WHY REGISTER?
- to ease the pain
- to get pleasure
- to learn

WHY CREATE
THE SERIES?
I'm a
truth sleuth

FINDING
HIDDEN KNOWLEDGE

And the truth shall set you free ... Those words have kept echoing in my head.

Of course it's not as easy as all that. Nelson Mandela, so goes the story, spent 27 years in prison for agitating for a very simple truth - racial equality. In the South Africa of apartheid, his message that did not go down well. And currently, the fact that many white farmers are being massacred in South Africa is a truth that is not being widely heard.

Many have died for very simple truths.

So it sounds good - the truth shall set you free - but there are twists and turns. In the words of Aldous Huxley: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

It does make many people angry. Also, knowing the truth, and not being able to reach others, makes some people mad, insane.

A quest of mine, starting in early childhood - making sense of the world - which meant figuring out, what is the truth here?

This past ... almost 7 years now ... I have been trying to figure out the truth about Islam, slowly acknowledging the unbelievable-to-me truth about the Qu'ran, and the even more unbelievable-to-me truth about Western responses to Islam.

For me, it all started when I heard of massive Muslim protests against some cartoons - that was in February 2006. What was all that about?

The questioning started. What utterly horrific cartoons were these, that the Islamic world would explode - when it stayed quiet about Muslim murder of Muslims, when it stayed quiet about the genital mutilation of millions of women? It's been an interesting exploration, to say the least.

I started knowing only that Islam was the third of the big world monotheistic religions. That was it.

I've learned a lot - mainly about the roadblocks against easily looking at the truth - roadblocks put up by Muslims, and at least equally big roadblocks erected in the West by the politically correct, by good liberals - anti-racist, feminist, and so one and so forth.

Bullying, name-calling, intimidation ... What was going on here?

This is my journey. It's also a journey taken by quite a number of others. Parts of our journey are often shared - the name-calling and attempted (or actual) intimidation. Parts are different, individual. A shared part is the roadblocks we have faced.

What's this series about?

The first series. I want to introduce you to a number of amazing individuals who have seen truths - meaning facts, information, data - that most people around them, especially powerful people, denied.

I want you to hear their journeys.

And as happens in many children's cartoons these days - where, for example, all the ants stand together against the evil grasshoppers - I want us to get the truth out more and more, until the world shifts, and easy and obvious truths come to be widely accepted.

There are, someone has said, 3 stages of truth. Ridicule, opposition, acceptance.

It's not that simple, of course. At different times, there are different forces against us.

Here an untruth came in quietly, I would almost say slyly - catching many of us unaware.

A new "truth" that was gaining ground in the West - a new opinion, actually - that one must not turn to the truth, that instead all opinions were equal, that one must not judge, that to be judgmental was wrong. (So anyone judging was judged wrong, though judging was supposed to be wrong. In other words, the only opinion one could judge, was the opinion that it was fine to look at facts and evaluate. That opinion, and only that opinion, was judged wrong.)

I write love poetry, kids stories. I appreciate good thinking. I had no desire to be drawn into any of this. But I was pulled in, as a couple of decades earlier I was pulled into movements that upheld truths that were boringly self-evident to me - about the equality of women, races and sexual orientations.

Sometimes we can't just stay on the sidelines.

The same, in different ways, happened to the people I've interviewed.


The second series of interviews has a different focus. From ethics - the sense of right and wrong, good and bad - to activism, to doing something to work against bad, make the world a better place.

A special focus: what have the most effective strategies been? And the least effective?


A question you may have: how did I get these amazing people to agree to an interview. I asked. I wrote the best possible email I could, found contact information (on the web - such an amazing resource), and asked. That's part of how I have gotten ever further out of the sidelines.

To listen ...

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WORLD TRUTH SUMMIT



From Ethics and Caring,
to Activism for Human Rights
including Freedom of Speech,
and to Truth Telling instead of
Political Correctness.






MORE PEOPLE
OF INTEREST

Bat Ye'or


Bruce Bawer


Jamie Glazov


Phyllis Chesler


Hege Storhaug