Shimon Peres is talking to Fabiola Gianotti, the ATLAS experiment's head, and is observed by CERN director general Rolf Heuer. Amusingly enough, the official caption by Haaretz (or CERN) says: "Shimon Peres talking with CERN Director general Rolf Heuer at the particle accelerator in Geneva Tuesday." Can you spot the difference? :-) Well, yes, I would agree that in this case, she was discriminated against (by the left-wing sexist pigs). By the way, I think that the reason why Gianotti was omitted is that she has no male suit. Despite their obsession with clothes, women haven't managed to invent a counterpart of the male suit that would make them look uniformly serious. Shouldn't Gianotti just borrow a suit from a man?
Now, of course, Israel is in the process of becoming a full-fledged CERN member. This process is totally natural. There are 50 Israeli scientists working at CERN, not to mention much higher numbers of physicists of Jewish descent.
However, there has been some hesitation on the Israeli side when it came to the country's contributions to the experiment. More importantly, there's some clear opposition from the side of the old members - and, I would say, many generic physicists from those nations.
"People here may be smiling," said one member of the Israeli delegation. "But not everybody here is enthralled with Israel."The French and the Britons have expressed reservations and the French are even worried that Israel's CERN membership would have a "detrimental effect on the French high-tech industry." Wow: I kid you not! The mysterious mechanism by which the membership of the Jewish state in a particle physics center could have a "detrimental effect on another nation's high-tech industry" hasn't been explained; they're probably afraid of the influence of the Internet Protocols of the Elders of Zion. :-)
The only explanations I can think of are related to this map of Europe in 2015:
This map has already become outdated a little bit: the Scandinavian country will no longer be called Sweden but the Polar Palestinian Authority (click). See also Goodbye Sweden. Thanks to Olda and Peter F. for the two videos.
Make no mistakes about it: there are lots of Israel haters among the particle physicists - and in many other "scholarly" groups in the West, too. The increasing influence of the Muslims in those countries is only making things worse. The differences in the opinions are significant: for example, I think that Israel should obviously become an EU member - and many key politicians in Europe agree - if the EU makes any broader sense. Some people don't like Israel even in a single scientific experiment.
