The motivational speaker’s topic was “benefits of forgiveness.” When he had finished his talk, he asked the people in attendance to raise their hands if they were willing to forgive their enemies.
He was pleased to see everyone raised their hand, except for one elderly lady. Seeing this as an opportunity to further illustrate his talk, he asked the woman why she wasn’t willing to forgive her enemies.
She promptly replied, “Because I don’t have any.”
“How old are you ma’am?” he asked.
“Ninety-three,” she responded.
“Please come to the front and tell everyone how a person can live to be 93 and miraculously have no enemies,” he said.
The woman slowly made her way to the front, turned to face the crowd and said, “It’s easy! I just outlived the bastards!”
[emember_protected for=”2″ custom_msg=’For more on this story, please see this week’s print edition of The Cross Roads.’]
Though the woman outlived her enemies, it’s quite obvious she hadn’t forgiven them. However, this year marks the 70th birthday of a nation that repeatedly helps its enemies. Israel is celebrating this milestone, yet its significant contributions to the world and its enemies, remain relatively unpublicized.
It is the only country in the Middle East willing to help the Syrians, who continually go to great efforts to bring their wounded over the border. There, they are treated by Israeli doctors, even if they belong to rebel groups.
Israeli experts helped South Sudan, one of the most dangerous countries in the world, by building an agriculture training village there. Israel is often the first on the scene when a natural disaster strikes, having provided humanitarian aid to over 140 countries. Their expertise recently enabled parents to communicate with their sons who were trapped in a cave in Thailand.
Nevertheless, the media manages to continually portray Israel in a negative light, but their numerous contributions paint a different picture. Those contributions include inventions being introduced into the medical world almost weekly. Very recently a hand held ultrasound machine was introduced that can be used with a smartphone.
Other medical inventions include a laser that shatters kidney stones, a wearable exoskelton that allows the paralyzed to walk, the ability to grow bones from a patient’s fat cells, the ability to perfect brain and spinal surgery with minimal invasive procedures, and a non-invasive sensor that can test newborns for autism.
Israel’s population has doubled during the past two decades, yet much of its land mass is desert, with the Sea of Galilee as its only water source. As a solution, their water supply is drawn from the Mediterranean Sea, desalinized and used as drinking water. Their own innovative drip system that consumes a fraction of the water used by traditional watering methods, is now used world wide. Israel also has a mobile water processing mechanism that can be used to purify water from the filthiest swamps with a simple hand pump.
Security is vital in this country. Israelis can continue with their daily lives, even in times of high tension, because the Iron Dome has a 90 percent success rate in taking down Hamas’ rockets shortly after they are launched. In other areas of security, Israel produced the use of a firewall to protect email and websites.
When countries threaten to boycott Israel, it would be good to keep in mind that many of today’s tech devices, such as computers, thumb drives, GPS navigation and cell phones, besides a good amount of the software that runs them, were either invented by, or are currently run by Israeli companies.
In case you are still not impressed, among 80 nations, this tiny country has been named the eighth most powerful nation in the world. Another notable observation is that 201 out of the 892 Nobel Prizes awarded, were presented to Jews, who compose 0.2 percent of the world’s population.
So next time you hear about enemy rockets being launched into Israel, please take all of the above into consideration. Someone has to, because their enemies, the UN, and the media certainly don’t.
[/emember_protected] 
