Development of new drugs, miracle cures and inventions are under the threat of cutoff if "Shariah-compliance" is permitted aboard

A recent posting at the tail end of December, carried by www.alphagalileo.org, speaks of a research grant awarded to five scientists in Israel, working under the auspices of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

This was posted by Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Jerusalem, Dec. 26, 2007 –– Five young Hebrew University of Jerusalem scientists have been awarded five-year research grants under the European Union's first competition for outstanding starting independent investigators. The amount awarded to the five Hebrew University winners totals 6,380,000 euros. [$9,391,039.85]
www.alphagalileo.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=readrelease&releaseid=526125

Scientists working as these individuals are, on long-term development projects that may –– or may not –– yield spectacular and much-needed results require patience, first. Very close to that, maybe even displacing savlanut (patience) is funding. University funds are limited. Private monies are often scarce, especially so once one leaves the capacious folds of the dough-factories of Silicon Valley, the Rolls Royce rivers of Chevy Chase and Old Greenwich or the canyons of Wall Street.

But the year-on-year demands for laboratory testing, retesting, trials, clinicals, scientific energies by young or not-so-dewy investigators are in actuality unending. The development of first-rate drugs from such majors as Pfizer, Lilly and Roche set their respective sponsors back in the multi-millions, often billions, before a single viable molecule can be successfully marketed to 'cure' or ameliorate troubling conditions or diseases.

Scientists working without the support of deep-pocket giants, however, are precision-tied to institutional money that can finance all the trial and errors inextricably linked with ultimate success.

Thus support for the five Israeli research leaders, coming surprisingly from the often-dour European Union, is cause for celebration. The funding comes from the European Research Council. It goes to the heart of the scientific method, whereby medicine and science is freed from the needs of fund-raising to address the core of their study subject. Beakers can be replaced. Mitosis can be observed. Laboratories can be equipped. Salaries can be paid.

The topics and projects of the Israeli five cover a wide spectrum of scientific inquiry: (From the Faculty of Medicine) investigation of the nature of dormant bacterial spores; (from the Einstein Institute of Mathematics) group theory and geometry; (from the Silberman Institute of Life Sciences) using optical imaging to probe long-term neurophysiological changes in vivo; (and from the Raca Institute of Physics) planets in the solar system and beyond –– how they form and evolve. And of the Institute of Chemistry: a new methodology for the design of drugs that act by modulating proteins; applications will be in cancer and AIDS.

The funding for many such trials can be substantial –– this award is a handsome 6,380,000 Euros, nearly $10,000,000. But from the projects listed, one can adduce the continual and ongoing need of such funding; each project requires massive involvement by researcher and support staffs, host institutions, the families of the researchers, and the scientific and academic community.

The competition chose about 200 start-up research leaders –– they received their doctorates during the past decade –– from a field of more than 9,600 candidates. The winning applicants represent two and a half dozen nationalities sited in some 170 host institutions. Israel, by the way, ranked seventh in aggregate total single country grantees of the 21 countries represented.

But what if the coffers of the ERC were slammed shut, because they were monitored and audited by a controlling influence that rejected such thoughtful and exigent awards? What if the recipient institution, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, displeased those who both decide on awardees but also dispense the funds from their foundations and other monetary institutions?

While it is a minor miracle that the hypercritical EU would recognize talent hailing from anything within the border of Israel, given their decades-long ...jihad... against anything Israeli, academic or scientific, if the current shariah financing take hold any further on the carotid of cash in Europe, such awards may well dry up in the future.

Not because of a lack of merit or potential in the recipients, mind. Not because of a shortage of dollars, euros or pounds, either. But the institutions that yield to the siren lure of "shariah compliance" no longer have prime oversight over their disbursements or decisions. The new-formed shariah petrolati -– muscle made in Egypt in the last century by none other than the dubious Muslim Brotherhood –– become the arbiters of who and what gets development money.

A strong-arming tactic that forces itself in to unwitting financial organizations, funding sources and fiscal tools via backdoor agreements that seem kosher on the surface, shariah financing is little more than battle with the West under a mild-mannered mask of economics dealings. You include me in your financing deals, and I pay you back-end fees that have fiduciary faeries dancing their pneumatic dance in the eyes of the unwary.

Following so-called Koranic dictates, nothing that involves the un-halal –– non "kosher" in Muslem terms –– is fair game to be nixed for any funding or backing. Think a minute: Nothing involving pork, or the products associated with swine. Nothing involving alcohol, or liquor of any kind. Nothing involving unmarried gender relations, sex for pleasure or the products serving those ends (Hollywood, anyone?), and of course, nothing involving the addition or promotion of anything vaguely associated with any faith other than Islam. Israel, a country that has yet to be officially recognized in 60 years of gestation and development, contributions to mankind and the arts, will not be at the end of the receiving queue: it won't be on the line at all.

That's just the start of where the velvet-treaded Zamboni of "shariah finance" is aimed. Look for the unyielding kibosh on all sorts of projects that "don't quite suit" the dictates of an ungloved petrotocracy making no secret of their interest in our pockets, our streets, our children, and our hearths. This is not to say that any program involving Dubai or the UAE is a stealth takeover bid. Not so.

But financiers, sponsors, investment people and hedge-funders must be on guard for the no-way-out deliberate coinage of specific "shariah financing" that pays sole homage to compliance with a fictional set of dictates that do not, in the end, come from the Koran, but from the all-too-scrutable mindset of those who do not hold global betterment as their primary goal in awarding their science, medicine, educational, environmental, libraries (Clinton's new library is heavily funded, for instance, by such 'financier-auditors' who owe zero fealty to anyone save themselves, not the dictates of the Koran; and expect Jimmy-Carter-like servility and subservience to their 'wishes' if these schemes are successful at hoodwinking the unsuspecting) and all such sectors subject to periodic outside funding.

Point of order: What sector of our society, any society, does not need periodic heavy infusions of treasure to stay afloat, even in the richest of the rich culture? That will, if 'shariah compliance' becomes the norm, largely cease for those sectors of investigation that fail to comport with the goals of this ingenious template for control of our financial institutions.

How many more Israeli scientists –– or scientists who don't 'fit the mold' of 'shariah compliance' –– will be recipients of open support for their decades-long effort to produce tomorrow's medical marvels and reliefs?

 
Marion D.S. Dreyfus is a British-born journalist with particular interest in healthcare, pharmacology and medicine, the politics of the Middle East, and the stock market. She has traveled widely in Africa and lived in Central and South America, Europe, and the Far East. She can be contacted at dreyfusmarion@hotmail.com

This appeared January 18, 2008 in the SRDD Shariah Due Diligence Newsletter (part of Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy) Jan. 1-7, 2008.

_________________________End of Story___________________________