Apr
29
2007
Vancouver-Kingsway’s most infamous Islamic terrorist sympathizer and recently-punted Green party candidate, Kevin Potvin, evidently believes that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
After being raked in what he calls the “corporate” (read: neocon, Zionist-controlled, Satanic) media for an article written by him in his own publication, The Republic, stating directly that he cheered for Osama bin Ladin on 9/11, Potvin is striking back in a curious way: he now claims that journalists and society as a whole have been cowed by relentless, shadowy pressure from their corporate masters to show an appropriate level of sympathy for those slaughtered on that day and condemnation for their killers.
I didn’t cheer on 9/11. I certainly didn’t feel a lump of love in my heart for the people who did it. And as much as Potvin has attempted to tell himself otherwise, the vast majority of clear-thinking and moral citizens in our part of the world didn’t, either.
But Potvin seems to have found a home, quite literally on the political fringe. Work Less Party cofounder Condrad Schmidt says of Potvin: “He’s a smart man, and he’s intelligent. You couldn’t ask for a better candidate. And we’ll run him in Kingsway–where else?”
As a related aside, the video above shows leftist icon Noam Chomsky dismissing the possibility of a neocon conspiracy behind the 9/11 attacks.
Apr
29
2007
I attended a Thursday night debate in Vancouver’s Gastown over Canada’s role in Afghanistan. Author and panelist Terry Glavin has already summed up the event, and the larger debate, nicely on his own blog.
It is refreshing to see intelligent people able to really discuss the issues that need to be talked about (ie. what the role of Canada’s NATO allies ought to be, how we can conduct ourselves according to international law in a chaotic environment against a fanatical enemy, the opium trade, Pakistan, etc) rather than a watered-down sound-byte without any context (ie. should we stay or should we go). Most of the panel agreed that Canada and the world had to stay involved, since simply pulling out all foreign troops would result in a horrendous civil war.
But I couldn’t escape the feeling that the people who most needed to be there, the ones who believe that their own commitment to peace precludes the involvement of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, even if a pullout resulted in hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths in that country – did not attend.
It would be nice if we had reached a point in the national discussion where we could all at least agree with Terry Glavin and others on the following: The Taliban were and are as savage, cruel, misogynist, violent and cunning as any of the battalions the enemy has deployed, and the people of Afghanistan continue to suffer their depredations. Canada has been honoured with the privilege and the opportunity to be fighting this war on the side of the Afghan people, at the request of the Afghan people, shoulder to shoulder with the Afghan people.
But not everyone is quite there yet. That’s a shame.