Trapped in Suburbia…

UPDATE: I’ve made edits based on new information.

It seems the political left in Canada is infected with some beliefs that hardly play to their claims of being friends of the various ethnic communities that make up Canada’s cultural mosiac.

First there was Liberal Candidate Lesley Hughes, now there is the Daryl Vernon.

Matt, over on A Step to the Right posted an email exchange between Daryl Vernon, a blogger on the GPC website, and Rosemary Frei, the Green Party candidate for York-Center, which took place before a debate at the Beth Emeth synagogue.

In the email exchange Daryl Vernon writes:

I would not expand except with great care before a one-sided jewish audience, but the most publicized item from ahmedinejad was imporoperly translater as ‘wipe isr off the emap’, but the quote was not so directly aggressive, was played up by that onesided & partly deluded jewish community;

(The emphasis on the above quote is mine, you can read the full email over at A Step to the Right)

It certainly seems that Daryl’s private email to Rosemary Frei suggests that he not only thinks that the Jewish community is ‘deluded’ but that they are playing up Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad‘s statement that Israel should be ‘wiped off the map’. In his email Daryl goes on to suggest that Iran’s position has been misinterpreted by the West and that it is outrageous that one UN member is rhetorically targeting another, as Israel is of Iran.

Unfortunately, while Ms. Frei left the copy of Daryl’s email at the synagogue she didn’t leave a copy of her reply, so we’ll never know if she agreed with or condemned Daryl’s position.

UPDATE: I received the following email from Camille Labchuk, the Press Secretary for the GPC.

Rafael,

below you will find an email sent to blogger Splatto which explains our issue on this position.

Matt McGuire:

Your recent blog post (http://splatto.net/blog/?p=921) contains a serious factual error. Daryl Vernon is not a paid employee of the Green Party and does not serve in any capacity in our “war room” (we use the non-military term “nerve centre”). The memo was not issued by the Green Party. We do not know Mr. Vernon but it is our understanding that he is member of the Toronto Jewish community.

Mr. Vernon’s comments do not reflect the views of the Green Party of Canada or York Centre candidate Rosemary Frei. If you care about accuracy, I suggest visiting our website to learn the truth about the Green Party’s position on the Israel / Palestine conflict: 

http://www.greenparty.ca/en/policy/visiongreen/partfive#IsraelPalestineConflict

Perhaps in the future you will check your posts for factual accuracy before publishing untruths.

Camille Labchuk

So it looks like, while Mr. Vernon may blog on the Green Party Website he’s not an employee of the Green Party of Canada.

I decided to do a quick scan of the Green Party website looking for more posts from Daryl Vernon and I came across the following blog comment Daryl posted in response to an article:

Brian, you’re not letting go of this, we see. When hopefully persuasive language is pretty much all one has, what one’s words conjure are an essential matter. I have spoken against GPC rhetoric invoking moon launch, Americana, Churchill & Chamberlain, WW-whatever, &c. There is no place any longer for this stuff in real green minds. Some ideals, methods & institutions, with important reformation, from the grossly destructive modern age should be used, lest we face, I agree, ruin
(an example at http://www.greenparty.ca/en/node/4574#comment-4800). But one has to just drop most of the mainstream historical Anglo world heroes & heroic activities as models. Greens cannot come to prescribe centralized command & control, as your rhetoric suggests. Central power should back up & be educative for local adaptations. Canada is a true world leader in cross-jurisdictional administrativia, although the EU seems to be catching up. Our success in large part is a result of isolation from armed conflict. Our green failures have been for going along with so much Anglo warlike leadership. “Thinkers” behind the Cons. like to proudly point to things like Vimy Ridge being utterly formative or our country. It is a travesty that it was so (see http://www.greenparty.ca/en/node/2581#comment-1795, esp. end). It would be a further travesty if we were to be so taken by the manipulative political hogwash south of our border that is driving to put Obama & his “color revolution” subverter associates in just such a place of command & control, and above all positioning for more & even increased, believe it, belligerence abroad. If you & others persist in making appeal to “war efforts”, you are playing further into the century-long continuum of violent depredation that manipulators will likely easily slide an acquiescent public into after their assimilation to more grandiloquent hogwash.

Stop the war-talk. I repeat what I said at http://www.greenparty.ca/en/node/3265, “If English-speaking people can still only be largely motivated to great causes by warlike rhetoric, I truly think there is no hope for them in the end.”

The emphasis in the above quote is mine, I’ll repeated the bolded text on its own for clarity:

It would be a further travesty if we were to be so taken by the manipulative political hogwash south of our border that is driving to put Obama & his “color revolution” subverter associates in just such a place of command & control

It certainly seems that Daryl Vernon isn’t that big a fan of Barack Obama. I find myself wondering if the Green Party shares his position that Obama’s associates are ‘color revolution subverters’ trying to put Obama in a position of command and control?

I have written back to Ms. Labchuk asking for the Green’s position on Mr. Veron’s blog posting on the GPC site. I will post updates as I have them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 10:20 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.