Green Party Candidates say the darndest things: Richard Zurawski

if we don’t reflect our local cultures and have a consolidated um media that’s vertically integrated we’re manufacturing consent and we’re not far off um totalitarianism

Not Sarah Palin, though good guess. That’s a quote from the Green Party’s candidate in Halifax West. He’s pictured above with some American Sunday school teacher.

The full interview can be heard here, about 60% of the way through. It’s after the part where he compares Sun News to Joseph Goebbels, compares Sun News execs to secret police putting fear into the populace, and after the part where he talks about the pernicious impact of religion in politics.

“Let’s genocide this entire bunch”

Apropos this article, mentioned here:

A Terrace, B.C., man who was once a gay wedding trailblazer is now under an RCMP investigation for a possible hate crime after posting on social media that the “only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

Terrace RCMP said Thursday an investigation is under way into the comment posted by Howard Boake on the web page of the local Terrace Standard newspaper. The RCMP said the investigation was triggered on Tuesday after they received a complaint from a “concerned citizen” over the comment.

Boake wrote on Facebook that, “the only good Indian is a dead Indian…Let have open season on em (sic).”

RCMP Const. Angela Rabut said the investigation is exploring whether there is a public safety component to the online comment.

“First and foremost is public safety. Is the public safe? We are going to make sure of that,” said Rabut.

Rabut said the investigation’s findings will be forwarded to local Crown counsel who will then determine whether there is enough to lay hate-crime related charges.

RCMP are investigating a guy for that?! I’m very surprised, because threatening to exterminate natives is really common online, even on major media sites ( if you consider Sun News major media). Here is just a small sampling of some of the death threats, wishes for violence, and literal calls for genocide made on Sun News’ Facebook page:

[re: natives] “let’s … genocide this entire bunch”

“Shoot dead all these useless dirt bags”

“Crack their skulls”

“Execute them”

“bring the hammer down on these wagon burners”

“Lets shoot them! Lets burn their reservations!”

“May those idle no more supporters … experience the karma of genocide”

From a Canadian Armed Forces soldier: “I’ll be playing cowboys and Indians”

“Let’s have an all out war and end this forever”

“Use force, that is the only way these people [natives] are going to shut up … it is about time the non-natives take a stand”

“Should have killed them all when we had the chance”

FYI: This isn’t an exhaustive list. I had another 100 or so more of these screenshots …

Just to show you how common this is, here are a few comments from Facebook written since I put this post up a couple days ago:

“Civil war baby”

“It wouldn’t be murder so much as suicide by stupidity”

“We need a civil war. That is the only logical solution.”

“vast swathes of the public education system are uncritically regurgitating the genocide story as if it were fact” Tory spokesman

“vast swathes of the public education system are uncritically regurgitating the genocide story as if it were fact“

That is an actual quote from a senior Tory. In fact, the person who said that was once head speechwriter for Stephen Harper. But before you break out the pitchforks, don’t worry, he wasn’t talking about the Shoah or Jewish people, he was just talking about “Indians” and residential schools, in which case it’s totally OK. I mean apparently it’s OK, because he said that in 2013, and in 2014 he was being praised by one MP, and as of September of last year was still listed as working as a media contact for another Conservative EDA. This person in question is Paul Bunner, editor of the C2C Journal.

A few more quotes from this fellow – also from 2013, from an article titled ‘The “genocide” that failed‘:

The primary author of the modern Canadian Aboriginal grievance and entitlement narrative was Harold Cardinal, the Alberta Cree “boy genius from Sucker Creek.”

It made the case for Indians as “Citizens Plus,” a separate, distinct caste of Canadians who, by virtue of their status as the country’s original inhabitants and singular victims of European colonization, had a moral and legal right to pursue their own cultural destiny independent of Canadian society, except that it [Canada] would provide the land and pay the bills.

Fontaine, who presented himself as a victim of sexual and physical abuse in a Manitoba residential school, had adroitly leveraged the 1996 findings and recommendations of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples into a political and financial gold mine.

The best that can be said of Harper’s apology is that it was a strategic attempt to kill the story and move on to a better relationship between Natives and non-Natives.

Already, vast swathes of the public education system are uncritically regurgitating the genocide story as if it were fact, thereby adding to the legions of Canadian voters who will be suckers for future Phil Fontaines and Harold Cardinals and their never-ending demands for more tax dollars and greater political autonomy. It will slow any progress on integration, democratic reform and financial transparency on reserves and do nothing to reduce the terrible social pathologies afflicting Indians on and off the reserves.

Context is also needed to refute the “intergenerational legacy” of residential schools. The idea that victimization of one generation automatically passes to their descendants defies human experience. If it were true, the survivors and descendants of the Nazi Holocaust would be humanity’s basket cases instead of a people who have prospered like few others.

The British treated Natives in this country more benevolently than they did any other indigenous peoples within their empire.

A couple points. Re: mention of the survivors and descendants of the Nazi Holocaust. The reality is far different from what Bunner writes:

As of 2005, 40% of the 400,000 Holocaust survivors living in Israel live below the poverty line, resulting in heated and dramatic protests on the part of survivors against the Israeli government and related agencies. The average rate of cancer among survivors is nearly two and a half times that of the national average, while the average rate of colon cancer, attributed to the victims’ experience of starvation and extreme stress, is nine times higher.

There is a whole literature dealing with the psychological challenges that survivors and their children face – including mention of rates of PTSD above 90% in one study. I don’t know why he would disregard the suffering and poverty of holocaust survivors, except that they’re a useful symbol to beat “Indians” over the head with.

Not to diminish what happened to us natives in the 20th century, but I recognize that the holocaust and the residential schools are vastly different things. The holocaust was one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century. The residential schools were horrible, were a crime, but of a different scale. 1.5 million children died in the holocaust, 4,000+ native children died in the residential schools.

While the scale is different, it’s still a big number, about 1 in 40 – or in more familiar terms, the residential schools produced a death toll equal to a Columbine School Massacre once every 4 months for the full 100 years of their operation.  Historically, they were only on the scale of the Nazi domestic euthanasia program, in which 5,000 German children were experimented on and killed. Granted, we put the civilians responsible for euthanizing those children on trial and then executed them… But the Germans were killed quickly, with gassing, the natives on the other hand were killed slowly, through neglect, abuse, and cruel experiments.

The point though is that all of these are crimes and you have to wonder about someone who casts doubt on that. Now to emphasize, I’m not saying that Paul Bunner is a holocaust denier, he obviously is not, and anyone who could read the above and think he is, is wrong and an idiot. But, is he saying that the crimes uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are not fact?  Read it again:

… vast swathes of the public education system are uncritically regurgitating the genocide story as if it were fact, thereby adding to the legions of Canadian voters who will be suckers for future [Native leaders] and their never-ending demands for more tax dollars…

If I found a Canadian politician who said he doubted the scale of the holocaust – I guarantee you that would be his last day in public life. But it is not hard at all to find establishment conservatives who deny the reality of what happened at the residential schools, who say that claims of abuse are being fabricated for money, or who just generally seem to be opposed to the concept of native rights. Here’s one. And another. And another.

I believe in free speech, and I support a person’s right to call us mercenary liars – but I also would like to see some god-damned social consequences for this stuff. Saying things like: “vast swathes of the public education system are uncritically regurgitating the genocide story as if it were fact” shouldn’t get you a round the world trip on the Prime Minister’s plane, it should get you branded for life as a political untouchable.

One very last point – when Stephen Harper gave the apology for the Residential Schools in 2008, Paul Bunner was working for him as a speechwriter. The same month Harper appointed the head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he took Bunner with him on his government jet, on a tour of NATO capitals. When Bunner says the apology “was a strategic attempt to kill the story” I’m inclined to believe him, after all, he was there.

Not speaking ill of the dead – Link Byfield edition

Link Byfield is dead. He was the editor of the Alberta Report (pictured left), and co-founder of the Wildrose Party. They say you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, so I’ll let him speak for himself.

Here he is the late Mr Byfield outraged at the Residential School apology:

“The government’s January 7 “apology” to natives [for the abuse done in Residential Schools] amounts to a defamation of the hundreds of people who gave their lives to these worthwhile institutions, and it should not be allowed to stand.”

And here he is asking for graphic details of Phil Fontaine’s sexual abuse:

“For example, we have often been told that Phil Fontaine, grand chief of the Assembly of First Nations, claims to have been sexually abused at a church boarding school. With the right reporter, he waxes very melancholy and soulful about it. Well, maybe he was abused – such things certainly can happen. But what does he mean by “abuse”? Was he taken into the principal’s office and sodomized, or did he just suspect the priest supervising the boys’ shower might be gay? Who knows. He doesn’t return our calls. Has anyone ever asked him?”

Source: http://sisis.nativeweb.org/clark/jan0898cli.html

A few words from Byfield on the “Indian Problem”:

“Take our Indian problem, for example, which certainly isn’t going away. But there I go. It is insensitive to say “Indian” nowadays; the approved term is first nations; and it is impolite to say “our”, as though we owned them; and it is impolite to say they are a problem.”

Again (a) writing on sodomizing native children, and (b) apparently denying the reality of residential school abuse:

As every liberal knows, we deplorable Europeans showed up here on the prairies, built railways, brought in farmers, shot off all the buffalo, forced the Indians to live on reserves, and then ordered them to send their children to boarding schools where they were sodomized and forcibly assimilated. Bad us – not that there’s anything wrong with sodomy, mind you. The only difficulty is that this is all fiction.

Source: http://sisis.nativeweb.org/links/sep13gm.html

He wasn’t just “opinionated” about natives – here he is discussing a gay pride exhibit at a Red Deer art gallery that received government funding:

Suppose it wanted to demonstrate the evils of homosexuality, and all the compulsive and revolting things homosexuals do with urine and feces, and explain in graphs why they carry such an astonishing array of intestinal parasites and venereal diseases. Would she grant that too? Would we have fun-loving “Homo on the Range” in  Red Deer, but up in Lacombe “The Perils of Perversion” – both sponsored and endorsed by the Alberta government … If Wild Pansies of Red Deer catches the public fancy, fine.

Source: Google Books

Some questions about the Tory internship program

That’s a page from the Campus Conservatives’ internship program FAQ.That’s what jumps out first. The $100 fee. Here it is zoomed in:

The reason I’m looking at that page is that I’m attending a roundtable discussion on internships in Ottawa this week. It’s my field of expertise, my company manages 30 internship programs for private schools and colleges across Canada and the US; and I’ve been involved in private regulation of internships in Canada.

Right off the top, from what I understand, political parties operate free of federal and provincial employment standards – so I’m not trying to imply they’re doing something illegal. I’m saying that if anyone else did it, they would get in trouble from the future bureaucrats this Tory internship program is spitting out.

First off the fee. Almost every school that operates a coop program charges a coop fee (ex 1, 2, 3, 4 ) . Those fees pay for things like monitoring, student support, regulatory compliance, and quality control. After paying those fees, and completing assignments, the universities who were paid the fees give the student academic credit that gets them closer to graduation. That’s not the case with the Tories’ fee though. They say it’s to cover their internal administrative costs.

Nowhere in Canada that I know of, can an employer charge an employee an administrative fee for hiring them. If an intern couldn’t pay that fee – would they be allowed to do their internship? It appears not.

But it’s an internship, so it’s largely exempt from labour/employment standards, right?

Well if it’s paid minimum wage, then it’s not an unpaid internship, and the ESAs/LSAs apply. So, is this paid minimum wage?

It doesn’t say ‘yes’, the website just gives a number – $1700 per month. Is that enough for minimum wage? Depends where and how much you work.

The website says the internship program is in Ottawa. And here is how they describe the work load:

So we start with a baseline of 40 hours per week. Plus weekend seminars and intensive political training, and a group project. These seminars are mandatory – don’t go and you could be fired:

So let’s be small-c conservative and say these seminars add only an extra 3 hours per week to the workload. That gives us a work week of 43 hours – based on the principle that mandatory training is typically paid. Again, these internships are in Ottawa where the minimum wage is $11 per hour. Over 4 weeks, with no overtime pay of course, that gives us $1892.

Interns are paid $1700 so that means that it’s less than minimum wage. In which case, my bad, maybe the $100 fee to participate is OK.

Being less than minimum wage though, that makes this an unpaid internship with an honorarium. And Ontario takes a dim view of honorariums. My staff have spent time talking to Ontario employment standards people, and back in July, 2013 they told us that if the student is not doing the internship as a requirement of their studies, it’s very tricky to offer an honorarium. Specifically what they said was: “if you advertise an honorarium, then the letter of the law states that that person would be informed of remuneration and would thus be considered an employee. Thus, they would be entitled to minimum wage”. If you want to offer one, you can do so after the intern starts, but you can’t do it as an inducement to get them to join the internship program, it can’t be offered up front.

If I were a private company offering this honorarium to recent graduates in Ontario, I’d be on the receiving end of some tsk-tsk’ing in the Star, and possibly a fine. Not so for the Tories.

Now for the last point, and possibly the most important. Internships should be for students only. Looking at the screenshots above, you’ll notice that to join this program you in fact do need to be a student:

However, you’ll also notice there’s no requirement that says you have to be a student who is doing this internship for academic credit. In some places, that’s a problem.

In BC or Alberta for example, that would get you in trouble with employment standards. To be exempt from minimum wage in BC, the internship (there, called a Practicum):

[must be] required by the curriculum, and will result in a certificate or diploma. It is not considered to be “work” for the purposes of the Act.

It’s not a big hurdle – there are a lot of internship and coop students in this country. But even that small restriction is too much for the Tories – that bare minimum student requirement for them is flexible:

Now it occurs to me that if you’re graduating in April, then in May you’re not a student. However that doesn’t bother the Tories as much. In BC, or Alberta, or Quebec – if you were a private company and tried that, it wouldn’t work out as well for you.

You know if it were anyone else, other than a political party, offering this internship in Ontario they’d have to worry about getting in trouble. If they were in BC, Alberta or Quebec, they’d know they’d get in trouble. But like I said above, political parties don’t have to follow the rules, they just have to enforce them on others.

One last, last thing. Because it’s from the Campus Conservatives, you might think this internship program is under the radar of MP’s and the Party itself. As you can, that is not the case:

Another example of a Tory saying bad stuff about First Nations

A few words about this guy, at the far right …

Back during the Idle No More thing, I spent some time trolling through the pages of Sun News to read the comments. A lot of them were very extreme, some even *literally* called for genocide.

I took screenshots of these comments and put some posts up on them, since deleted. But I was going through my blog library and saw that some of these comments were still there. Among those was this one milder comment:

The name I want you to notice is Greg Douglas. At the time, his profile picture stood out as more professionally done. Here was his Facebook page from back then:

So finding that earlier today, I thought to check and see where he was now (along with a few others that I will post in the near future). He’s a guy with political ambitions, who has headed his local chamber of commerce. He’s also listed as president of a Conservative Party riding association.

On his Linkedin, he says he is no longer president of the riding association. He is listed as holding that job from September, 2012 – November, 2013.

I went back to his facebook page, to see if I had the right impression of him. I found this:

That was in a comment to a note he posted. That note:

Does Canada Belong to the First Nations?

August 29, 2012 at 11:09pm

Interesting piece I received by email today. What do you think?

Q: Does Canada ‘belong’ to “first Nations” Aboriginal People as ‘they’ claim?

This land does NOT belong to them. Why do some people keep saying that
it does? Is it because that’s what they want you to believe? Well then
the marketing campaign must be working.

Let’s get this straight…

1. These people’s ancestors did not just appear in North America
magically out of thin air one day 50,000 years ago. They came in waves
across the land/ice bridge from Asia. What’s more these waves in many
case were not related groups of people. They came from various places
around North Eastern Asia and were from different genetic
strains….in other words the “natives of North America are not a
homogenous group of people and more importantly…. They are
immigrants too, like millions of immigrants today.

2. The idea that the “natives” were peaceful caretakers of the land or
benevolent tenants couldn’t be further from the truth. The various
tribes warred on each other constantly. They were violent. Want proof?
Ask the Hurons…oh that’s right you can’t. The Iroquois wiped them
out. How about slavery that was rife among the first nation tribes
until the Europeans came over and freed the slaves and put an end to
this “valued cultural tradition”? Is slavery peaceful and humane?

3. The idea that we “stole” this land from them is also ridiculous. A
more technologically advanced and numerous culture invaded and
conquered. This is exactly what has been happening since the dawn of
humanity all around the globe. To say we “stole” their lands is just
plain wrong. That is akin to saying the Saxons should return England
to the Angles. Or maybe we should launch a campaign to have Roman
descendants give Italy back to the Etruscans.

It is a nonsensical notion driven by the politically correct bleeding
hearts, some intellectually deficient politicians, the Government, and
it will continue to cost this country needless and wasted billions and
billions until we get some backbone and turn off the taps.

Are these people in trouble? Yes. Do they need help? Yes. Are they
responsible enough to look after themselves and efficiently spend the
billions the tax payers give them? Certainly not.

The only way to fix this situation is to bring them into society as
equals. They should be getting jobs and paying taxes like the rest of
us because in reality, they are no more special than any of the other
hundred or more cultures that call Canada home.

Turn off the taps. Do away with this “traditional use” and “cultural”
nonsense. Educate their children to become modern citizens, instead of
finding their identity and source of pride in some folks who occupied
the land 15000 years ago. Let them stand or fall on their own account.

And then there’s this:

I should add, the riding association Mr. Douglas is president of brags about how Conservatives are better for First Nations people:

Since the Harper government took power in 2006, we have seen significant concrete efforts to improve the situation facing Aboriginal Canadians. Notwithstanding the outlandish claims of many on the left, the Harper government has done more to help Aboriginal Canadians than any other government since Diefenbaker.

Below is a list (originally compiled by blogger Sandy Crux) of the Harper government’s accomplishments on the Aboriginal file. Please share this with your friends, so that we can dispel the myths being perpetuated by some in the media and remind Canadians of all the great work that our government is doing for our Aboriginal communities.

– See more at: http://www.edmontonsherwoodpark.ca/harper-government-has-a-long-list-of-accomplishments-on-aboriginal-issues/#sthash.MWpIbWia.dpuf

This is one of a half dozen Tories I’m preparing posts on right now. All have a similar profile, with a long public track record of saying things which many, including myself, would say are anti-aboriginal. It bothers me that these people don’t hide it, it bothers me that they don’t have to. It bothers me that while they’re publicly saying they support natives, in private – in what they think is private – they’re insulting us, calling us lazy, and uneducated.

Example: that comment above in the screenshot is from January 21st. The blog post bragging about Tory support for natives was posted by the same person on January 30th.

Last week, I put up a post on the Tory candidate from Nanaimo and his past editorials about natives (among many other things). I can’t imagine that I’m finding every Tory that has issues with natives. But I’ve got 7 of them I’m looking at right now. If I’m getting 1 in 10, that’s 70 people in positions of authority in the party who hold backwards views of natives. And the party’s not really that big …

What is it about the Conservative Party that makes it a safe and supportive environment for people who hold anti-native views? And how seriously should we take any comment from Tories when one week they call us lazy and stupid, and the next are telling us they’re our best friends?

A few editorials from the Nanaimo Daily News

A screengrab from the federal Conservative website, showing Conservative Party candidate, Mark MacDonald.

Below you will see a few excerpts from editorials published by the Nanaimo Daily News. Why are these interesting? These editorials below were published when Mark MacDonald was editor. He has since resigned and will be running as a Tory candidate in 2015. Editorials, as a rule, are unsigned – so there’s no way of knowing if Mr. MacDonald wrote these, though as he says: “I wrote most of the editorials for the Daily News“.

Mark MacDonald’s newspaper is noteworthy because it has a track record of publishing racist, anti-aboriginal letters, letters which Mr. MacDonald has addressed by saying: “It’s freedom of speech. It’s a letter to the editor. It’s not (the newspaper’s) opinion“.

I wouldn’t disagree that racists have the same free speech rights as anyone else. But the decision to publish a racist letter has nothing to do with free speech. Or to quote free speech advocate Ezra Levant: “Forcing editors to publish rambling letters is not a human right in Canada“.

The Nanaimo Daily News wasn’t forced to publish racist letters, they chose to do so. While their owners now admit it was a mistake, and Mark MacDonald eventually apologized, the fact that this happened more than once made me think it could be useful to take a look at some of the editorials published during Mr. MacDonald’s tenure as editor.

Here are some excerpts and links to a sampling of the Daily News’ editorials between January 2013 and September, 2014:

“Not to defend the Indian Act, but a cursory look at it shows that at its inception it attempted to help groups of people who did not want to integrate into Canadian society and look after them just the same. Has it worked? No. So, get rid of it, plain and simple. Make an even playing field for all Canadians, with no recognition of race for special status or treatment. Residential schools? A travesty. Was the whole point of residential schools to damage a particular group of people? Or was it an attempt – and a failed one at that – to deal with systemic problems with a people who appeared to need help and weren’t looking after some of their own as they should? What the perverts did is totally without excuse. When does it become time to move on? Are today’s non-First Nations people expected to pay for the sins of the forefathers forever? How far is it reasonable to go back to demand restitution: 100, 200 years? Back to Adam?”

See more at: http://www.nanaimodailynews.com/opinion/questioning-first-nations-is-not-racism-1.259915#sthash.KIp79MRJ.dpuf

Note: 200 years ago, seriously??? The entire run of ‘I love Lucy‘ happened before natives had the right to vote in Canadian federal elections. The first American to die of AIDS, did so before natives had the right to vote in Quebec. When Madonna was a teenager, natives in Canada could still be arrested for the crime of drinking in a bar. None of this stuff is ancient history …

“The Charter of Rights and Freedoms has, in many ways, become a protection of law breakers, as opposed to law keepers.”

See more at: http://www.nanaimodailynews.com/editorial-mps-need-to-reconstruct-prostitution-laws-1.788374#sthash.IzBFyfHf.dpuf

“Nanaimo Foodshare and Nanaimo Community Gardens do an admirable job of getting the message out that excess fruit, nuts and vegetables grown throughout the region can be used to help feed the hungry. Rather than just let them rot on the vine, tree or in the ground, people go on their spare time, gather, and distribute the bounty to the less fortunate? It’s a great concept, and worthy of applause. But isn’t gleaning supposed to be an opportunity for those who have not, to go out and work to gather for themselves? Not only is it generous on the part of the land owner, but it is also good for the needy, who can do something about their plight by working hard and providing for their own. Maybe it’s time we start taking a look at re-evaluating our assistance efforts, and determine whether or not we’re actually really helping people in the long-term by the things we do, or hurting citizens by making them totally dependent forever.”

See more at: http://www.nanaimodailynews.com/editorial-creating-dependency-or-self-sufficiency-1.801677#sthash.a3Cb8ETF.dpuf

Note: The TL;DR version of this is ‘Got an apple tree? Tory candidate wants homeless people to knock on your door 50 times a day to take your apples’

“Kudos to Westbank for private health care”

See more at: http://www.nanaimodailynews.com/editorial-kudos-to-westbank-for-private-health-care-1.633058

“A voucher system, where students and parents can take their allotment of funding to whichever educational opportunity they desire, has proven to be effective in some states south of the border, but that concept would be likely contested vigorously. The introduction of the element of choice would allow parents to decide where their child could be educated, and hopefully flourish under a different system. Funding for private school students could be elevated from the current 50 per cent to full rate, making those institutions more affordable, which would lessen some pressure on public schools.”

See more at: http://www.nanaimodailynews.com/editorial-maybe-it-s-time-for-educational-alternatives-1.809009#sthash.obYGQDgY.dpuf

“Firefighters have to justify their existence”

See more at: http://www.nanaimodailynews.com/editorial-firefighters-have-to-justify-their-existence-1.605476

“Looking past how much was spent on food and drink, those [federal MP] expense forms could potentially yield information that may be dangerous in the hands of Canada’s enemies.”

See more at: http://www.nanaimodailynews.com/editorial-accountability-and-discretion-go-together-1.677543#sthash.V7MsbuCc.dpuf

“A vote for the Conservatives is a vote for the pipeline.”

 See more at: http://www.nanaimodailynews.com/next-federal-election-a-pipeline-showdown-1.1134270#sthash.30HkpHQy.dpuf

“If you’re going to run for public office, you’ll need some thick skin.”

See more at: http://www.nanaimodailynews.com/editorial-etiquette-refresher-course-may-be-needed-1.623160#sthash.dg1olSZn.dpuf

“When politicians put something in writing, they should choose their words carefully”

 See more at: http://www.nanaimodailynews.com/better-to-think-first-than-apologize-later-1.1113887#sthash.ZEKntD6S.dpuf

Liberal MP’s statements weirdly the same as Wikipedia entries

Apropos of nothing . . . for your consideration, from Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis’ website (re: something about Crete):

After one day of fighting, the Germans had suffered very heavy casualties and none of their objectives had been achieved. The next day, through miscommunication and the failure of Allied commanders to grasp the situation, Maleme Airfield in western Crete fell to the Germans, enabling them to fly in reinforcements and overwhelm the island’s defences. The battle lasted ten days.

And from Wikipedia’s entry on the Battle of Crete:

After one day of fighting, the Germans had suffered very heavy casualties and none of their objectives had been achieved. The next day, through miscommunication and the failure of Allied commanders to grasp the situation, Maleme airfield in western Crete fell to the Germans, enabling them to fly in reinforcements and overwhelm the defenders. The battle lasted about 10 days.

Here he is again. Jim Karygiannis’ website marking Israeli independence day (this one stood out because of the foreign spelling used for ‘centre’):

Yom Ha’atzmaut centers around the declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel by the Jewish Leadership led by future Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, on 14 May 1948. Yom Ha’atzmaut is celebrated on the 5th day of Iyar (eighth month of the civil year and the second month of the ecclesiastical year) in the Hebrew calendar, the anniversary of the day on which Israel independence was proclaimed.

And Wikipedia’s entry for Israeli Independence Day:

Yom Ha’atzmaut centres around the declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel by The Jewish Leadership led by future Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, on 14 May 1948… Yom Ha’atzmaut is celebrated on the 5th day of Iyar in the Hebrew calendar, the anniversary of the day in which Israel independence was proclaimed…

It’s a funny coincidence. I wonder what would happen if someone looked at the rest of his media releases and speeches in parliament.  There wouldn’t be any other weird coincidences would there?