Let’s Hear It For The Home Team
By Ann Huggett (05/27/03)
This has not been a good month for Canada. In the first week of May Canadians had to live down the embarrassment of sending 25 reconnaissance troops to Afghanistan unarmed because no one bothered to sign the necessary Military Technical Agreement papers by which the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) operates with the interim Afghani rulers.
The Canadian Defense Minister, John McCallum, didn’t see any problem with Canadian troops having armed German chaperones thereby proving that socialists don’t even know enough to bring a knife to a gunfight let along the guns!
Then in mid month, after Toronto managed to beg the World Health Organization to drop the travel restrictions because of SARS, 33 more suspected cases of SARS popped up. Now one of the first cases of SARS in the US has been diagnosed because a West Virginia man just returned from a trip to Toronto. Evidently tourism and political correctness is more important to Toronto than the general health of the population.
This last week saw the banning of Canadian beef because cattle from Alberta tested positive for the dreaded bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) a.k.a. Mad Cow Disease. Having Prime Minister Jean Chretien tuck into a thick, juicy steak to prove to the nervous nellies of the world that Canadian beef is safe didn’t do much because most people think photo-ops like that are a sign of insanity anyway.
So it was probably easy to overlook a minor incident which occurred in the US between Canadian and US hockey fans. At the May 21st NHL Game 4 play-off between the New Jersey Devils and the Ottawa Senators in East Rutherford, New Jersey, 4 hapless Ottomans found themselves the center of some very unwanted attention.
Wearing Senator and Canadian team jerseys with one even draped in the Canadian flag, 18 year olds Lee Piazza, Ted Mirsky, Brian Herman and Mike Prior all found out just how endearing Canada has made itself recently to the USA. Thanks to all the anti-US temper tantrums thrown by Canadians in the weeks prior to and during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Canada has built up what they call in metaphysical circles, bad karma.
From being shocked at hearing the Canadian national anthem booed, being called “f**king communists”, “terrorists”, “SARS”, and “pansies”, having a team signed pulled out of their hands, and being told that their flag would be burned or their clocks cleaned, the Canadians reacted with the same snitty superiority they use in stopping bullets in Afghanistan.
“We told one young man that he had no right to mock an entire nation and that we were here to see a game, not engage in a foreign-policy debate," said Piazza. “"Dozens of people threw food at us, uttered discriminatory insults, shoved us, pointed at us and laughed at us. It felt like a nightmare. The hate directed toward us was like nothing any of us had experienced before. I can't even imagine how some minority groups must feel [being] subjected to this kind of discrimination on a daily basis. For me, the 2003 Stanley Cup playoffs have lost their innocence."
That last sentence is a sure-fire winner of a whine and oh-so-typical of socialist induced education. The last time anybody looked the only group getting that kind of treatment here in the USA are whites. We’ve bent over backwards to be oh-so-inclusive and tolerant only to be branded racist whenever it suited the poverty pimps. Currently Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are having real problems with new black immigrants to the States because they refuse to feel that whites victimize them.
So although I wouldn’t call this a full blown international incident because 4 Canadians ran up against rough edged, grudge-bearing New Jersey hockey fans with long memories, let’s see what prompted the New Jersey hockey fans to act like that shall we?
In March at the Montreal Canadiens-New York Islanders game at the Montreal Bell Center the US anthem was booed by the same bunch of big burly Canadians who saw fit to target the busload of 12 and 13 year old visiting American hockey players. Those poor kids were subjected to verbal harassment, obscenities, and seeing their nation’s flag dragged through the streets only to be set on fire.
Those pre-teens didn’t come up to Canada to discuss foreign relations either but that didn’t seem to stop Canadians from venting at them. Even the kids’ Canadian counterparts on the ice stooped to calling them “sh*ts” and “Down with the USA” to their faces with the referee agreeing with that assessment!
We won’t even go into all the countless anti-war demonstrations or the fact that Canada still acts like a revolving door hotel to the world’s terrorists and their organizations.
Elected Canadian officials haven’t acted better either. Because of his socialist love affair with petty tyrants and dictators, Chretien let his anti-war fever get the better of his diplomatic skills and called President Bush a moron. Carolyn Parrish, the federal MP for Mississauga-Centre (Ont.) snarled, "Damn Americans. I hate those bastards." This is not acting like a good neighbor especially since the US has ensured Canadian safety and security all through the Cold War, and buys something like 85% of everything Canada produces.
Memo to Canada: If you want us to be good neighbors then act like one too. We’ve been there for you and we’d like it if we could count on you too. Don't call our President names or us bastards, don't boo our national anthem, don't burn our flag, and don't harass American children participating in hockey tournaments.
If you'll mend your ways, maybe we’ll ease up on border restrictions, start buying your inspected beef, and our two leaders will finally shake hands again. In other words, we won't dish out the same crap to you that you expect us to eat raw and with a smile.
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