Jerusalem News (20 November 2016, 19 Cheshvan, 5777)
 Contents:
1. 'Medical' Marijuana a Con By Dr. Carlton E. Turner
2. Arnold Roth: This Ongoing War
18-Nov-16: American service personnel killings in the Mid East get scant reporting and even less comprehension
3. The Obama Legacy By Sol W. Sanders
4. Obama and Israel by Yair Davidiy
5. Prince Charles Quietly Visits Grandmother's Grave in Jerusalem By:Hana Levi Julian
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1. 'Medical' Marijuana a Con
By Dr. Carlton E. Turner
http://acdemocracy.org/medical-marijuana-a-con/
Extracts:
As the former Drug Czar under President Ronald Reagan, with an extensive background in marijuana research, I thought I should share some of my thoughts about 'medical' marijuana.
From 1970 to 1981, I held various positions at the Research Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, School of Pharmacy at the University of Mississippi. During this time, I published over 100 original papers, chapters in books, patents, and two large Marijuana Bibliographies covering marijuana research starting in the 1880s. I also served as the Director of the federal government's Marijuana Project.
That research project was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The project grew Cannabis sativa L. plants from seeds obtained from over 100 sites worldwide. We processed the plant material into marijuana and supplied this standardized research marijuana to researchers throughout the world. All of the marijuana shipped was analyzed by a procedure developed at the University and recognized as the world standard by the United Nations Narcotic Laboratory.
Now that you know a bit of my background let me give you the facts about marijuana:
Marijuana is a very crudely prepared drug comprised of the dried leaves, small stems, and flowers of the Cannabis plant. Marijuana contains unique chemicals called cannabinoids. Cannabinoids have biological activity and have been the subject of thousands of research studies since the 1970s. Some cannabinoids can be medicinal and have been regulated by the FDA, and prescribed by licensed physicians since 1985....
Pro-drug groups, marijuana users, the media, politicians, and those wanting to profit from marijuana sales.... claim that society should not use marijuana derivative drugs approved by the FDA. That only "natural" marijuana should be used as medicine. To further cloud the facts, medical reporters claim marijuana works for many ailments, but in reality, they are referring to cannabinoid drugs. The marijuana legalization advocates want to confuse the public to accept that 'natural' marijuana as a panacea for any human condition, and falsely claim it is safe to use as an unregulated "medicine." But this so-called "medical marijuana" is a fraud and a con job.
The fact is that marijuana is a dirty drug with so many different side effects that it will never pass the required safety and efficacy testing for medicine. Marijuana can contain over 700 individual chemicals, and when smoked the number of chemicals expand to the thousands. The smoke contains 50 percent to 70 percent more cancer-causing compounds than tobacco.....
Marijuana is not, and will never be medicine.
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2. Arnold Roth: This Ongoing War
http://thisongoingwar.blogspot.co.il/
18-Nov-16: American service personnel killings in the Mid East get scant reporting and even less comprehension
Posted: 18 Nov 2016 04:08 AM PST
Extracts:
Relatively little attention gets paid in the mainstream news media when American military personnel come under attack from so-called friendly forces while they serve in the Middle East. That's a shame became those killings tend to throw light on tendences that ought to be better understood.
A couple of recent examples.
Case number one: Two men - Army Sgt. Douglas J. Riney, 26, of Fairview, Illinois, and Michael G. Sauro, 40, a civilian employee of the US Army from McAlester, Oklahoma - were shot to death by "hostile enemy forces" in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, according to a US the military announcement in late October, quoted by the Chicago Tribune.
But how hostile were they?
According to a Military Times report, the attack happened at Camp Morehead, an ammunition supply point outside Kabul:
The shooter was reportedly wearing an Afghan Army uniform. The Riney's unit was at the base to determine whether the Afghans were tracking their ammunition inventories properly, defense officials said. [Military Times, November 4, 2016]
So was the shooter an Afghan soldier? Merely dressed up as one? And does that count as hostile enemy action? Or was this the result of so-called friendly fire? We will probably never know since "the attacker was later killed", according to this source.
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But we know there are precedents. For instance, it was announced back on September 15, 2012, that four International Security Assistance Force personnel "died... in southern Afghanistan following an insider attack suspected to involve members of the Afghan police". As later became via a Talbian report, the American soldiers were killed by policemen "loyal to the movement" in "a carefully premeditated attack on six US troops at a vulnerable observation post by a team of six Afghan policemen working with them that night." [Long War Journal, May 15, 2013]
Case number two: Three US military personnel were killed on November 4, 2016 in an attack at the gates of an air base in southern Jordan. The Al-Jafr air-field, in a remote desert location near the southern Jordanian city of Ma'an (population: 50,000) and closer to Saudi Arabia than to Iraq, supports US air operations in the region. Called the King Faisal Airbase in the Jordanian media, it also serves as the venue for joint US/Jordan training operations. The shooter fired at a car carrying the Americans as they were entering the base. A Jordanian officer was wounded.
The Americans were in Jordan on a training mission, officials said. The U.S. military typically maintains about 2,000 U.S. forces on the ground in Jordan to support training with the Jordanian military and operations against the Islamic State in neighboring Iraq and Syria... Pro-Western Jordan is a key member of a U.S-led military coalition against the Islamic State group, which controls parts of neighboring Iraq and Syria... The United States has spent millions of dollars to help the kingdom fortify its borders. For the West, any sign of instability in Jordan, a key ally, would be of great concern. ["Officials say three U.S. service members killed in Jordan attack", Military Times | Andrew Tilghman | November 4, 2016]
Was this a terrorist attack? Could be, now it's revealed the shooter was not only dressed as a member of "friendly" forces but actually was one.
President Barack Obama said the US took the attack "very seriously", according to a BBC report.
Seriously or not, a reasonable person might wonder how likely it is that a full expose of what happened will ever be done by the Jordanian authorities, given their disdain for informing the public.
As to whether some of the blame attaches to the American victims, as Jordanian voices have said, a spokesperson for the US embassy in Amman said this past Wednesday that the investigation continues to be "ongoing and has not yet reached any conclusions... [and the Americans] appreciate the assistance of the government of Jordan... Contrary to press reports, there has been absolutely no credible evidence to suggest that US personnel acted contrary to orders or established procedures when accessing the base...' [Jordan Times, November 16, 2016].
Eric Barbee, the Embassy spokesperson, was evidently referring to this:
...Jordanian state media reported that the servicemen, from the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) in Fort Campbell, Ky., sparked the incident by disobeying orders from Jordanian soldiers... ["U.S. refutes claim its soldiers sparked Jordan shooting", USA TODAY, November 17, 2016]
The ongoing inability to solve the mystery of the October killings is less understandable once two especially notable previous Jordanian killings are considered.
 2015: At least five people, including two Americans, two Jordanians and a South African, were killed after a Jordanian police officer opened fire at a US-backed police training facility near Amman, before being shot dead himself. At least four other people, including two more Americans, were injured in the attack, according to US officials..... at least one Western news report quoted "security sources" saying the shooter was "a sympathiser of Islamic State with strong anti-Western feelings".
 1997: A Jordanian soldier opened fire on a large group of about 40 Israeli schoolgirls from grades 7 and 8 at the AMIT Fuerst School in Beit Shemesh who were on a class excursion to the so-calledm 'Island of Peace' at Naharayim, a scenic peninsula on the Jordan River near the Israeli border. He killed seven of them and injured six others. The Wikipedia account says he "expressed pride for his actions, was imprisoned by Jordanian authorities, but was later called a "hero" by the Jordanian Justice Minister, Hussein Mjalli, and Parliament, who called for his release". They were not alone. As an Alarabiya news report from 2011 observes, "Jordan's powerful Islamist movement and the country's 14 trade unions, which have more than 200,000 members, have repeatedly called for Dakamseh's release...
The confusion and doubt about the involvement of "friendly forces" in the cold-blooded killings (sometimes called "blue-on-green" attacks - and here's a list of some others) of US service personnel on active duty in Moslem countries, and about their motivations, very likely contributes to the success of the terrorists rather than to their defeat. We shudder to think what it does to the feelings of the bereaved families back home.
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3. The Obama Legacy
By Sol W. Sanders
http://acdemocracy.org/the-obama-legacy/
Extracts:
Historians will debate the importance of the Obama Administration and its role in American history for decades to come, of course. The legacy which presidents leave behind them is always a concern of our chief executives, and it has been of even more importance to Barack Obama.....
Obama, of course, perhaps more than any other recent president, is an ideologue - and he insisted in his political campaigns that he aimed at a "transformation" of American society. His framework for events is a combination of his studies of history but overlaid by the socialist and pro-Communist views of the little social-political group around the University of Chicago who launched his career.
There is no doubt that he has effected changes, whether they are indeed transformations, and whether any have been beneficiary, only time will tell.
But any honest examination of the effects of his strategies is a record of miscalculation and failures. Perhaps the most dramatic ones have been in foreign policy. His campaign to withdraw American power and decision-making from the international scene has demonstrated what had always been apparent to serious students of foreign affairs: the enormous power of the U.S., economic, political and military, has a role in any international confrontation even when Washington chooses to remain neutral or withdraw its influence. A world order without U.S. participation is not only unimaginable to our allies but something our adversaries always question as a possibility.
The Middle East is the most dramatic example of the failure of Obama's effort to remove American leadership and power in the interrelated conflicts there. First, his effort to weaken the U.S.-Israel alliance encouraged the Muslim terrorists in the area. Then, Sec. Hillary Clinton's courted the brief Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt - overthrown by the military through popular demand. Obama and Hillary attempted to boycott the new military rulers thus providing an opportunity for Russian arms sales and influence where it had been expelled a half century ago by pro-Western Egyptians.
In Syria, Obama's initial declaration of opposition to the Basher al-Assad regime was followed by withdrawal. Washington's retreat assured the descent into a bloody, irresolute civil war sending a flood of millions of refugees into neighboring countries and Europe. The threat of force followed by its withdrawal has returned Moscow to a base in the eastern Mediterranean and helped extend Tehran mullahs' state terrorism excesses across the Fertile Crescent, even into Latin America. A treaty to curb Tehran's nuclear weapons, never submitted to the Senate as the Constitution demands, is rapidly disintegrating.
In East and South Asia, Obama's ambivalent policies toward Chinese aggression have encouraged Beijing to aggressive territorial claims against its neighbors, discouraged unity among the Southeast Asians against Chinese Communist threats. Again Hillary's much-publicized pivot to the Western Pacific has failed to materialize. Slowly, the rape of the American economy by the Chinese through export subsidies and currency manipulation - begun in the Bush Administrations - has become so clear that the Trump Administration will have no option but a dangerous crackdown.
Obama's role as the first American Afro-American president was, whether admitted in public discussion, seen as an important opportunity to continue to heal the historic American race problem. But whether in part because his exotic background linked him neither to the rising black middle class nor the poor of the ghetto, he either took indefensible positions on individual race incidents or completely neglected the mayhem of his Chicago hometown.
Obama's claim for his Affordable Care solution to long-term U.S. medical care is nearing collapse with skyrocketing costs and failure of the insurance framework which was to support it. His steady stream of executive directives for additional regulation and environmental restraints has contributed toward the slowest and most erratic economic recovery since World War II.
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4. Obama and Israel by Yair Davidiy
Obama is still in power and may yet do Israel harm but we hope he will not and that we have no reason to regret our kind words below:
Our web-sites waged a campaign against Obama even before he was elected almost 8 years ago.
http://www.britam.org
http://hebrewnations.com
See:
HOP. The Hussein Obama Pages
http://www.britam.org/hop/obama23.html
Obama has proven our dire prognostications correct.
BUT
he did not close the shop down.
The family fortune was diminished and its economic base eroded but it stayed in place and may easily recuperate.
The US public needed some form of public medical service and Obama Care does seem to have worked somewhat at the beginning. It did provide an answer that was needed at the time.
Now it should be replaced but it may have served a purpose for a while.
Obama was against Israel and made it felt BUT the US continued to provide Israel with much needed military aid at a high level.
The money kept coming and we have to say Thank You.
It was not for nothing. The US benefits from Israel but no-one seriously believes that self-interest explains it all.
It is something deeper than that.
The US in the UN and internationally continued to provide Israel with some degree of protection against the heathen vilifications and attempts to grievously harm us.
[We do not know to what degree the good points are thanks to the US administration and its professionalism rather than Obama himself. This does not really matter. Obama ruled by the book, his book.]
Obama and his gang of lovey-dovie imitation of potheads kept pressuring Israel to make harmful concessions. Nevertheless nothing serious seems to have happened either way.
The US power and prestige was harmed and sometimes harmful but it was not irreparable.
Obama had the talents of an entertainer and he entertained and that was worth something.
Obama and his boys and girls continued to spread the poison of homosexual toleration alongside flattering the Moslem evil-doers.
Nevertheless it could have been worse and he never said he would do otherwise.Â
Personally I think the black people would have been better served if their first US President had have been a conservative. An assertively straight "Uncle Tom" type would have been nice. or maybe not?
Barak Husssein Obama is what we got.
We had him for a while. No hard feelings.
You could have done better Mr. Barak Hussein but who knows?
Perhaps in your next reincarnation you will merit to give better expression to whatever good you had in you.
Here's hoping that henceforth things will get better.
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5. Prince Charles Quietly Visits Grandmother's Grave in Jerusalem
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/prince-charles-quietly-visits-grandmothers-grave-in-jerusalem/2016/10/04/
By:Hana Levi Julian
Published: October 4th, 2016
Princess Alice of Battenberg was laid to rest in a place of honor on the Mount of Olives at the Church of Mary Magdalene, due to her recognition by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Center as a member of the Righteous Among the Nations. She is also recognized by the British Government as a 'Hero of the Holocaust' as well.
Both honors were earned by the actions of the princess in providing shelter to the wife and children of Haimaki Cohen, a Greek Jewish parliamentarian, during the Nazi Holocaust.
The princess was born in 1885, initially diagnosed hearing-impaired and later diagnosed with schizophrenia. At age 18 she was married to Prince Andrew of Greece and of Denmark. The couple produced four daughters and a son, Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh, who later became the husband to England's Queen Elizabeth II, and the couple produced Prince Charles of Wales.
Princess Alice died at London's Buckingham Palace in 1969, expressing the wish to be laid to rest at the convent in Jerusalem. But it took more than a decade to fulfill that last wish, inasmuch as the UK does not recognize Israel's sovereignty over that part of its capital, where the princess wished to be laid to rest. As a result, the British royal family has imposed strict restrictions on official visits to Israel. The media team with Prince Charles did not report on the visit.