Two preposterous trials suggest something is seriously wrong at the Ontario Crown Attorney's Office

There are a lot of serious crimes that Toronto police, courts, and prosecutors have to deal with every day. Thousands of sexual offences were reported to police last year in Toronto, which also saw four murders just this past weekend, as gun violence has been mounting in the city since John Tory became its mayor in 2013.

Police investigations and prosecutions cost lots of taxpayer money and eat up resources. So when the Crown Attorney decides to pursue frivolous cases involving minor matters to make a social or political point, for a variety of reasons, the public has a right to demand an explanation.

Perhaps the most glaring of these recent abuses was the trial of Gregory Alan Elliott, in the notorious Twitter trial. Elliott faced a two year legal battle that cost taxpayers a mountain of cash for simply engaging in a twitter fight with a pair of radical feminists. Even the prosecution and police acknowledged that Elliott hadn't threatened or sexually harassed the two women who filed criminal charges against him. In fact, Elliott hadn't even violated twitter's terms of service. The exchanges between Elliott and his accusers show all the parties involved being obnoxious and insulting. But part of the grounds for the Crown's case against Elliott was, quite literally, that he had the temerity to use the same twitter hashtag as two strident feminists who had commenced an online campaign against him.  However the feminists in question have a very cozy relationship with some senior Toronto Police officials and with some leftist city councilors and left-wing media figures. 

You don't have to be Oliver Wendell Holmes to realize that such a prosecution not only didn't have a reasonable chance of conviction, but it was also idiotic and a political abuse of the justice system. Beyond that, Elliott's prosecution was a trial balloon for a state-sponsored attack on Canadians' free speech rights.  That abuse cost Ontario taxpayers figures that may reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more.

For different reasons, the trial of Jian Ghomeshi is equally troubling. Sexual assault is a deplorable crime and we have every reason as a society to punish it severely. Like many observers of the circumstances surrounding events leading to the Jian Ghomeshi trial, I find his behavior appalling.

Ghomeshi had been accused of hitting women with whom he was romantically linked and of harassing and abusing staff at the CBC.

He was an entitled prima donna, whose imperious arrogance was enabled by his superiors and the culture at the state broadcaster. In the wake of public revelations of his behavior,  Ghomeshi's former friends and colleagues, many of whom knew for years what he had been up to, scurried to denounce him faster than a Baath Party Official could implicate his own brother-in-law at one of Saddam Hussein's show trials.

One of the stranger aspects of the Ghomeshi controversy was how people immersed in sado-masochistic culture, including those in it who were the former CBC star's friends, became upset that he was casting their deranged sexual proclivities in a bad light.  How people who get pleasure from beating each other and who derive joy from having rods placed in their urethra could be made by Ghomeshi's case to look any more depraved than they already are escapes me. But that's another conversation. Because in the wake the of Ghomeshi's defense contention that the complainants consented to their abuse, sado-masochism as a lifestyle is also somewhat on trial.

When the story broke, Toronto's then-Police Chief, Bill Blair, cast a wide net to find more of Ghomeshi's victims. While there's no such thing as a "perfect victim," the Ghomeshi accusers turned out to be irredeemably flawed in that they kept vital information from police. Even if we give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they weren't deliberately lying in the witness box, Marie Henein, the defense counsel, proved that they weren't telling the truth about a great deal of their testimony.

Imagine if you went to police and told them someone hit and choked you. There's no documentation or medical evidence to support your allegation because you didn't think there was an injury significant enough that you needed to see a doctor about it. When they ask you when the attack happened, you tell them it took place 11 years ago, and it only just now occurred to you to press charges.

That's exactly the situation in the Ghomeshi case. The only reason the accusers in the Ghomeshi case weren't laughed out of the police station is because in the wake of so much bad publicity, the police and Crown attorney were actively seeking complaints against him. The reason these charges could go forward was that Ghomeshi was kissing the complainants prior to the alleged attacks, which elevated the charge from common assault, which has a statute of limitations, to sexual assault, which has none.

Sex crimes are horrible violations of the person, and often victims are frightened and intimidated by both their attacker and the legal process they have to endure to press charges. We have every reason to facilitate the laying of sexual assault charges involving rapes and sexual abuse. But am I the only one who thinks the charges in Ghomeshi's case are an abuse of the system?

In the months before the trial, twitter hashtags emerged, like #IbelieveLucy, in support of Ghomeshi accuser Lucy DeCoutere.

I believe Lucy too. I believe what she says about what Ghomeshi did, and I believe he's a violent, vile, manipulative creep. But I don't believe her beyond a reasonable doubt to the standard of a criminal conviction.  Hopefully, Ghomeshi will pay a penalty in that he will have lost the adulation and star status he so obviously craved. But that happened before the court case, and it's mystifying how the Crown could have decided to take such a weak case to trial.

So far, the only thing the Crown has proved beyond a reasonable doubt is that Ghomeshi is an asshole. But that's not an indictable offense.

In a criminal trial in which there is no physical evidence and the prosecution relies solely on the credibility of witness allegations, the defence has a right to challenge witness credibility and recollection. Indeed, in such a case, there can be very little other defense. Considering the glaring omissions including forgotten love letters and "romantic encounters" subsequent to the violence, the outlandish contradictions, and bizarre inconsistencies in the witnesses' testimonies, the Crown not only doesn't seem to have met the standard of proof necessary for conviction in a criminal case, but it's unlikely they would have won a civil case where just a preponderance of evidence is required. In the Ghomeshi trial, not only did all three complainants initiate contact with him after the alleged assaults, but they lied in court by first claiming under oath that they did not. It's also harder to be convincing that you aren't bringing charges against a famous person as an attention-seeking mechanism when you're actively courting publicists and the media in the wake of those charges. It's going to be next to impossible to convict someone on the basis of such witnesses who have annihilated their own credibility.

Much of the criticism of the trial proceedings come from people upset that the inconsistencies in the testimony, and in particular, the fact that the complainants continued to romantically engage with Ghomeshi after he abused them, is based on a misogynist belief that sexual assault victims "should behave a certain way."

But what's far more troubling than that is that those same critics seem to be advocating the total undermining of the foundation of our judicial system by creating a class of crime where a proper defense cannot be conducted and where a mere accusation can be grounds for criminal conviction. That the Crown would facilitate such a case at public expense is a disgrace.

There are some lessons to be learned from the Ghomeshi trial. Rather than spending time telling society that they need to accept any degree of incomprehensible behaviour from sexual assault victims, perhaps we need to tell sexual assault victims that they need to behave in some measure like rational people.

If a man beats you up, then you should not continue to date him. That doesn't excuse the violence in any way. But it also means that if you're an adult and aggressively pursue a romantic relationship with someone who abuses you, people might reasonably conclude you are an eager, voluntary participant in the abuse.

That may sound harsh. But to the accusers and taxpayers who funded the farce in court the last few days, not nearly so harsh as the Not Guilty verdict the judge is likely to render in the Ghomeshi trial.

Twitter fun with my pet troll Dennis

I have an online troll named Dennis.

My pet troll Dennis likes to spend time on twitter and do the online equivalent of YELLING AT ME if I tweet something that upsets him about Toronto politics.

I should probably ignore my troll, but I have to confess, it's fun taunting him to see what stupid thing he'll come up with next.

Here's a recent sample:

In the above screen shot, I responded to something from Sue-Ann Levy, whom I know in real (offline) life, and had provided her with some background for a recent item on Olivia Chow she wrote for the Toronto Sun.

Dennis, whom I have never met, but who has sent me some weird tweets in the past, was evidently trolling twitter, saw it, and sent me an affectionate message:

Now what my troll Dennis was referring to as a "Pure Smear,"  and as he so eloquently put it, "U Deliberately Mislead," is my publishing an excerpt from the official record of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario in which the province's Housing Minister confirmed that Toronto Mayoral candidate Olivia Chow and her husband Jack Layton were indeed living in taxpayer-subsidized housing while making a combined income of over $120,000 per year.

The SubsidyGate issue is an old one and really wouldn't be all that important, except for the fact that Chow and her supporters have dredged the subject up and are lying about it. In order to help set Dennis right, I gently pointed out, in my own idiosyncratic fashion, that he might be mistaken while reaffirming his right to free speech:

Rather than a catalyst to thoughtful re-examination of fact and self-reflection, I'm shocked, yes, shocked to report it only exacerbated Dennis' fury:

Now Dennis did have me confused.

Does "Clumsy OX Clown-Dresser" mean that he thinks I'm a clumsy ox who dresses like a clown? Or is it supposed to imply that I dress clumsy oxen (and perhaps by my poor choice of wardrobe for them make their clumsiness more pronounced)?  Or is the hyphenated "clown-dresser" supposed to suggest that I'm a clumsy ox who dresses clowns? Well, whatever the answer to that question may be, the one thing that seems pretty clear is that Dennis was having an online freakout. Being the sympathetic person I am, I thought I should draw that to his attention in the most sensitive,  compassionate way possible:

Did you think that pointing out to someone that he was having a public meltdown might lead him to calm himself down and stop?

Naw, me neither:

Meet Dennis downtown!? Gee, maybe he's seen the error of his ways,  become a fan and wants to buy me a beer! I love when my fans buy me beer.

...OK, I've never actually had a fan buy me a beer, but I can unequivocally say that were it to happen, I'd love it!

Hey, wait a second! 

What's that about "pathetic parasite"??? You know, I don't think Dennis wants to meet me to by me a beer at all! I think what he wrote to me sounds like some kind of threat!

I like to think of myself more of a lover than a fighter,  but I also like to think I can handle myself when need be. But this whole deal sounds entirely like a no-win situation for me. From his twitter photo, and even more on facebook, Dennis looks well into the geriatric period of his existence. And he also looks like he has a hefty weight advantage over me. Now if there's anything less dignified than fighting with an old coot and beating him up, it'd be fisticuffs with an old coot and having him beat me up!

All-in-all, it didn't seem like Dennis was offering me a very attractive invitation, and I thought it only reasonable to highlight that:

I have an admission to make.

I was being facetious and don't actually own a set of dueling pistols. And even if I did, am hardly going to use them on some fool in downtown Toronto.

Not that I don't find them to be interesting artifacts, but as far as firearms technology goes, we've come a long way since the 18th Century. But there are some really neat literary accounts of dueling pistols, like in Joseph Conrad's The Duel and Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon, so it seemed like a good evocation.

Obviously escaping Dennis was the irony of him calling me a "parasite" while he was bellowing his vicarious outrage for Olivia Chow, who is the preferred candidate of every special interest public-trough feeder in Toronto. It would have been remiss of me not to point that out:

Needless to say, Dennis didn't like any of that either:

Afraid of my own shadow!?  Ha! Just goes to show how stupid he is!

I'm not the least bit afraid of shadows! I'm just cautious around them because they're good places for spiders to hide!  So there, grampa!

Anyway, it's difficult to tell if the the syntax-challenged Dennis was trying to call me a vacuous miscreant who is a mouthpiece, or a mouthpiece for vacuous miscreants. Whatever the answer to that may be, my pet troll is always good for a laugh and let's hope Dennis eternally remains Dennis.

UPDATE: 20/3: Dennis was evidently up well before dawn this morning and decided to take another of his blind twitter swings at me. I have to say, this one stings a bit. He has insinuated an acute need for popularity on my part. Of course that's true. I so desperately want to be part of the mainstream media clique like the popular gang at the Toronto Star and CBC and in politics like with the NDP and the Ontario Liberal Party, and of course with the well-funded bureaucracy of the higher ups in the education establishment. For reasons I can't comprehend, my exposing their idiocy and wrongdoings, and publicly making fun of and insulting them has had the reverse effect.  Oh, well... I suppose I'll just have to reconcile myself to going on with the small circle of people I actually like and respect.

If only I could be more like Olivia....

Pam Anderson causes another Liberal social media implosion

It turns out Carolyn Bennett isn't the only Liberal MP in need of a remedial course on how to use twitter.

Angry, stupid tweets from Humber-St. Barbe-Baie Verte MP Gerry Byrne have the Newfoundland Liberal in hot water. I guess this is where I'd get in trouble if I told a Newfie joke...

My Liberal MP publicized a $500 pie-in-the-face bounty on Justin Trudeau

Social media can be like juggling chainsaws. If you do it well, you can make quite a name for yourself, but do it badly and you can end up with a nasty, self-inflicted gash, or worse.

I'm amazed that politicians would use something as potentially self-damaging as the "this is the sentence I'm now thinking" service twitter for anything but the most mundane messages.  For an elected official who hopes to stay such, there's absolutely no upside to any other use for it.

People like former Senator Fred Thopmson have used it to showcase their very clever wit, but the operative word there is former and the the number of people who are as pithy as Thompson are few.

Which brings me to my member of Parliament, Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett.

The other night, thanks to a re-tweet from Carolyn, I learned  of a dire threat to newly selected Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau.

Described, by another twitter user as "someone on twitter encouraging others to assault Justin Trudeau" and with an attached photo of the offending tweet, I immediately checked it out.

I am no fan of Mr. Trudeau the younger. It is with pride that I note that a Google search for the term "Justin Trudeau is an idiot" produces one of my blog postings as the top result. But even more strongly, I believe that political violence is a reprehensible form of expression in a democratic society.

This was retweeted  by my Liberal MP to her 12k followers

And it's completely unnecessary. We have so many other ways of expressing ourselves to tear them down, and as long as politicians follow the law and are subject to elections, political violence is completely unacceptable and should be condemned.

However it seems the "assault" being encouraged in this instance was not quite the savage menace implied by the message I saw.

It turned out that someone with the twitter handle Ottawa Angry Cat had posted a $500 bounty, insofar as a donation to the Humane Society in the name of a person counts as such,  to anyone who would shove a cream pie in the face of Liberal leader Justin Trudeau.

Don't get me wrong. Although I support the fine work the Humane Society does, shoving a pie in Le Dauphin's face is not OK, no more than it's OK for someone to throw a slushie at Toronto mayor Rob Ford.

But the thing is, that Ottawa Angry Cat's contract on Justin would probably not have been noticed had my MP not decided to disseminate it to her over 12,000 twitter followers.

Ottawa Angry Cat only had a few dozen followers, a number almost doubled following Carolyn's publicizing of his bounty. How anyone would actually ensure that someone only known as Ottawa Angry Cat made good on his promise is something that might be considered when assessing the seriousness of the threat, but that's not really the point, I suppose.

Now, thanks to the diligent efforts of a big, big fan of Justin Trudeau, it appears the RCMP have been notified and Ottawa Angry Cat has gone deep into hiding.

But the question remains, is it really such a smart thing for an MP to be advertising, in rather exaggerated terms, a bounty on her leader?

When I expressed my twitter surprise that my MP was doing so, Carolyn responded that "people needed to know what's out there." I was interested in learning about Ottawa Angry Cat's threat being there because I found it mildly amusing, but "need" would be something of an overstatement in this instance.

I like Carolyn Bennett. I think she's on the wrong side of some very serious issues, but she's a good person and she's not corrupt, and it's not every Liberal Party politician in Ontario at the federal or provincial level about whom you can say that.

However, social media isn't something she seems to get all that well. I've helped her with a twitter gaffe before, Still, Carolyn doesn't seem to have learned the crucial lesson that as a politician, social media is a tool that can do you as much harm as good.

Alec Baldwin's Real Twitter Problem - the peasants can talk back

...Baldwin sputters that the very tools he can use to bypass "the mainstream media and talk directly" to his audience also empowers all those dim people out there in the dark. What's more, his followers have minds of their own. They may enjoy his turns in Glenngarry Glenn Ross and 30 Rock and guest-hosting on Turner Classic Movies but not really find his views on fracking to be worth a damn. It's a real kick in the pants for a celebrity to be reduced to asking, "Do you think I'm really changing anybody's mind?"

Palestinians to Canada: We condemn you!.. Now give us more charity!

Checking in on my twitter feed this morning, I couldn't help get a chuckle out of back-to-back tweets from CBC Top Stories. The first had Derek Stoffel reporting that Canada had committed $25 million in new funds (on top of the $300 million already committed) to the Palestinian Authority.

The second had Sasa Petricic reporting that the Foreign Minister of that same Palestinian Authority was condemning Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird for siding with Israel by having a meeting in the Israeli capitol.

I'm still waiting for the CBC tweet that says the Palestinians are so offended that they are going to turn down the handout from Canada's taxpayers.

Fun with Internet trolls

Obviously, I should find better things to do, but I decided to waste time again on twitter today.  As some wit once said about the Internet - if you were talking about it in the past, you might say 'someday, we will have something that will let you communicate with anyone in the world instantly and access the sum total of human knowledge, and we'll use it to look at funny pictures of cats and pick fights with strangers.' Well, I was involved in some of that this afternoon.

I retweeted a comment by Ezra Levant about the apparent hypocrisy of the Toronto Star's outrage over the, ahem, ...alleged crack cocaine use by Toronto Mayor Rob Ford:

Then for reasons unknown, someone named Werner Patels decided to include me in his reply to Ezra.

The name sounded vaguely familiar. Werner, as a quick google search revealed, is a sometime contributor to The Huffington Post. In his self-written twitter profile, he describes himself in effusive terms as a "thinker" and "improver of all things"

Now if someone with such a pompous, self-inflated public opinion of themselves wants to play trash talk with me,  I'm usually game, so I played back with:

Implying Werner is pompous evidently really pissed him off:

Scumbag?!?  Scumbag!?! Them's fightin' words!  Well, take this, Werner!:

Werner was none too pleased with that and shot back:

Ah! It appeared that Werner hadn't clued in that he had replied to me when he replied to Ezra's tweet. So being the friendly, helpful fellow I am, I thought I'd politely let him know where he made his error:

That really set off poor Werner!

He either was too lazy to bother to check his own correspondence or simply doesn't understand how the medium he was using works. But in either case, I think I actually saw some of the forehead veins in his litter twitter image throbbing and him sucking even harder on his lips when he blasted out these two tweets:

Clearly, the obviously humorless Werner still hadn't figured out that he initiated contact with me. It was therefore incumbent on me to set him straight (because I was bored killing time before I needed to join a conference call  ...ok,  that doesn't really make it incumbent, but I was having fun):

And that was the last I have heard from Werner Patels.

Bottom line: I really need to find more productive things to do between calls!

GenuineWitty is rattling all the right (bad) people

Obviously, I'm not trying hard enough.

I've been writing and going on television talking about malfeasance in the education system, in politics, among radicals and more, but other than the occasional hostile comment, email or tweet from a seemingly unbalanced weirdo, I haven't inspired obsessive hatred towards me yet.

Not like Greg Renouf, who publishes a blog called GenuineWitty.

Greg was one of the original people in Vancouver and Toronto's Occupy protests. Seeing the would-be movement become hijacked by the old left, and various nutcase radical groups, he set about to expose them and their agenda.

Which really bothers them a lot.

He has been physically attacked by the radicals he's exposed and has inspired pathological anarchist clowns to write idiotic things about him like:

Blogger Greg Renouf has been a terrible annoyance and worse to revolutionaries and activists across Turtle Island since at least December 2011 when he was called out publicly for harassing an activist about Occupy Vancouver even though that particular activist was hardly ever at the encampment. He has since moved to Torontowhere he has engaged in a more long-term campaign of slander, harassment, and conspiracy theories about the “tides funded” “treason” of what he sees as the left.

This is a callout for awareness, in the hopes that someone can shut him down in whatever capacity possible on the internet or wherever. It should also not be taken lightly that he is fairly tech-savvy.

That however, is the tip of the iceberg. Usually it requires someone to be a major public figure, like Toronto Mayor Rob Ford or Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to inspire the type of vindictiveness to get someone to devote the time and energy to creating blogs and twitter accounts for the sole purpose of attacking one individual.

Apparently the damage Greg Renouf is causing to the radical left, at least in their tiny minds, puts him in the league of nationally-known leaders.

Renouf has inspired both a blog and twitter account maintained by some lunatic that is obsessed with him and his exposure of insane radical protests groups and the people involved with them in Canada.

To which all I can say is, keep up the good work, Greg.

Below is a link to Renouf's report last week about the fanatical anti-Capitalist group, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty's attempt to take over Metro Hall - it is worth a read and you can access it through this link

Classic bonehead fail: Papa John's restaurant calls customer "Lady Chinky Eyes" and prints that on receipt

I've always maintained that racists are stupid, but just how stupid is always a new surprise.

A woman named Minhee Cho received a receipt this week from a Papa John's restaurant in New York in which she was identified by the name a server described her: "Lady Chinky Eyes"

Minhee Cho tweeted a photo of the receipt and as one might guess, there's a new position that just opened up to replace a recently terminated Papa John's employee in New York.

Ms Cho is the Communications Manager for ProPublica, an independent journalism site. Ironically she has demonstrated something people who work in media know all too well. Celebrity gossip and odd human interest stories get far more attention than hard news. With her tweet, Ms Cho has now generated more interest in herself than ProPublica ever managed to accumulate.

Twitter “opens a window into journalists’ minds and, often times, the view ain’t pretty”

Fun piece from Scott Stinson in The National Post about twitter and how it exposes what journalists really think and the rivalry between them.

"Saying a keynote is equivalent to a hand job or that the speaker is ugly is not positive criticism.”

News flash: Journalism students lack sense of humor.

Or at least some. On the other hand...no, not that kind of other hand.. some seem to be having fun.

The University of Toronto student paper The Varsity reports:

Josée Boileau did not expect to receive abusive tweets during her keynote at the Canadian University Press’ January national conference. As the editor-in-chief of Le Devoir was presenting on the paper’s history and adjustment to new media, a Twitter account named @le_devoir appeared, which featured a background picture of Boileau.  

The account, which also referenced her long speech and deemed her remarks arrogant, sparked comments from other delegates. One attendee tweeted that Boileau was “not just tooting the Le Devoir horn [but] leaning on it with all her weight,” while another lamented “sitting through an hour-long Le Devoir hand job.”

CUP is a non-profit media co-operative, with membership from campus papers at most Canadian universities. CUP President Erin Cauchi said she heard of the tweets shortly after the speech.  

“They were in poor taste and they were rude and I was horrified. I saw some people laughing about it, but I thought it was horrible.”

Cauchi said the “totally inexcusable” remarks prompted a phone call from Boileau and a response from conference heads.

“We made it clear very quickly that we do not condone that behavior as an organization.” 

Cauchi admitted that Boileau spoke for twice her allocated time. “She went for a long time. […] Print journalists aren’t as used to performing.”

Amid responses that the comments were only said in jest, Mai Anh Tran-Ho, editor-in-chief of Le Délit, the francophone paper at McGill University, shot back that “saying a keynote is equivalent to a hand job or that the speaker is ugly is not positive criticism.”

With her talent for stating the obvious, Ms Tran-Ho will have a superb future as a journalist in Quebec.

Not to spoil things for you, but the Varsity report doesn't say whether the speech had a happy ending.


Full story at The Varsity.

An interesting addendum to Carolyn Bennett's policy clarification courtesy of Dr. Dawg and Antonia Zerbisias

Check out the updates at the end of this post to see strange interpretations placed on straightforward events by a pair of prominent members of The Looney Left.

UPDATE: The story also made Macleans online. The user comments overwhelmingly reflect the idea that people respect a politician who owns up to a mistake and corrects it. The public is behind you on this, with the exception of a couple of people (see above) who are still mired in an acid flashback of 1960's radicalism.

The Inside Scoop on Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett's hard lesson on tweeting

Due disclosure.

I like Carolyn Bennett and a friend of mine is one of her assistants.

I don't agree with her about everything. For example, we have different opinions on the Iraq war. Mine are more like Christopher Hitchens' and hers are like Michael Ignatieff's are now (as opposed to Michael Ignatieff's before he decided he wanted to be Prime Minister, when he too agreed with Hitchens).

But Carolyn is a good MP, a devoted public servant, is accessible and we share enough views that I am comfortable in supporting her.

Today, she tweeted an article from rabble.ca about Stephen Harper's appearance at the UN. Followers of this blog know my opinion about rabble.ca, which I usually refer to as being a Marxist mouthpiece and a collection of some of the least intelligent minds in this country who lend their support to a number of particularly odious causes.

Usually when a public figure tweets something with a description of it being "interesting," it can conceivably be taken as some sort of endorsement. The article by Derrick O'Keefe, contained rabble's typically simple-minded, extreme bias against Israel:

Canada under Stephen Harper has been called “Israel’s best friend,” even as that state has grown ever more aggressive in violating international law to maintain its occupation and collective punishment against the Palestinian people. Fittingly, Israeli PM Netanyahu was visiting Ottawa in May when Israeli forces massacred nine members of an international aid flotilla seeking to break the siege of Gaza. The Harper government took the lead in enforcing the siege, backed Israel’s brutal military assault on Gaza, and has taken steps towards criminalizing and suppressing criticism of the state of Israel. .. -War. But then Harper’s unstinting support for Israel is consistent with his sympathy for war and illegal occupation more generally -

Needless to say, I was very surprised. Carolyn has always been a strong supporter of Israel, but people have been known to change their positions (see Michael Ignatieff above).  I tweeted this back to Carolyn:

I hoped the answer would be "no" and was gratified to see I was correct in her subsequent tweet:

I thought this was an informative lesson on the dangers of politicians using social media without being fully aware of its implications and through my friend, contacted Carolyn to get her version of events.

Of course, Carolyn remains a strong supporter of Israel and her mistake was in not reading the article carefully and not being familiar enough with its dubious source or author. Another part, naturally is that partisanship tends to make politicians jump a little too easily at opportunities to attack the other side, and the people who hate Stephen Harper in this country have not done themselves any favours by acting rashly and aligning themselves with some nefarious characters.

Carolyn asked what I would suggest she do under the circumstances to clarify matters and make sure that no one misconstrues what happened. I suggested two things. The first is to get ahead of the game and make a statement herself telling the truth about what happened. Everyone makes mistakes. And she hadn't done anything wrong. It would only be a problem if it were misinterpreted.

But it's best to talk about it yourself than to wait for someone else to come across it and do just that.

The second piece of advice was to be very careful in the future about sources she use or allow herself to be associated with. rabble.ca is about to the left what the KKK is to the right, and neither is something a credible person would want to be associated with.

Carolyn took my advice and promptly posted this to her blog:

Hard lesson today on retweeting


Posted on 23. Sep, 2010 in Media


A friend sent me a link to a Rabble.ca article on Stephen Harper’s speech at the UN. I didn’t agree with the premise that Canada didn’t deserve a seat on the Security Council, but I thought the the record on indigenous people, global warming, Aid, Khadr was worth sharing .. I retweeted with the word ‘interesting’ … I was shocked to be tweeted back asking if I supported the anti-israel rhetoric in the article. I went back to the article and was upset to realize that the article I bhad read on my berry had truncated and that I hadn’t read the last paragraphs before I retweeted the article. This is a serious lesson for me. I am thankful how quickly the error was pointed out to me and that I was able to reply that in no way did I support the anti-Israel message. As I hadn’t really agreed with the premise of the article I had used the word ‘interesting’ on purpose. But I now realize that as an MP if I cite an article it can be interpreted as ‘promoting’ it or worse yet that I agree with every word. In the future I promise to be more careful and to make clearer my support or lack of support for the opinions being put forth in the ‘link’. Mea culpa. It has also been pointed out to me that I should be wary of certain publications, authors as an initial screen. I will do better in the future. I learn a great deal using social media tools… The information, the frank feedback are all part of a learning culture and a ‘democracy between elections’ in which citizens and their elected representatives can interact in real time. I take this responsibility seriously. I apologize for today’s error.

 
Her post has already been picked up on Canada.com
 
All's well that ends well.. just another day in the blogosphere...

UPDATE: Looney Tune al-Starzeera columnist Antonia Zerbisias, whose pathological hatred of Israel led her to write defenses of Hamas in The Toronto Star's Living section until she was canned from that gig, is shocked and saddened that Bennett would apologize for inadvertently tweeting the anti-Israel rabble.ca tripe (which the Zerb no doubt endorses in all regards).



You can't get much better confirmation than that. When the Zerb doesn't like something, it's almost certainly the right thing to do.

UPDATE 2: Less-than-brilliant blogger Dr. Dawg saw Carolyn's clarification and attributes it to the evil Israel lobby and a big conspiracy! Wow, I didn't know a tweet from me was so important. According to paranoid nitwit Dawg, I am "the spinning blades of the pro-Israel lobby."


Thanks Dawg, now I really feel powerful! I left him a comment in gratitude.

it may not have occurred to you, Dawg, but Carolyn has been a consistently strong supporter of Israel, and upon confirming the full text of the article, she wanted to make it clear that she didn't want to be associated with the idiotic views expressed about it.

Quite commendable, really, on her part.

Your position is clear, you want to label Israel as an "apartheid" country, although you really should invest in a dictionary before you continue with that. Apartheid doesn't usually allow for racial integration and full enfranchisement, but what's a few facts here or there?

You might want to look into the Palestinian law that proscribes the death penalty for anyone selling land to Jews and see where that fits into your apartheid concepts, or can we assume that's just fine with you?

Imagine.. a parliamentarian wants to make sure that her position on an issue isn't misconstrued, and since you don't like that position, it must be part of some conspiracy. Suffering from a little LDS yourself, it seems.

And by the way, I'm the one who alerted Carolyn to the full content of the article. We had a nice conversation in which I suggested to her that rabble is not the sort of publication that lends itself to credibility. I make the sacrifice of wading into that ideological cesspool from time to time to see what the other side is up to, but rabble.ca articles probably shouldn't be referred on other than for the purposes of being mocked.

Dawg provided a perfect example of the paranoid delusions and conspiracy-minded craziness of the extremists on the anti-Israel radical left. One tweet from me and  "the spinning blades of the pro-Israel lobby" are at work. And a clarification by Carolyn of her policy position to preclude misinterpretation becomes "self-abasing confessions offered by the victims at Stalin's show trials"   

Wow. And people like Dawg and Zerb wonder why the rest of us think they're nuts.

And by the way, Dawg demonstrated his commitment to free speech and liberalism by banning me from his site after that one and only comment I ever posted on it. Ha!