderate Muslims.
“At the Harvard of Sunni Islam, he said directly to the clerics and to the professors: ‘This is your mission. You will be held to account if you do not confront this problem inside Islam,’” Sisi said. “So Muslim leaders say that it is a problem in Islam, and obviously, it is.”
Extrapolating from the unexpected attacks on Pearl Harbor and New York City during 911, Rosenberg said that the theme of his novels is that “to misunderstand the nature and threat of evil is to risk being blindsided by it.”
“We were blindsided by a theology and an ideology... that we did not understand,” he said. “Was it understandable? Yes it was. But did we as leaders in America, and in the West generally, understand it and take it seriously? We did not.”
Rosenberg went on to cite Obama’s “catastrophic” Iranian nuclear deal as a case in point of the inherent dangers of not understanding the consequences of radical Islam. “He believes that he’s Nixon and he’s dealing with China...and that Iran wants to be part of the world’s system, that they feel isolated and left out,” he said.
“So, let’s bring them in... and hope that gradually, they will evolve into a player that we can deal with.”
Such a supposition, Rosenberg warned, is profoundly naïve and dangerous, despite the fact that the majority of Iranians want freedom and to be integrated into the world. “If you base your analysis on the Iranian people, you come to the conclusion that they want engagement,” he said. “The key is the top: the Ayatollah and his inner circle. The question is not what the country wants... the question is what the supreme leader and his inner circle want. What do they believe?” “Because if you misunderstand what they believe,” he continued, “you will be blindsided.”
He contended that Iran, which is far more patient than ISIS, poses the larger threat of genocide.
“Iran’s leadership says: ‘No, we’re not going to build a caliphate now, we’re going to build nuclear weapons because once we’re ready for genocide, we’re not going to use swords and AK-47s, we’re going to use atomic weaponry. We’re going to be able to kill millions, and not just thousands.’” Iran, he warned, is “biding its time.”
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joelcrosenberg | November 9, 2015 at 3:27 pm | Categories: Uncategorized | URL:http://wp.me/piWZ7-3nX

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Oldest human skull in Middle East found in northern Israel



Oldest human skull in Middle East found in northern Israel

JERUSALEM POST    
A consortium of Israeli archeologists and anthropologists announced the discovery of the oldest human skull ever found in the Middle East on Wednesday.

The partial skull, discovered nearly seven years ago, was found in the Manot Cave in Western Galilee.

The announcement comes after years of painstaking lab analysis to verify its date of origin, and according to Dr. Omry Barzilai of the Antiquities Authority, the 55,000-year-old skull is “one of the most important discoveries in the study of human evolution.”

“This rare skull constitutes the earliest fossilized evidence outside of Africa, indicating that today’s human population originated from East Africa and migrated from there 65,000 years ago,” he said while standing behind the skull, several meters outside the cave.

Barzilai added that the cave’s entrance collapsed over 30,000 years ago, nearly hermetically sealing the site in an excellent state of preservation.

A subsequent morphometric analysis of the skull determined that it indeed belonged to modern Homo sapiens, he said.

“Cave sites usually leave remains open to later intrusions, but the fact that the cave collapsed 30,000 years ago allowed us to explore archeological surfaces that were not subjected to human intrusions,” Barzilai continued.

“It is one of the best preserved sites in Israel and we expect to find more [remains].”

Indeed, Prof. Israel Hershovitz, an anthropologist from Tel Aviv University who helped oversee the analysis, said the cave’s seal ostensibly froze its human contents in time.

“The most exciting thing about this cave is that no one has stepped in it for 30,000 years,” he said. “Imagine someone entering your house after 30,000 years, and all the dishes and furniture are still exactly where you left them.”

“When it collapsed it was like a time capsule, or prehistoric lab,” added Dr. Ofer Marder, a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

“It was perfectly preserved.”

Hershovitz explained that two main migrations occurred out of East Africa to the Middle East by archaic and modern Homo sapiens roughly 120,000 years ago and between 60,000 and 70,000 years ago, respectively.

However, he noted that archaic Homo sapiens, which were a variation of modern Homo sapiens, never made it past the Middle East, while modern Homo sapiens thrived, and successfully continued their migration to Europe and Asia.

“This connects the link of modern Homo sapiens out of Africa to modern man,” said Marder. “This group is special because it went on to conquer the world, whereas archaic Homo sapiens died here.”

Hershovitz said that modern man went on to replace and breed with indigenous populations, including Neanderthals, in the Middle East, Western Asia and Europe. He added that as a result of the interbreeding, most human beings have between 1 percent to 4% Neanderthal DNA.

“One of the migrant routes by which modern humans spread out across the world passes through the Levant [Mediterranean Basin], which is the only land crossing between Africa and Europe,” he explained. “But until now, no modern human remains that date to the period between 45,000 and 65,000 years ago were discovered.”

Asked why only the skull was located from the corpse, Marder said he could not be sure, but theorized that either hyenas indigenous to the area dragged it there, or that it was moved by water activity.

Still, Marder added that he is confident that more remains will be found in the area during ongoing excavations.

To date, five excavations seasons between 2010 and 2014 have been conducted in the cave, located 40 kilometers northeast of the Mount Carmel prehistoric caves.

The study of the skull was a joint project of the Antiquities Authority, Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University and was funded by the Dan David Foundation, Israel Academy of Sciences, Irene Levi Sala CARE Archeological Foundation and Leakey Foundation.

The discovery is featured in the new issue of Nature magazine, released Wednesday.

The Jerusalem Post - Israel News