Morsi willing to meet with an Israeli leader
(JNS.org) Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi is willing to meet with an Israeli leader, preferably President Shimon Peres, a senior Egyptian official told Israel Hayom, despite talk of a Muslim Brotherhood refusal to meet with Israeli officials until an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal is signed. The Egyptian official said that if such a meeting were to take place, it would be in Washington, after the upcoming U.S. presidential elections. The objective would be to establish a new platform for more positive relations between the countries. According to the official, the president’s declaration to the assembly that Egypt would honor its international treaties, including its treaty with Israel, was a result of efforts by U.S. officials to bring Israel and Egypt closer together. Meanwhile, the New York Times reported on Saturday that President Obama had informed Congress he intended to transfer $450 million to Egypt immediately as part of the U.S. government’s pledge of $1 billion in aid after Mubarak’s regime collapsed. The move, however, was immediately opposed by Congress, which has refused to approve aid packages for a regime run by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Apple Maps denies Jerusalem a country
(JNS.org) Controversy over Jerusalem has now invaded the world of technology. The Algemeiner reported that Apple’s newly released operating system—the iOS6—contains a mapping feature listing Jerusalem as an unaffiliated city that is not part of any country, in addition to specifying no capital city for Israel. The Jewish state is the only country on “Apple Maps” with no capital. Every country on Apple’s new maps except for Israel has a capital city marked with an encircled five-point star, according to the Algemeiner’s analysis.

Prague Jewish cemetery vandalized
(JNS.org) Twenty-six out of 150 tombstones at a Jewish cemetery in the woods near Prague have been vandalized, the Associated Press reported. Miroslav Doubek, a Czech Republic Police spokesman, told the AP on Sept. 26 that unknown perpetrators most likely knocked over the tombstones within the last two months and also broke an unspecified number of tombstones into pieces. The cemetery is located 40 miles away from Prague in a town called Prudice.

Professors caught teaching antisemitic, anti-Israel views
(JNS.org) Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT) has released a 30-minute video in which Northeastern University professors promote antisemitic and anti-Israel views in their classroom lectures. According to Dr. Charles Jacobs, APT President, one, a tenured professor in the Boston-based school, consistently defamed Israel and his department of Middle East Center for Peace, Culture and Development “has been built to inculcate students with a hostile and demonized view of the Jewish state, with repeated comparisons to the Nazis… As the video shows, one professor in the Department has also introduced the students and the university to virulent antisemitic Arab officials and religious leaders,” APT said in a press release.”  In the video, a Northeastern economics professor also tells students to be proud of being called antisemites, and brags that for more than a decade the student body has been largely turned against Israel.
“The problem of anti-Israelism and antisemitism is not restricted to this campus but is a national problem that first came to wide public attention in 2004 with the controversial film ‘Columbia Unbecoming,’ which documented the intimidation of Jewish students at Columbia University,” said Jacobs. “Northeastern professors cannot be allowed to indoctrinate students and promote lies,” he added.
The video is available to view on YouTube at http://bit.ly/PHnt3m.

Netanyahu meets with Bloomberg
Maxine Dovere/JNS.org
NEW YORK—New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg welcomed the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Gracie Mansion following Netanyahu’s United Nations speech Sept. 27. Noting the “special bond between our city and Israel,” the mayor said “both are a target for those who seek to destroy freedom.” Bloomberg recalled that, following the 9/11 attacks, “the people of Israel stood with us in solidarity, knowing that terrorists are only victorious if they frighten people into giving up their beliefs, their values and their way of life. … I am sure that the U.S. and Israel can work out a common policy in the interests of both nations and in the interests of peace…When we say ‘never again,’ we must mean it,” Bloomberg said. Netanyahu acknowledged Bloomberg as “a champion of New York City and of the United States.” It is “important to be clear and unambiguous about our determination to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons,” he said. “It can be stopped, if we are clear and resolved about the red line that Iran must not pass,” Netanyahu said.

Abbas accuses Israel of “ethnic cleansing”
(JNS.org) Addressing the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 27, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of carrying out “ethnic cleansing” in East Jerusalem. Israel took control of eastern Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Day War after Jordanian attacks. The Jewish state then expanded the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem to include the eastern parts of the city. Eastern Jerusalem includes a number of important Jewish religious and cultural sites such as the Western Wall, a remnant of the Second Temple. Abbas also said the Palestinians would now seek an upgrade to non-member state status, which only requires approval of the UN General Assembly. They currently have non-member observer status. Abbas sought last year to gain full statehood member status, but failed to obtain the necessary votes in the UN Security Council after the U.S. threatened a veto.

Israeli experiment pits man vs computer
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) More than two-thirds of participants in an experiment held in Israel on Sept. 24 could not tell the difference between a person and a computer. In a game show simulation of the “Turing test,” in which the audience had to deduce whether answers to trivia questions were provided by a human or a machine, the audience witnessed multiple contestants who were asked assorted trivia questions by TV host Avri Gilad. One of the contestants was fed answers from a computer; the rest answered to the best of their knowledge. The audience of 2500 then voted on who they thought was the computer among them. Twenty-seven percent answered correctly; the rest were split among the remaining contestants. “Since the majority of the participants did not correctly identify the computer, it shows they thought it was a human, and therefore with some reservation it can be said the computer passed the Turing test, at least for this event,” Israeli Science and Technology Minister Professor Daniel Hershkowitz said.

A “different perspective” from Ahmadinejad?
(JNS.org) Addressing the United Nations General Assembly on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad opened his remarks by saying he has been speaking on the world’s problems for seven years and that he wants to “raise such issues from a different perspective.”
In offering that “perspective,” Ahmadinejad said Iran is faced by a continuous “threat by the uncivilized Zionists to resort to military action against our great nation,” and called for a new world order in which Western countries working for “the devil” are not in control.
On Sept. 24, three days before his UN address, Ahmadinejad had told reporters that while his country “has been around for the last seven, ten thousand years,” Israel has been “occupying” territory in the Middle East for 60-70 years and has “no roots there in history.” Representatives from the U.S. and Israel decided not to be present for Ahmadinejad’s Yom Kippur remarks. Ahmadinejad also recommended the establishment of an “independent fact-finding team” to uncover the “truth” about the Sept. 11, 2001 al-Qaida terrorists attacks.

Senators ask Cuban leader to release Alan Gross
(JNS.org) Nearly half the U.S. Senate came together in a bipartisan letter led by Sens. Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Jerry Moran (R-KS) that urges Cuban President Raul Castro to release Jewish-American contractor Alan Gross on humanitarian grounds. Gross has been imprisoned in Cuba since December 2009 after he was sentenced to a 15-year term for bringing communications devices to the country’s Jewish community. Cuba convicted him of “crimes against the state.” “After three years of unjustly imprisoning American citizen Alan Gross, my colleagues and I are hopeful that the Cuban government will take action and grant his release,” Sen. Moran said in a press release.
The letter, signed by 44 senators, said that Gross is suffering from a number of debilitating medical conditions, including severe weight loss and degenerative arthritis. It also said that he is suffering mental anguish because of separation from his family and their health issues—his elderly mother and daughter are both battling cancer.

Bomb explodes in Sweden Jewish community center
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) A bomb exploded at a Jewish community center in Malmo, Sweden early Sept. 28, causing damage but no injuries. The door leading into the community center was shattered, as were several windows. Two suspects, both 18 years old, have been taken into custody and have denied any wrongdoing. The head of the Malmo Jewish community, Fred Kahn, told the Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan “There is always a constant threat against Jewish institutions, but we hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary now. We have to increase our security, but we have no money for such things. We have to use the money we get from membership fees, which could otherwise be used for social, cultural and other purposes.” Malmo sees some 50 to 100 antisemitic incidents per year. Many of the perpetrators are first- and second-generation Muslim immigrants, who make up 30 to 40 percent of Malmo’s population of 300,000. Many of Malmo’s Muslims are Palestinian.