The Jeff Farias Show

Monday, March 16 2009

At 3:30 we welcome back artist, activist, author Tom Loret http://www.tomloret.com As an artist I seek to create a plateau of mind that depicts and confirms the principles of unabridged creation. To do this I paint out all the baggage of mind that develops in the painting process. When a passage of paint evokes a familiar, sentimental, or twice-seen reference I get rid of it with a loaded brush or with a sweep of the palette knife. The final canvas is the result of these encounters. I find this approach more alive than all the unending repetitions of commonplace designs, symbols, personal reflections, and insane compulsions that would otherwise keep me locked in a scrapbook of my own biography. We will discuss Tom’s essay on the US and torture.

We also spoke with “Combatants for Peace” Bassam Aramin and Yaniv Reshef. Mr. Aramin is a former Fatah fighter, who at age 17 served seven years in an Israeli jail for planning an attack against Israeli soldiers – and has renounced violence. In 2007, in the days after his his ten-year old daughter, Abir, was hit by the rubber-coated bullet of an Israeli occupying soldier, the Israeli members of Combatants for Peace stayed round the clock with his family at the hospital. Mr. Aramin was a co-founder of Combatants for Peace in 2005 and chose to continue with his commitment to nonviolence even after the death of his daughter. Mr. Reshef was an infantry soldier in a sabotage unit of the Israeli Army – and is no longer taking part in the occupation His home in Israel is just19 km from Gaza in an agricultural community that suffers frequent missile attacks. Mr. Reshef recently organized Combatants for Peace meetings in the Israeli city of Sderot so that townspeople could hear from his Palestinian and Israeli partners first hand. Their movement, Combatants for Peace, numbers over 600 former Israeli soldiers and former Palestinian fighters, who have pledged to abandon violence and work together using creative nonviolent tools to build justice and peace – and playgrounds in memory of Abir Aramin.

At 5 PM Derek Finkle - about his upcoming article ‘The Untouchables’ chronicling widespread police corruption. After graduating from Princeton University, Derek Finkle became Toronto Life magazine’s first editorial intern in 1993. He went on to be a regular contributor to ‘Saturday Night’ magazine and ‘The Globe & Mail’, among other publications, before publishing his first book, ‘No Claim to Mercy’, in 1998. An examination of the controversial Robert Baltovich murder case, ‘No Claim to Mercy’ won the Crime Writers’ Arthur Ellis Award for best non-fiction & was named a ‘Notable Book of the Year’ by ‘The Globe & Mail’. Joyce Carol Oates, writing in ‘The New York Review of Books’, hailed Finkle’s book as “a model of investigative journalism, ambitiously & carefully researched, & in its conclusions, original & provocative.” Baltovich was finally acquitted of killing his girlfriend, Elizabeth Bain, on April 22, 2008. In 2000, Finkle was hired as a contributing features editor at the weekly ‘Saturday Night’. From 2002 to 2007, he was the editor of ‘Toro’ magazine, which garnered more than sixty National Magazine Award nominations, including Finkle’s gold for investigative reporting in 2005. Derek is also a founder of “Canadian Writers Group”. http://www.cjfe.org/releases/2007/28052007finkle.html http://www.torontolife.com/covers/2009/4/ http://www.penguin.ca/nf/Book/BookDispl … 85,00.html http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/baltovich_robert/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ … books/home

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