New Media

“To be honest, it makes me a little ashamed to be Korean. The whole nation feels terrible for what happened.”

My South Korean international students didn’t hold back as they gave their opinion of the news from Virginia of a Korean student who shot at least thirty people on an American campus.

Meanwhile, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun expressed his condolences to the families of the victims, describing it as an unbelievable incident.

Undoubtedly, their sorrow is sincere. Of course, Koreans or Asians in general need not fear any sort of ill will or reprisals against their citizens traveling in North America or immigrants who have already settled here. No sane person would ever condemn an entire nation for the acts of a madman.

And of course, no one will assume that just because Cho Seung-Hui compared himself to Jesus and called his acts a martyrdom that this shows that Christians are fanatical killers.

But for those who believe that much of American society is fundamentally and unredeemably intolerant and institutionally racist, one has only to compare the actual reaction in the USA to this massacre, and the predicted reaction if the roles were reversed, in South Korea or virtually any country in the world.

The Green Party of Canada has finally gotten around to dumping Vancouver-Kingsway candidate Kevin Potvin after it was discovered that the magazine store owner cheered the 9/11 attacks and had a soft spot in his heart for Osama bin Ladin.

It took nearly a week for the Green party to send this guy packing, during which party leader Elizabeth May asked for an apology and explanation and was rewarded by Potvin with more ideological posturing and useless, rambling rationalizations.

At least they did get around to giving Potvin a well-deserved boot, but the delay should certainly prompt people to wonder why the Green party caters to such people in the first place.

Standing up for planet Earth and cheering the mass-murder of human beings aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive positions, but it’s a tricky balancing act for a Canadian federal political candidate.

Federal Green candidate for Vancouver-Kingsway Kevin Potvin has been outed as a stooge for Al Queda by Public Eye Online. The founder of the local socialist rag, the Republic of East Vancouver, wrote in an editorial in 2002 that he felt pretty darn good as hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Centre on 9/11.

Potvin wrote: “When I saw the first tower cascade down into that enormous plume of dust and paper, there was a little voice inside me that said, “Yeah!” When the second tower came down the same way, that little voice said, “Beautiful!” When the visage of the Pentagon appeared on the TV with a gaping and smoking hole in its side, that little voice had nearly taken me over, and I felt an urge to pump my fist in the air.”

The editorial goes on in this vein. “Nor was I alone, I know for a fact, whenever I passed a TV or newspaper with a report on the ensuing US war to capture Osama bin Laden, and I secretly said to myself, “Go, Osama, Go!” I am happy he has eluded capture by the Americans.”

Asked to explain his comments this week, Potvin at least has the decency to remain consistent in his slimy views: “I guess I could do the slippery thing and say I’ll go home and read it. Or I could also give you a wishy-washy answer. But, listen man, I’ve got to be honest with you. I totally endorse that.”

Nobody screens Canadian political candidates to ensure that they don’t hold views sympathizing with the enemies of civilization. Who knew one would ever need to?

Vancouver is one of the best cities in the world.

Citizens of our green Pacific Rim urban paradise already knew that. But a recent survey from Mercer Human Resource Consulting put us at number three in the world, just ahead of Auckland and Dusseldorf.

Discreet Swiss bankers surreptitiously maintained their nation’s lock on the two top spots, with Zurich and Geneva taking their respective (and traditional) places at number one and two.

While it’s nice to see yet another survey place us where we think we should be, you have to question the methodology that ranks the New World’s famous coastal metropolis of New York below what amounts to a large-ish town nestled in the Alps.

In full disclosure, I’ve never actually visited either place, but unless my perspective is completely off, some of the cities listed in the survey just aren’t comparable. Counting up scores on pre-determined variables like climate, crime and infrastructure seems like a fair way to do it, but it leaves out the possibility that a city can be far more than the sum of its parts.

In the old story of Samson and Delilah, the Hebrew version of the incredible Hulk quite literally brings down the house upon himself and his people’s oppressors, the Philistines.

In the Victoria Philharmonic Choir’s theatrical version of this story, Sampson is turned into a Zionist suicide bomber.

As Tyee columnist Terry Glavin rightly points out, until director Simon Capet came along, “nobody had figured out a way to use the Samson story to so completely turn things upside down as to reconstruct an important work of art to portray a Jew as a suicide bomber”.

Suicide bombings and terrorist attacks on civilians by Islamic extremists are a daily occurrence both in Muslim countries and and elsewhere, while Jewish suicide bombers are an as yet unprecedented phenomenon. This drama appears to be another well-meaning and catastrophically lunk-headed attempt to equate all terror with resistance and all terrorists with freedom fighters.

Judging by the letters defining Israeli efforts to combat terror as “state terror” that Glavin received in response to his column, it seems clear that a good number of people are taking exactly the wrong message out of this drama.

As the video above shows, there are certainly people out there who are deluded enough to claim that Samson and Osama bin Ladin are essentially flip sides of the same coin. The pillars of wisdom and logic come tumbling down…