University of Toronto's March "Islam Awareness Week: Power of Diversity" featured talks highlighting nature, the trials of boxing great Muhammed Ali, and an festival of fine arts and food. The talk by two native Canadian converts was especially empowering. We first honoured the native peoples who once dwelt on the land where we were sitting, the Mississauga, Huron and Iroquois. Toronto (Tkaronto ) is an Iroquois word, meaning  'reflection of trees on water' or 'meeting place', and the Toronto Passage – the Humber and Rouge rivers – as a shortcut between Lake Ontario and Georgian Bay. It was a vital link in the trade route that ran from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Superior.

The first speaker was David Alexanderson, a Cree/ Lakota from Saskatchewan, who spoke about the nightmare of growing up native in Canada -- his parents alcoholics, his father violent, his childhood spent in 57 different foster homes, where he suffered frequent abuse by these constantly changing authority figures. Because his parents were drinking heavily during his mother's pregnancy, he was born with fetal alcohol syndrome, which creates severe behavioural problems.

http://noliesradio.org/archives/126016

We are told we live in a Judeo-Christian civilization, that the West has a Judeo-Christian heritage, a concept useful to a largely Christian empire where Jews play a powerful role, but one which is rejected by serious scholars, both Christian and Jewish. Talmudic scholar Jacob Neusner told Newsweek: "Theologically and historically, there is no such thing as the Judeo-Christian tradition. It's a secular myth favored by people who are not really believers themselves."

The concept was popularized in the 1940s as a reaction to Nazism and was used by the imperial elite in promoting anticommunism, and in Israel's conquest of Palestine, fashioned as a "clash of civilization" targeting Islam. Many of the founders of Israel (Ben Gurion and Begin) had been communists, and many American Jews in entertainment and intellectual life were communists and had to refashion themselves as anticommunists in the new age of US empire.

It became the foundation of the ideology of the “special relationship” between the US and the newly proclaimed Jewish state in 1948, and was integral to American politics by the 1960s. It was an inevitable result of Israel’s creation and its early need to make an unbreakable bond with the leading empire.

The coup d’état of the 28th of Mordad in Iran remained the centerpiece for the new imperialism. It was only natural that the US embassy in Tehran became a "nest of spies", as it has been dubbed since then, ‘mission control center’ for all US espionage activity in the Muslim world.

Interview with Iranian weekly Panjereh*

These days we hear a lot of "Pokemon Go". What do you think about the effect of reality games within US and around the globe? What will be the future of these games which attract ten of millions? Do they reinforce or neglect which aspects of human life?

Video games have become the staple of children with the advent of the computer age. The Japanese are the most innovative. Along with Nintendo, the most popular is Pokémon (Pocket Monsters), first issued in 1996, where humans, known as Pokémon Trainers, catch and train their 'pocket monsters' to battle each other for sport.

The latest games, called virtual reality games, allow the player to surrender his/ her mind to a computer world of sight and sound, a magic black box on the head, where the mind can feel all kinds of physical effects -- flying, teleporting at will to other planets in a heightened, superhuman reality, like an angel or a god.