Researchers looked at data of over 840,000 people who got booster; paper co-author says study ‘unequivocally’ shows value of extra dose against Delta strain

By TOI STAFF     Today, 10:02 am

 
A couple receive their third dose of the COVID-19 vaccine at Shaare Zedek hospital, on August 17, 2021, in Jerusalem. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)

Israeli research carried out before the emergence of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus found that people over the age of 50 who received a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had 90 percent lower mortality than those who did not get the booster.

The research, based on data from the Clalit health maintenance organization and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, examined those who had received their second dose of the vaccine at least five months earlier. Clalit is the largest of Israel’s HMOs.

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T. Belman. Victor picks up where I left off.

by Victor Rosenthal     December 9, 2021

This morning I sat down with my newspaper, my coffee, and my cat, to read that the IDF held a ceremony on Tuesday to mark the completion of the massive and sophisticated barrier on the border (or whatever it is) with the Gaza Strip.

They call it an “iron wall,” 65 km long, with a fence that rises to a height of 6m above the ground and a concrete barrier below it whose depth is not specified, but is said to go deep enough to stop the tunnels that Hamas loves to dig. There is also a barrier that extends into the sea at its northern end. The whole system is rich in various kinds of sensors, radar, cameras, and even remotely controlled weapons. The IDF reports that numerous tunnels were discovered and destroyed during the construction of the underground barrier.
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NATO promised Ukraine full membership in 2008, but without explaining how or when. Putin sees that promise as an ongoing threat to Russia.

NEW YORK TIMES     Dec. 8, 2021

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg addresses the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in Riga in November, where ministers discussed how to counter the Russian military build-up on the Ukrainian border.Gints Ivuskans/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

BRUSSELS — Ukraine presents NATO with a dilemma many years in the making — one the alliance, itself, helped create.

In 2008, NATO — an American-led alliance explicitly created to counter the Soviet Union — promised membership to two former Soviet republics, Ukraine and Georgia, but without specifying when or how.
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by Giulio Meotti, GATESTONE INSTITUTE           Dec 8, 2021

COLOGNE, GERMANY – MAY 09: A general view of the city’s main mosque, which has temporarily become a mass vaccination center against Covid-19, during the coronavirus pandemic on May 09, 2021 in Cologne, Germany. City authorities are offering more than 1100 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine at the mosque on a first-come first serve basis for a second day following the accumulation of doses. (Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)

• “I will continue to take a critical stance against those… who use the liberal structure and tolerance of the constitution to impose totalitarian views of the state and who undermine the rules of the rule of law, using anti-Western indoctrination…. I will not adapt my vision of freedom of expression to… ‘Everyone has the right to freely express their opinion in a way that is not contrary to Sharia law'”. — Ralph Giordano, FAZ.net.

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By  Wendi Strauch Mahoney, UNCOVERDC

The Testimonies Project is a vaccine injury reporting documentary project organized by an Israeli citizen, Avital Livny.  In June, she began collecting vaccine injury testimonials for the vaccine injury documentary website in response to Israel’s Ministry of Health (MOH) expansion of the vaccine rollout to individuals 18 and younger.

Livny is a mother of two young boys, ages four and nine, who is concerned about the expansion of vaccine administration to younger and younger people. Livny took the project live in September. Israel has now approved the vaccine for children ages five and older.

https://www.vaxtestimonies.org/en/

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Prime Minister Naftali Bennett used to be a critic of his predecessor’s policy on settlement building, but is now following in Netanyahu’s footsteps. Settler leaders are content to see the status quo being maintained

By Anshel Pfeffer, HAARETZ   Dec. 8, 2021

The prime minister of the Israeli government has various additional titles and roles, some of which are barely known to the public. For instance, they are also chairperson of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission. And by law, they also hold any government ministry that for whatever reason does not have a minister in situ. Which means the present incumbent, Naftali Bennett, is also minister for settlement affairs. (The post was supposed to go to Nir Orbach, a member of Bennett’s Yamina party, but for now he prefers the influential job of Knesset House Committee chairman.)

This is intriguing, because six months have passed since Bennett became both prime minister and settlements minister, and so far he doesn’t seem to have much of a policy on settlements beyond continuing that of his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu.

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By Michelle Malkin, JWR

The profit-maximizing corporations that covet your “digital health” data hide behind nonprofit umbrella groups that pose as public interest do-gooders. These vaccine passport profiteers are turning millions of human beings into walking QR codes in the name of fighting COVID-19 and under the guise of bringing “normalcy” back. It’s an unprecedented worldwide racket that rewards compliant sheep and punishes free-thinking, autonomy-seeking citizens.

Let’s name them.
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Obama fundamentally transformed the military the way that he did the country.

By Daniel Greenfield, FPM     Wed Dec 8, 2021

Editors’ note: This article on the subversion of the American military is one of a series Daniel Greenfield has written on what is probably the greatest and most immediate threat to America’s security and survival. It’s a subject surrounded by silence. See the Freedom Center’s articles on this issue at its new campaign site, Committee for a Patriotic Military. Also make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s booklet, Disloyal: How the Military Brass is Betraying Our Country.

By the time Barack Obama left office, every branch of the military was smaller than it had been on September 11. But the change in size concealed the true impact of America’s most left-wing president in undermining our national security and weakening us in the face of our enemies.

“I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” Obama famously boasted. He used the pen to unleash a blizzard of executive orders and memorandums. Some led to outraged protests, but some of his most devastating penned assaults on our nation’s military flew under the radar.

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T. Belman. France also thought the Maginot Line would protect them. Hamas will now devote their efforts to build a fleet of drones which will fly over the fence. Of course. with the aid of additional funds it will receive for agreeing to calm. Israel would be better off with no such agreement. Achieving temporary calm is not worth it.

As for stopping the tunnel threat, surely Israel could have developed the technology to detect tunnel building in Israeli territory for a small fraction of the cost of building the fence.

IDF chief Aviv Kohavi says new 40-mile above- and below-ground fence is changing the reality along the restive border, where subterranean attacks have dogged the military for years

By Judah Ari  Gross, TOI        Dec 7, 2021, 

An Israeli soldier stands guard during a ceremony opening the newly completed barrier above and below the Israel-Gaza border, Tuesday, Dec. 7, 2021.(AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov)

NETIV HA’ASARA — Standing in the shadow of a 30-foot-high concrete wall, top defense officials announced Tuesday that Israel had completed construction of a massive barrier running the length of the Gaza Strip both above and, critically, below ground.

The NIS 3.5 billion ($1.1 billion) project has taken over three years to complete and is meant to end the threat of cross-border attack tunnels from the Palestinian enclave, which the Strip’s Hamas rulers have utilized to deadly effect.

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T. Belman. Not only is the number of refugees unlimited, they are unvetted for terrorist ties and are untested for disease including Corona. I wonder if they will get a pass on masks also.

Not only did about 1/3 of the Republican Senators support the plan but only 1/3 GOP voters were not against it.

BY Robert Spencer, JIHAD WATCH

If you wanted to destroy the country, what would you do differently from what Congress and Biden’s handlers are doing? No one knows how many jihadis are among these people; they’re largely unvetted. But the key part of this story is at the end: “The data revealed also that most Afghan arrivals in the U.S. live on welfare.”

That’s the goal. Create a group of people that is utterly dependent upon the government, and will keep on voting for those who will keep the gravy train going.
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T. Belman. Mandabilt’s reasoning is totally wrong. He betrayed democracy, not Netanyahu, by substituting his opinion for that of the electorate.

Dershowitz on Netanyahu trial: ‘Israel should be deeply ashamed’ (June 5, 2020)

Knesset would “never in a million years” make it a crime for politicians to push publications for more flattering media coverage “because if they did, half of the members of the Knesset would be in prison.”

“Israel is the first country in modern history to ever put a political leader on trial for trying to get good media coverage or trying to eliminate negative media coverage,” Dershowitz told i24. “If you want to try people on these offenses in cases 1000, 2000 and 4000, let the Knesset pass statutes.”

ISRAEL NATIONAL NEWS

Transcripts of closed conversations held by Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit in the context of the indictments against opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu reveal the attorney general’s feelings about the former prime minister.

According to the transcripts, which were revealed by Channel 12 News, Mandelblit said that “Netanyahu endangered democracy, we were saved by the grace of heaven.”

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T. Belman. Greenfield puts the blame squarely on Bennett. When the coalition formed, I thought with Bennett, Shaked and Saar, among others from the right, in the government, that they would steer the government on a right wing path. Oh, how wrong I was.

Veteran tour guide Shalom Pollack refused to back down when Yad Vashem removed photo of Jerusalem Mufti meeting Hitler from its walls. 

By Daniel Greenfield, INN

Mufti Amin al Husseini und Adolf HitlerBundesarchiv, Bild 146-1987-004-09A / Heinrich Hoffmann / CC-BY-SA

Would the appointee of a coalition government that includes Islamists really be expected to do anything else?

Some background to this story (first made public through Arutz Sheva in this article, ed.).

Israel’s current government is a leftist-Islamist coalition that includes some former conservatives “out front” as stalking horses. One of those is serving as the current prime minister. Another was Gideon Sa’ar’s New Hope party. Dani Dayan, a former consul general and Yesha council leader ran on the New Hope party list. The only purpose of the New Hope party was to tear away enough conservative votes to create this leftist hybrid government. Now it’s expected to be wiped out in any future elections.

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DEC 8/21

A VERY IMPORTANT EXPLORATION OF DRONE WARFARE.

DEC 7/21

The luxury of having no rival in the world induced the United States into the first bout of self-hate in its history. We are now faced with navigating reality under such conditions.

By Conrad Black, AM GREATNESS

A vacuum was created 30 years ago by the peaceful collapse of both the Imperial Russian state constructed over centuries from Peter the Great to Stalin, and the Bolshevik dictatorship of the Soviet Union that was purporting to perfect Marxism and spread it to a yearning and grateful world. That vacuum has been filled by China, assisted at least tentatively by selected opportunistic allies. So thorough, sudden, and bloodless was the American-led triumph over the Soviet Union, that it has required 30 years for a serious replacement challenge to the West to emerge.

At the end of World War I, when Germany effectively surrendered but was not occupied, the supreme Allied commander, France’s Marshal Foch, correctly described the 1919 Treaty of Versailles as “a 20-year armistice.”

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Renowned, talented singer-songwriter Billy Joel.is a prototype of what has happened to American Jewry’s baby boomers. Opinion.

By Howard Rotberg, INN

Vladimir Bukovsky said that “(modern left-liberalism) is an extreme mental aberration best described by the Russian saying: that it is like a dog in reverse because it barks at its own folks and wags its tail in front of a stranger.”

The Biden left-liberal administration in America is turning out to be nightmarish for both America and Israel. It hurriedly pulled out from Afghanistan leaving Afghan allies to the persecution by the Taliban. It left to the Taliban billions of dollars of up-to-date military equipment. It opened up its southern border without vetting immigrants. It flooded the money supply with printed money thus creating an inflation that will hurt most the lower and middle classes who thought that the Democratic Party was their friend.
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The tactically brilliant but strategically crazy attack on Pearl Harbor unleashed incalculable furor against a once sophisticated Japanese empire, which foolishly attacked the United States at peace.

By Victor Davis Hanson, AM GREATNESS     December 5, 2021

Most Americans once were mostly in agreement about what happened on December 7, 1941, 80 years ago this year. But not so much now, given either the neglect of America’s past in the schools or woke revisionism at odds with the truth.

The Pacific war that followed Pearl Harbor was not a result of America egging on the Japanese, not about starting a race war, and not about much other than a confident and cruel Japanese empire falsely assuming that its stronger American rival either would not or could not stop its transoceanic ambitions.
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