My latest crowd-funded documentary project "Israel for Canadians" is now live on Kickstarter.

Too many Canadians have somehow acquired a mistaken impression of Israel as a regional bully, a fortress under siege, an intolerant, chauvinistic or even theocratic culture, or a colourful museum. I want to dispel all such illusions, showcasing its technological achievements, its contemporary culture, its environmental movement, its vigorous debates on everything from religion to security, its very real security challenges and its inhabitants' abiding desire for peace.

If you value the only democracy in the Middle East, a dynamic, open society, an ally of the West, the home of one great world religion and the birthplace of another, please visit Kickstarter and make a pledge.

Because as the late George Jonas once put it, "Truth unasserted is a lie unopposed."

"Pain is not suffering"

Slogan on a Nike ad featuring Olympian triathlete Simon Whitfield in Globe and Mail August 27, 2008

"‘The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms.'"

G.K. Chesterton, quoted in "Serenity in Storms” in George William Rutler He Spoke to Us

"it is only by eternal institutions like hair that we can test passing institutions like empires. If a house is so built as to knock a man's head off when he enters it, it is built wrong.:

G.K. Chesterton What’s Wrong with the World p. 193.

"Chesterton begins his essay ["The Philosophy of Gratitude"] by recounting a passage from a letter he received in response to one of his essays. The writer wanted to know the meaning of the following sentence that he had read in Chesterton: 'No one can be miserable who has noticed anything worth being miserable about.' Chesterton tells us that he wrote this sentence in 'a wild moment.' But it was still true, whatever its wildness. If I notice that I am miserable, then I must have some sense of what it means to be not miserable. My condition, in other words, is not exclusively locked into misery."

James V. Schall SJ in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 13 # 8 (July-August 2010)

"For when once people have begun to believe that prosperity is the reward of virtue their next calamity is obvious. If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtues, it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue. Men will leave off the heavy task of making good men successful. They will adopt the easier task of making our successful men good."

G.K. Chesterton, “The Book of Job,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton

"You say you want man to be to himself what God has been to man. But what God has been to man is man’s absolute superior, and man cannot be his own superior…. So when you say you want man to be to himself what God has been to man hitherto, you mean you want some men to be to other men what God has been to man. You want some men to be the absolute superiors of others. I assume that you want to be in the former group and not in the latter."

J. Budziszewski in What We Can’t Not Know [part of his Platonic dialogue with a skeptic].

In some sense the French Revolution was “the black desperate battle of Men against their whole Condition and Environment, - a battle, alas, withal, against the Sin and Darkness that was in themselves as in others: this is the Reign of Terror."

Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution