Backlash

First Nations Day of Action: a sampling of comment from one "mainstream" conservative blogsite:

Mark my words - the moment is approaching when a bandana prowling these police protected barricades will end up in the crosshairs of someone's high powered rifle.

Canadians need to arm themselves. Then they need to surround the reservation and KILL anything that moves. After that Canadians need to dare the Government to do anything about it and force a confrontation.

That is exactly what the ordinary working people of Ontario are saying: just shoot them. The protesters don't have much sympathy here.

Perhaps someone could hold an impromptu bingo game or set up a beer tent, to diffuse the situation.

To hell with these red ni**ers, I am fed up with them and the moronic liberals that insist on feeding them. Native land claims should start and end with a six foot deep hole in the rock garden.

See if they can drive a beer truck through. Then wait 8 hours, and re-open the highway.

maybe we need a couple of more duddly georges


UPDATE (later that same day):

Seems like Wendy Sullivan, aka RightGirl, is the darling of some of our Canadian Embassy folks in Washington. They love her support-the-troops initiative. This is what she had to say about today's Day of Action:

As opposed to the other 364 days...when the Natives do absolutely nothing except smoke, drink and fuck their daughters. This Friday will mark the Native Day of Action(tm)here in Canada. It's their chance to whine and complain that us white guys who pay 45% in income tax to support their smoking, drinking and daughter-fucking are ripping them off.

Let the Canadian Embassy know what you think of sourcing this drooling racist.

h/t The Galloping Beaver. Follow the links: she's not getting one from me.

UPPERDATE (that evening):

A couple of good articles to bring us back to sanity, one quite humorous, the other asking the hard questions, to be found via Shmohawk's Shmorg.

UPPESTDATE (June 30):

The owner of the blogsite from which I drew the remarks that appear above is none too pleased with me. In a series of deflective moves, she accused me of dishonesty, implying strongly that I had made the quotations up (after she removed some of them from her combox). That didn't fly, so she advanced the notion that they were planted by left-wing agents provocateurs (see comment posted here). When the ensuing guffaws subsided, she turned her attention to the photograph, above, and accused me of being a "bigot." She claimed that the photo maligned Westerners and played into stereotypes. Why not show a picture of a Mohawk warrior or a Jamaican gangsta, she asked, although neither group could be credibly linked to the sentiments expressed in the comments.

The photo may indeed remind one of American Southerners: I don't read "Westerners" in the picture (source here), and in any case the events under discussion took place in Ontario. A stereotype? Certainly: rather self-consciously depicted in the photo, I think. My point was that the authors of the bigoted comments quoted above were playing into stereotypes themselves. Set a stereotype, in other words, to catch a stereotype. Not to mention a well-known conservative blogger.

EVEN UPPIERDATE (June 30):

The Washington Embassy has sent out the following form letter:

Dear ----:

Thank you for your email regarding a post made this week in the blog
"Right Wing Girl" and the our article about the Canadian Angels website
from a 2006 edition of the Connect2Canada newsletter.

Our mention of Canadian Angels was made over a year ago. We have now
removed that reference to the Canadian Angels site from the
Connect2Canada website and newsletter and will not make future references
to it.

Thank you again for your message. We very much value the feedback of
Connect2Canada members.

Regards,
Bernard Etzinger
Connect2Canada team
Canadian Embassy, Washington, DC

AND IT GETS UPPIER STILL (June 30):

Kate McMillan has shown me the door. That's what you get, I guess, when you show her a mirror. My response is here--well, it was there a moment ago, but has since been deleted.

Her expression of grievance, in any case, bears all the signs of careful manufacture. She is still fussing that I didn't source the offensive comments individually, calling this "dishonest." If she is suggesting that they did not actually appear over at her place, then that word would better apply to her. I failed to acknowledge, she says, that she had removed some (but by no means all) of them. But that wasn't even in question. Of course she did. Any sensible comments editor would have done the same.

She claims "misrepresentation," but I quoted the comments accurately. She makes the absurd claim that I "insulted rural Canadians" (yesterday it was just "Westerners") with the photo, an assertion which, when you think about it, is pretty insulting in itself to rural Canadians. She then accuses me of "hypocrisy" for getting into some discussions at her place with some of the more rational folks who post there, on issues such as the Iroquois influence, or lack of it, on the writing of the US Constitution. Why participating in these conversations is "hypocritical" in her eyes is beyond me. It's not as though I was having such discussions with the bigots I quoted.

In any case, as noted in my response, my post was not about Kate. It was about the backlash, and I think I captured it pretty well. I'm sorry she took it personally, but she did set a certain tone with her "bandana [sic] in the crosshairs" comment. We all saw what that unleashed.