True North Humanist Perspective

Lia Tarachansky

A Jew reports from Israel

Brilliant director, writer of critical analyses in prose and poetry

Lia Tarachansky's documentary on the heart of  the Israeli crisis

Lia Tarachansky will be in Toronto Canada with her documentary

On The Side of the Road
6:00pm | Nov 3
Bloor Cinema
506 Bloor Street West
Details: NarativProductions.Webs.Com or,

Email: jewishoffthegrid@gmail.com

In collaboration with Cinema Politica, Independent Jewish Voices, Doing Jewish Off the Grid, the United Jewish People's Order (Winchevsky Centre) and the Global Justice Working Group of First Unitarian Congregation, Ottawa.

Ex-Nobel committee leader regrets Obama Peace Prize

Prestigious award failed to encourage strength in Obama

17 September 2015

(RT) — Former Secretary of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, Geir Lundestad, says in his new book that the body “didn't achieve what it had hoped for” when it gave Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt and conferred the prestigious award on him in 2009.

While it is quite rare for Nobel officials to openly discuss the nuts and bolts of their secretive committee, the former director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute has apparently owned up in his memoir Secretary of Peace, released on Thursday 22 October that the panel had expected the award to somewhat challenge Obama, who received the Nobel Peace Prize during his first term.

The Norwegian historian told AP that the committee "thought it would strengthen Obama and it didn't have this effect." The five members of the Nobel Committee, often former politicians, are appointed by the Norwegian parliament. The coveted award was met with an avalanche of criticism instead. An army of opponents noted that Obama had made no foreign policy achievements worthy of the prize in less than nine months in office. On top of this, he received the award while the US was engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (More)

Second of a series:

In September 1939 Churchill tried to bridge the gap

between London and Moscow in his hatred of Hitler

How Churchill attempted to crack the 'riddle' of Russia

Gabriel Gorodetsky is Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and emeritus professor of history at Tel Aviv University. He has held visiting fellowships at St Antony’s College, Oxford, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington DC, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and the Rockefeller Bellagio Research Center. In 2010 he received an honorary doctorate from the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. Among his books are Stafford Cripps’ Mission to Moscow, 1940-1942 (1984), Russia between East and West: Russian Foreign Policy on the threshold of the 21st Century (2003), and Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (1999).

10 October 2015

By Gabriel Gorodetsky

After the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the Soviet ambassador to London Ivan Maisky had few friends who grasped Russia’s motives. Churchill, as Maisky revealed in his diaries, published by Oxford historian Prof. Gabriel Gorodetsky, knew better.

Shortly after the outbreak of the war, Churchill, who had been a vociferous opponent of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, was appointed as the First Lord of the Admiralty. On 1 October, 1939, in one of his early broadcasts, he made the now famous reference to Russia: “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

This sentence has since been often employed to describe Russia’s sinister and incomprehensible policies. But Churchill did not stop there (as most historians do). He in fact cracked the riddle: “but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest. It cannot be in accordance with the interest of the safety of Russia that Germany should plant itself upon the shores of the Black Sea or that it should overrun the Balkan States and subjugate the Slavonic peoples of south Eastern Europe. That would be contrary to the historic life-interests of Russia.”

Maisky, who since the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact had become a pariah in London, his survival hanging by a thread, did not fail to see the chance of amending relations with Britain. He was determined to help Churchill find the key. He therefore was quick off the mark seeking a meeting with Churchill. (More)

Son of Billy Graham says Russian Syria intervention

may save countless Christians from Islamist slaughter

'You understand that the Syrian government for their good and for their bad over the history of this country, they have protected Christians, they have protected minorities from the Islamists.'

30 September 2015

ISIS slave market: women, girls on same list as cattle

'Who will be the brave, furious, visionary authors of our manual of revolutionary love?'

Eve Ensler is the award-winning author of The Vagina Monologues, and the founder and artistic director of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls (http://www.vday.org).

This piece was originally commissioned for La Repubblica and appeared simultaneously in The Nation and French Elle.

I am thinking of religious fundamentalism and how many women have been raped in God's name and how many massacred and murdered.

I am thinking of the price list leaked out from the ISIS Sex Slave Market that included women and girls on the same list as cattle. ISIS needed to impose price controls as they were worried about a downturn in their market.

Forty- to 50-year-old women were priced at $41, 30- to 40-year-old women at $62, 20- to 30-year-old women, $82 and 1- to 9-year-old children, $165. Women over 50 weren’t even listed. They had no market value. They were discarded like milk cartons with past sale date markers. But they weren’t simply abandoned in some smelly dung heap of trash. First, they were probably tortured, beheaded, raped—then thrown into a pile of rotting corpses. I am thinking of a 1-year-old child’s body for sale and what it would be like for a hefty, sex-deprived, war-driven 30-year-old soldier to buy her, package her, take her home like a new television. What would he be feeling or thinking as he unwrapped her baby flesh and raped her with his penis the size of her tiny body? (More)

Russian university releases anti-extremist textbook

'ISIS is not Islam' wins support of Muslim scholars

'One of the university’s students, 19-year old Varvara Karaulova left Russia for Turkey this summer in the hope of marrying an ISIS fighter she had met online. The girl was detained by Turkish law enforcement officers and returned to Russia, but the case gained a lot of attention in the media.'

06 October 2015

A university in Russia’s Urals region has published 3,000 copies of a book detailing with the deceits used by Islamic State and describing the dangers that await the possible recruits to the terrorist group. The work targets young people, Muslim clerics and civil servants in Russia.

“Without any exaggeration, the whole world is now fighting with the Islamic State. Their principles are inhumane and destructive for the very foundations of humanity. As we study Islam and Orthodox Chistianity in the Theology Department of our university we can expertly explain the processes that are now taking place in the world,” the chancellor of the Urals State Mining University said in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda daily. (More)

'Blair’s role in destroying Iraq

will follow him to his grave'

20 October 2015

John Wight has written for newspapers and websites across the world, including the Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and Foreign Policy Journal. He is also a regular commentator on RT and BBC Radio. He wrote a memoir of the five years he spent in Hollywood, where he worked in the movie industry prior to becoming a full time and activist and organizer with the US antiwar movement post-9/11. The book is titled Dreams That Die and is published by Zero Books. John is currently working on a book exploring the role of the West in the Arab Spring. You can follow him on Twitter @JohnWight1
By John Wight

Many around the world believe that Tony Blair did not only support the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, but did so in contravention of international law. New damning evidence in this regard suggests the net is finally closing in on him.
The unearthing of two classified US government memos, published in the UK tabloid, the Mail on Sunday, leaves no doubt that the former British prime minister committed Britain to following the US into Iraq a full year before the bombs started dropping on Baghdad in March 2003.

The first of the memos concerned was sent to US president George W Bush by his secretary of state, Colin Powell, in early April of 2002. In it Powell writes: “On Iraq, Blair will be with us should military operations be necessary. He is convinced on two points: the threat is real; and success against Saddam will yield more regional success.” (More)

Is it the end of the world again?

1 November 2015

By Sam Gerrans

Sam Gerrans is an English writer, translator, support counselor and activist. He also has professional backgrounds in media, strategic communications and technology. He is driven by commitment to ultimate meaning, and focused on authentic approaches to revelation and realpolitik. He is the founder of Quranite.com – where the Qur’an is explored on the basis of reason rather than tradition – and offers both individual language training and personal support and counseling online at SkypeTalking.com.

My last two pieces argue that the U.S. is fragile and could go into meltdown at any time given over-extended supply lines, a morally weak population, and fiat currency. I wanted to see if the apocalyptic vision of the Christian End Time prophecy is on the money.

It’s hard not to get apocalyptic when the world is falling apart.

The Christian right takes doom in its stride, however. In the U.S. and across the world, believers in End Times prophecy are dug-in to the idea that the end of all things really is upon us – and they can point to verses in the Jewish and Christian Bibles in support of this view.

So are they right? (More)

'A Russian attack on NATO is an insane dream': Putin

'Russia’s military is not global, offensive, or aggressive'

7 June 2015

RT — Russia is not building up its offensive military capabilities overseas and is only responding to security threats caused by U.S. and NATO military expansion on its borders, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera.

Speaking to the paper on the eve of his visit to Italy, Putin stressed that one should not take the ongoing “Russian aggression” scaremongering in the West seriously, as a global military conflict is unimaginable in the modern world.

“I think that only an insane person and only in a dream can imagine that Russia would suddenly attack NATO. I think some countries are simply taking advantage of people’s fears with regard to Russia. They just want to play the role of front-line countries that should receive some supplementary military, economic, financial or some other aid,” Putin said.

Certain countries could be deliberately nurturing such fears, he added, saying that hypothetically the U.S. could need an external threat to maintain its leadership in the Atlantic community. “Iran is clearly not very scary or big enough” for this, Putin noted with irony.

Russia’s President invited the journalists to compare the global military presence of Russia and the U.S./NATO, as well as their military spending levels. He also urged them to look at the steps each side has taken in connection with the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Russia’s military policy is “not global, offensive, or aggressive,” Putin stressed, adding that Russia has “virtually no bases abroad,” and the few that do exist are remnants of its Soviet past. (More)

Click here to return to