Patient trapped in a 23-year 'coma' was conscious all along | Mail Online

Rom Houben was trapped in a coma for 23 years and had no way of letting anyone know he could hear what they were saying (pictured posed by model)

'I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,' said Mr Houben, now 46.

Doctors used a range of coma tests, recognised worldwide, before reluctantly concluding that his consciousness was 'extinct'.

But three years ago, new hi-tech scans showed his brain was still functioning almost completely normally.

via dailymail.co.uk

"Mr Houben describes the moment as 'my second birth'.
Therapy has since allowed him to tap out messages on a computer screen.
Mr Houben said: 'All that time I just literally dreamed of a better life. Frustration is too small a word to describe what I felt.'
His case has only just been revealed in a scientific paper released by the man who 'saved' him, top neurological expert Dr Steven Laureys.
'Medical advances caught up with him,' said Dr Laureys, who believes there may be many similar cases of false comas around the world.
The disclosure will also renew the right-to-die debate over whether people in comas are truly unconscious.
Mr Houben, a former martial arts enthusiast, was paralysed in 1983.
Doctors in Zolder, Belgium, used the internationally accepted Glasgow Coma Scale to assess his eye, verbal and motor responses.
But each time he was graded incorrectly.
Only a re-evaluation of his case at the University of Liege discovered that he had lost control of his body but was still fully aware of what was happening.
He is never likely to leave hospital, but as well as his computer he now has a special device above his bed which lets him read books while lying down.
Mr Houben said: 'I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me - it was my second birth.
'I want to read, talk with my friends via the computer and enjoy my life now that people know I am not dead.'
Dr Laureys's new study claims that patients classed as in a vegetative state are often misdiagnosed.
'Anyone who bears the stamp of "unconscious" just one time hardly ever gets rid of it again,' he said.
The doctor, who leads the Coma Science Group and Department of Neurology at Liege University Hospital, found Mr Houben's brain was still working by using state-of-the-art imaging.
He plans to use the case to highlight what he considers may be similar examples around the world.
Dr Laureys said: 'In Germany alone each year some 100,000 people suffer from severe traumatic brain injury.
'About 20,000 are followed by a coma of three weeks or longer. Some of them die, others regain health.
'But an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 people a year remain trapped in an intermediate stage - they go on living without ever coming back again.'
Supporters of euthanasia and assisted suicide argue that people who have lain in persistent vegetative states for years should be given the opportunity to have crucial medical support withdrawn because of the 'indignity' of their condition.
But there have been several cases in which people judged to be in vegetative states or deep comas have recovered.
Twenty years ago, Carrie Coons, an 86-year-old from New York, regained consciousness after a year, took small amounts of food by mouth and engaged in conversation.
Only days before her recovery, a judge had granted her family's request for the removal of the feeding tube which had been keeping her alive.
In the UK in 1993, doctors switched off the life support system keeping alive Tony Bland, a 22-year- old who had been in a coma for three years following the Hillsborough disaster.
Dr Laureys was not available for comment yesterday and it is not clear why he thought Mr Houben should have the hi-tech screening when so many years had passed."

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American universities for sale

The New York Post reports that American universities are for sale to Iranian money. Unsurprisingly, one of the universities that is for sale is my alma mater, Columbia Bir Zeit on the Hudson.

Anti-Israel, pro-Iran university professors are being funded by a shadowy multimillion-dollar Islamic charity based in Manhattan that the feds charge is an illegal front for the repressive Iranian regime.
The deep-pocketed Alavi Foundation has aggressively given away hundreds of thousands of dollars to Columbia University and Rutgers University for Middle Eastern and Persian studies programs that employ professors sympathetic to the Iranian dictatorship.
"We found evidence that the government of Iran really controlled everything about the foundation," said Adam Kaufmann, investigations chief at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.
Federal law-enforcement authorities are in the midst of seizing up to $650 million in assets from the Alavi Foundation, which they charge funnels money to Iran-supported Islamic schools in the United States and to a syndicate of Iranian spies based in Europe.
In one of the biggest handouts, the controversial charity donated $100,000 to Columbia University after the Ivy League school agreed to host Iranian leader and Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, according to the foundation's 2007 tax filings obtained by The Post.
Rutgers professor Hooshang Amirahmadi, former head of the school's Center for Middle Eastern Studies and president of the American-Iranian Council, a nonprofit advocacy group, unabashedly has touted Hezbollah and Hamas as legitimate organizations and not terrorists.
Between 2005 and 2007, the Alavi Foundation donated $351,600 to the Rutgers Persian language program, a spokesman for the school acknowledged. The university would not comment further.
Alavi's Web site says its mission is the "promotion of Islamic culture and Persian language."

The Obama administration will undoubtedly dismiss this as freedom of expression. Sorry, but foreigners have no right to freedom of expression in the United States, and they certainly don't have the right to act on behalf of terror organizations and governments.
Read the whole thing.
On December 19, 2008, the same day that the Alavi Foundation's President was indicted for obstruction of justice, the organization contributed between $25,000 and $50,000 to the William J. Clinton Foundation (yes, the foundation established by the Secretary of State's husband). And that wasn't the organization's first or only contribution to the former President.
There's much more about the Alavi Foundation here.
With the Alavi Foundation influencing the education of America's best and brightest through contributions to America's universities, what could go wrong?

via israelmatzav.blogspot.com

as a person who knows the Columbia University neighborhood well this doesn't surprise me.

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Death for being a Christian - Washington Times

A 15-year-old Egyptian girl, Dina el-Gohary, has written an emotional appeal to President Obama asking him to use his influence to save her father, Maher el-Gohary, who is being persecuted for his beliefs. "Mr. President Obama, we are a minority in Egypt," Dina writes, according to a report from the Assyrian International News Agency. "We are treated very badly. ... We are imprisoned in our own home because Muslim clerics called for the murder of my father, and now the Government has set for us a new prison, we are imprisoned in our own country."

Dina and her father are Christian converts in a part of the world where conversion can mean death.

The Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East are among the world's greatest offenders against freedom of conscience. Religious liberty does not exist or is severely curtailed based on Shariah supremacy. Egypt is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which commits signatories to respect a variety of liberties, including religious freedom, but a court considering whether Mr. el-Gohary could legally change his religious affiliation ruled that Egypt was only bound to honor those provisions that did not contradict Islamic law, and "in the event of a contradiction, Shariah takes precedence."

Egypt's Constitution guarantees freedom of belief but not freedom of religious practice. The same court stated that faith is "an internal, personal matter," but the right to actually practice a religion other than Islam "is subject to restrictions that may be imposed through regulations that emphasize certain higher interests, especially those related to safeguarding public order and moral values and to protecting the rights and freedoms of others." Because Muslims would take offense at Mr. el-Gohary becoming a Christian, their indignation outweighs his right to choose his faith. The state thinks that changing the religious affiliation on his identity card from Muslim to Christian is "a threat to societal order."

The court further insulted Mr. el-Gohary by claiming he could not even prove he was a Christian. Documentation supplied by the Coptic Christian Church was tossed because the court said the church had no legal authority to recognize conversions and that Mr. el-Gohary was "toying with religion."

Mr. el-Gohary has had several death-sentence fatwahs issued against him, has been forced to live in hiding and has been banned from leaving the country. His case actually is one of the more benign. Former Afghan citizen Abdul Rahman converted to Christianity and was arrested and threatened with death but managed to flee to asylum in Italy. In August, during an anti-Christian riot in Pakistan, eight people were burned to death and two others were fatally shot.

"You said that the Muslim minority in America are treated very well," Dina el-Gohary wrote to Mr. Obama, "so why are we not treated here likewise?"

The U.S. government is well aware of Mr. el-Gohary's plight. The State Department's 2009 International Religious Freedom Report covers his case in detail. We urge Mr. Obama to review this report. He has gone out of his way to curry favor with Muslims at home and abroad, but the president seems unwilling to address this difficult issue. We have heard him apologize extensively for American actions abroad, but when it comes to religious liberties, the United States is not the country with the problem.

For his part, Mr. el-Gohary is adamant that he will remain a Christian regardless of the oppression he faces. He said he and his daughter would not revert to being Muslims "even if we have to live on the streets. We love our Lord Jesus, and we have left Islam for good."

via washingtontimes.com

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Europe Dumps Democracy - Hudson New York

“I have always considered this treaty a step in the wrong direction,” Czech President Vaclav Klaus said last month. “It will deepen the problems the EU is facing today, it will increase its democratic deficit, worsen the standing of our country and expose it to new risks.” Klaus calls the EU doctrine “Europeism.” In a speech last August, he defined “Europeism” as “a neosocialist doctrine, which believes neither in freedom, nor in the spontaneous evolution of human society.” He said it has the following four characteristics: “(a) economic views based on the concept of the so-called social market economy, which is the opposite of the market economy; (b) views on freedom, democracy and society based on collectivism, social partnership and corporatism, not on classical parliamentary democracy; (c) views on European integration which favor unification and supranationalism; (d) views on foreign policy and international relations based on internationalism, cosmopolitism, abstract universalism, multiculturalism and on denationalization.”

“To my great regret,” he added, “Europe is more and more dominated by this way of thinking despite the fact that it is an extremely naïve, unpractical and romantic utopism, not shared by the European silent majority, but predominantly by the European elites.”

These European elites are currently deciding whom to appoint as the Union’s first President and first High Commissioner (the EU’s common Foreign Minister). The 27 EU governments have already agreed that the former should be a Christian-Democrat and the latter a Social-Democrat. Diplomatic sources say that Herman Van Rompuy has the best chances of becoming President, while the British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, is tipped as High Commissioner. Incidentally, Mr. Miliband, too, has a link to Belgium. His father, the Marxist ideologue Ralph Miliband, was born in Brussels and spent the first sixteen years of his life in the Belgian capital.

via hudsonny.org

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RubinReports: Obama's General Says: Syria Allied with Al-Qaida, Attacking U.S.; White House Says: Is that a Problem?

Syria is letting al-Qaida and Saddamist terrorists come in, get armed and trained, cross the border in Iraq, and run back for safe haven. Right, general?:

“The U.S. commander's comments reinforced accusations by the government of Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki that al Qaeda and former Baathists were working together to undermine improved security and elections expected to be held in January. Maliki's government has also accused neighboring Syria of giving a safe haven to Baathists plotting attacks in Iraq.”

Yes, that’s what I said, right? And do remember that the Obama Administration has refused to support Iraq’s complaints against Syria. Are the Syrians helping kill a lot of people?:

“Overall violence in Iraq has fallen sharply in the past 18 months and November so far has experienced one of the lowest civilian casualty levels since the 2003 U.S. invasion. But attacks by suspected Sunni Islamist insurgents like al Qaeda remain common. The twin suicide bombings in Baghdad on Oct. 25 devastated the Justice Ministry and the Baghdad governorate headquarters, while two similar suicide bombings on Aug. 19 killed almost 100 people at the foreign and finance ministries.”

So violence is continuing. As U.S. forces withdraw someone is trying to wreck the situation there so that the U.S. departure looks like defeat. Wonder who?

"`We believe that there will be attempts to conduct more attacks between now and the elections because they want to destabilize those,’ Odierno said.”

And who might be making those attacks, general?

"`My experience is there probably was some movement of fighters or explosives coming from Syria,’" he said when asked if the investigations had indicated any links to Syria.”

Thank you. So, the Obama Administration’s military commander says Syria is behind massive attacks and working closely with Usama bin Ladin’s guys.

Has the president of the United States said anything about this? Has he made any criticism of Syria? Is he ready to break off engagement efforts with the dictatorship? Has he backed up Iraqi government requests for backing in demanding Syria stop facilitating such attacks and turn over those Iraqis responsible?

No, no, no, and again no.

via rubinreports.blogspot.com

"Not to mention Syria trying to take over Lebanon, allying with Iran, sponsoring Hamas and Hizballah, being a major sponsor of international terrorism, and trying to build nuclear weapons’ facilities secretly?"

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