Friday, December 31, 2010

How old Were They?

'Regardless of how old a person is when they die,
if they’re not ready to go, then it's always too young and too soon.'


Thursday, December 30, 2010

Death Has a Sound

Death is the deepest of silence.
It is a quiet unlike any other.
Do you hear that?
Be still and listen.
There it is.
A quiet unlike any other.

Monday, July 5, 2010

Sunday, July 4, 2010

Friday, May 7, 2010

Mount Sinai Hospital


CJN Article on Marla April 5th, 2012

The Canadian Jeiwsh News

Comedian talks about surviving breast cancer

Tags: Health


Marla Lukofsky
TORONTO — Marla Lukofsky, a standup comedian for 30 years, makes her audience laugh and cry.
Since 2008, she has turned her energy from standup to sharing her journey with breast cancer, which she was diagnosed with in 1998 at age 42.
She will be speaking at an event sponsored by Life2, a Richmond Hill educational group, April 18 at 8 p.m. at the Rouge Woods Community Centre, located at 119 Shirley Dr. in Richmond Hill.
Lukofsky talks about her experience with humour and pathos, she said, “taking the audience on a rollercoaster of emotions. Their brains start spinning. I give them a lot to think about.”
Single, with “no children that I know about,” she calls her humour self-mocking and witty. She has performed standup across Canada and the United States, and has represented Canada at international comedy festivals in Scotland and England.
She turned her current act into a one-woman show, she said, 10 years after surviving cancer, and after she had written a memoir. “My friend read it and said I should turn it into a speech, so I did.
“It’s funny, it’s sad, and it’s informative. I talk about early diagnosis and screening, and how to talk to someone who has cancer.”
She said that she receives letters from people commending her for her honesty. “One that stands out is from a 17-year-old boy whose aunt had been diagnosed with cancer. He hadn’t been able to talk to her, but after hearing me, he gave her a call.”
Lukofsky said a doctor in India read her story, which was published in a U.S. medical journal, and he asked for a videotape of her reading it.
“He is showing it at a conference. This is a very big deal. It will be broadcast across the world. They want to know my story. The doctors have said that the stories help doctors and patients.”
She said that she feels like she’s making a difference. “I help people feel less alone, and sometimes I even help save lives. My story transcends so many levels. It is really a story about facing a diversity.”
For information or tickets, e-mail Life2@hotmail.ca, or call 416-333-3257.
This article appears in the April 12 print issue of The CJN

The CJN by Carolyn Blackman 2012: Comedian Talks about Cancer

Friday, April 30, 2010

Dinner Date in TV Guide Starweek 1985: Brent Thrall dines with Marla Lukofsky


IS Gay Pride in Toronto of 2010 Really something to be Proud of???

GAY PRIDE 2010 IN TORONTO. IS IT REALLY SOMETHING TO BE PROUD OF????

You’ve all heard the news. The group named Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA), who was a part of last years Gay Pride Parade with permission and support from the Gay Pride Planning Committee shouted out words of hatred and carried signs showing the same messages. Some displayed swastikas. If this group is so harmless and just expressing free speech, what does it tell you when their actions incited bystanders to utter anti-Semitic verbiage?
Let me remind you that Section 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code of Canada makes it an offense to incite hatred against an identifiable group or to make public statements that promote hatred.
That describes this group perfectly.

Toronto politicians say they MAY not fund Gay Pride next year if this group remains in the parade. Why MAY, I ask? Why not NOW as in this year!
Hillel said: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”
Now is the time to do something to prevent this damaging group from participating in Gay Pride, period.

Protesters in the United States weren’t able to "Stop Dr. Laura, (Schlessinger)" but Canada did in 2009 by banning this American popular radio personality from Canadian stations for being critical of homosexuality. Her comments fell under the category of Canada’s hate crimes.
If Canada could do this to Dr. Laura, why can’t Toronto do this to QAIA?

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council agreed with a complaint that Dr. Laura was abusive towards gays and lesbians. 

QAIA is abusive towards Israel, and in turn, Jews, because let’s face it folks, it’s one and the same. Even if there are Jewish members in QAIA, they are obviously self-hating Jews.

Just to let you know, Dr. Laura Schlessinger calls herself a Doctor, but her biography says the Ph.D was earned in physiology, NOT medicine or psychology. She gives advice to millions of listeners across North America. Just think of the damage she may have caused to others with her words.
Schlessinger has repeatedly described gays and lesbians as "abnormal," "aberrant," "deviant," "disordered," "dysfunctional" and "an error." She's also linked homosexuality to pedophilia.

QAIA repeatedly describes Israel as unfair and cruel. They claim that Israel denies equal human rights and equates it to the former situation in South Africa. Why doesn’t QAIA acknowledge that Israel is the only democratic country in that area, that it is the only country that has gays in the military, in parliament, in universities, and protects its homosexual citizens under its laws, unlike so many other countries. Take Uganda for instance. Being gay or lesbian in Uganda is illegal and those who are, risk being locked away for up to 14 years. Now, a new parliamentary bill wants gay people to face even stiffer penalties and is proposing life imprisonment and even death sentences in some cases. Many Arab states and communities have similar punishments towards homosexuals. In Iran, those found having homosexual sex may face death by either hanging, stoning, cutting in half by a sword, or dropping from a tall building or cliff. Why doesn’t QAIA spend their energy exposing the real culprits who threaten gay people’s human rights since Gay Pride is a gay celebration after all, isn’t it???

Ernst Zundel, a leading Holocaust denier, neo-Nazi propagandist, white supremacist ideologue and one-time resident of Toronto, Canada, was also found guilty several times after making derogatory statements against Jewish people. He too proclaimed that he was simply exercising his right to freedom of speech. Interestingly, as long as he kept voicing his opinions, synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in Toronto were being desecrated. In May of 2005, a Federal Court judge declared Zundel a threat to national security and Ottawa deported him to Germany where he faced charges of inciting racial hatred and defaming the memory of the dead. In 2007, he was found guilty on fourteen counts and imprisoned. Finally! Well, that’s one way of fixing the problem.
So Dr. Laura is out. Ernst Zundel is out. But Toronto can’t seem to get rid of QAIA. I say put your money where your mouth is, Toronto.

Toronto threatens gay parade’s funding over anti-Israel group
April 22, 2010
(JTA) -- The city of Toronto has threatened to withdraw funding from a gay pride parade if an anti-Israel group is allowed to participate.
The city believes that its anti-discrimination policy was violated by the participation of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid in the 2009 Pride Toronto parade, to which the city gave $121,000, the Toronto Star reported Monday.
The city reportedly received complaints about the use of the phrase "Israeli apartheid."
Pride Toronto officials told the newspaper in an interview hours before the city's general manager of economic development and culture made the funding cut threat that it had not been decided whether the group would be allowed to march in the 2010 parade.
The threat follows the announcement and cancellation last month of a Pride policy that would have parade signs reviewed by an ethics committee.
Elle Flanders, a Jewish member of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, objected to the city comparing a political opinion on apartheid to hate speech.
"They're trying to compare it to hate speech, and I find it deeply offensive, as somebody who's been fighting human rights battles for a really long time, to hear that criticism of the State of Israel is somehow hate speech. No way," Flanders told the Star. “”

I say nope! The most offensive thing is that this group hides behind freedom of speech instead of admitting just what they are doing; inciting hatred.
Check out this link.
‘City may cut Pride funding over ‘Israeli apartheid’ marchers
'May' is the key word here. Why May???
M
Bureaucrat calls name of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid ‘very problematic’
Very  Problematic??? That's putting it mildly!


Check out this article by The Globe and Mail.

“Israel is the only country in the Middle East where gays and lesbians enjoy full legal protection against discrimination. Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are the only cities in the Middle East that have gay pride parades. So imagine the surprise of Jewish Torontonians when an anti-Zionist group called Queers Against Israeli Apartheid showed up at last year’s Toronto Pride parade to rant about the crimes of the Jewish state.
What business does such a group have in a parade celebrating the fight for homosexual rights? Kyle Rae, the gay city councillor who helped found the hugely successful annual event, says the group is piggybacking on the parade to spread a political message “that has nothing to do with celebration of pride.”
He has a point. By worming its way into Pride Week, which draws more than a million people, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid gets a broad platform for its fringe message.
That message is far from harmless. The group says it was formed “to work in solidarity with queers in Palestine and Palestinian resistance movements around the world.” If that were its real objective, you might expect it to protest the plight of homosexuals under the fundamentalist Hamas regime in Gaza.
In fact, the group has little to do with gay rights. Its real aim is to portray Israel as a racist state, undermining the country’s legitimacy by comparing it with South Africa’s apartheid regime before the end of white rule. On the issue of whether Israel even has a right to exist, it says on its website: “It’s hard to answer this question without making clear what exactly it means.” Last year the Ontario Legislature declared that calling Israel an apartheid state “incites hatred.”
Pride Week organizers have been slow to wake up to this threat. When Queers Against Israeli Apartheid first popped up, the organizers listened to voices within the gay community that said it would be a mistake for a movement with roots in protest and dissent to seem to be banning anyone from the march. They backed down again when critics in the community objected to a decision to create an “ethics” committee to vet placards carried in the parade. “Don’t Sanitize Pride,” the critics said. “Free expression must prevail.”
But the organizers can’t be hamstrung by fears of being labelled censors. That is just the quivering reaction that Queers Against Israeli Apartheid are counting on. In the same way that the far-left groups that once infiltrated the peace movement cried “red baiting” whenever someone tried to challenge them, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid cry “free speech” and expect everyone to run for the hills.
This is not a free-speech issue. The group is free to spout its malignant nonsense on any street corner day and night. It has a free run of many university campuses. No one is shutting down its website or blacking out its posters. The question is whether a parade dedicated to promoting gay rights is obligated to welcome a group that is pushing a completely different agenda – one that happens to deeply offend many people both in the parade and on the sidelines. If it is, then Pride could soon become a very different event, with contingents from every group with an axe to grind and a pink triangle to slap on its placards.
Fortunately, Pride now seems to recognize the danger. Organizers have revised their procedures to make sure that march applicants get a closer look and that marchers can be held legally accountable for any violence that might stem from their actions. After warning that city funding could be withdrawn from the event if it doesn’t meet Toronto’s anti-discrimination and human rights policies, city officials say that “there are now mechanisms in place that allow Pride Toronto to keep the focus of the parade on the celebration of the history, courage, diversity and future of the LGBT communities.”
That – not the supposed sins of Israel – should be the message of Pride Week.”

I THINK THIS GLOBE AND MAIL ARTICLE SAYS IT ALL!