What’s Wrong with Canada?
This is not a piece I had intended to write today, since I have far more important things to research. However, due to the disparaging remarks plastered by my sparring partner Matt Gurney on the Net after our debate in the John Oakley show broadcast yesterday morning live in Toronto, Canada and due to the insolence and misrepresentation used in these, I have been asked to reply.
Opinion pieces do not necessarily respect the views of the editorial staff of PRAVDA.Ru.
I enjoyed myself early yesterday on the AM640 John Oakley radio talk show in Toronto and I enjoyed very much speaking with the host, John Oakley. Evidently the feeling was mutual because the feedback I received from the radio show (not one message but several) was not only positive but effervescent, and they asked if I would like to come back. For me, that was that. I smiled, shrugged, had a coffee, prepared a few lessons for my University students and started preparing my editorial about Dr. Karadzic.
Not Matt Gurney, my sparring partner (Assistant Editor, Comment and Member of the National Post Editorial Board) who was called to the John Oakley show to spice things up, who managed in twenty minutes to say three things (two of them unfortunately playing into my hands) and who then appears to have spent the entire day writing pages trying to justify himself and claiming how he had pasted me on the show. (??) He seems to be the only person who shares his own opinion.
To be perfectly honest, if that makes him happy, big deal. I am far more worried about the terrapin that went missing in my garden three days before I move house and sell up here. However, one thing is crystal clear, and this is that there is a Russophobic cabal in the international media which strikes at the heart of Russians at every twist and demonises Serbs at every turn. And the epicentre right now appears to be in Canada.
Let us take, for example, the photo Mr. Gurney chose to illustrate the piece in his newspaper, a picture of a clapped-out Lada with the caption “Lada: Apex of Soviet Achievement”. Er…why didn’t he choose the world championship winning KAMAZ? Right, we know the answer. And why did the National Post allow him to print it?
Let us then warp over to the beginning of the radio show in which John Oakley kindly allowed me to present my piece, and then turned to Matt Gurney. He started straight off by stating that “he (myself) obviously doesn’t know very much about the Olympics” and accused me of “complete ignorance” for raising the issue of Canada’s competence in holding the Games while mentioning the numerous cases of strange and hurtful decisions against Russian athletes, quite apart from the rumours of harassment which have yet to be investigated. We will come back to that.
Before anyone could reply, he then stated clearly that mentioning the cruelty of Canadian soldiers lost me any claims to credibility as a journalist and then…oh dear. Oh deary, deary me.
He spent the rest of the show either in stunned silence or playing right into my hands. Let us see.
Immediately after defending his wonderfully behaved Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, he then referred to Russian troops in Georgia. Kind of defeatist as an argument using the same ploy you just criticised, eh? Then it got better. Like what sources do I have claiming that Georgia attacked Russia and how did I know, was I there on the border?
As I pointed out to this…journalist?…there is a slight difference between missiles travelling south to north and those travelling from north to south and one does not have to travel to Mongolia to know that it’s cold there right now. See, we have things called TVs! Yes, and the…er…Internet! Wow, eh?
Yeah, and iPods and stuff!
After accusing me of being a paranoid (don’t worry Mr. Gurney, I only worry when you’re speaking of me behind my back) he then admitted that the Canadians seemed “souped up” for the hockey game with Russia, for which I thanked him, my point exactly. And that was about it from Mr. Gurney. In the rest of the show I brought up the several cases of weird decisions during the Games – the inexplicable Silver to Plushenko after his flawless quadruple jump and performance in the second phase; the Korosteleva incident, in which the Russian skier was asked to go and give a urine sample on her way to her race; the Detkov incident in which a Russian snowboarder was disqualified after his Gate jammed twice and was then allegedly insulted by an official, to name just three.
So, where did these events take place, Burkina Faso? Or Vancouver, Canada? It was a point I made over and over again during the twenty-minute interview and then the mike cut out after I answered the first speaker.
End of story? For me, yes. Actually I frowned when it was over because while I found Oakley highly professional, I had expected far more from Gurney. But Gurney spent the next hours in a massive sulk producing pages of his own version of the interview in his National Post piece: “ Anti-Canadian Pravda writer puts the "P" in paranoid”.
