The 'Official position of Liblogs'

Jason Cherniak took his ball and went home, quitting his personal blog after his candidate went down in flames (Cherniak proudly referred to himself as a 'Dion Liberal' more than once.) and his slimy campaign of slander against the NDP resulted in only his own party losing a candidate to antisemitism allegations. It can be fairly assumed that there is no future for him in the current backroom power elite of his party - pretty clearly his long time ultimate goal.

But he hasn't been able to resist ramming his views down everyone's throat. The Liblogs aggregate is still his personal property - at least as far as he's concerned - and he has been using his power to silence anyone not toeing his personal 'Israel right or wrong' line and using his bully pulpit to put a permanent post at the top of the aggregator to pronounce 'the official position of Liblogs on the fighting in Israel and Gaza'.

I'm not kidding those are literally his words. There are no comments allowed in response to his bully pulpit piece which lays out his own extremely idiosyncratic and biased view of the timeline of events leading to the slaughter now taking place in Gaza. (UPDATE: Only a few minutes after I posted this and now Cherniak's 'official position of Liblogs' statement has vanished. Did Cherniak think better of it or has one of the other Liblogs admins stepped in?)

He does munificently concede that 'Individual bloggers are free to disagree as long as they do so in a mature and civil manner' - as defined by Jason naturally. That's not really a demonstrated judgment I'd be comfortable with, but its up to Lib bloggers if they are comfortable with Jason's benevolent dictatorship.

To date several Lib bloggers have harshly criticized Jason's behaviour including his censorship, bully pulpit control of the top of the aggregate's page and misuse of the Liblog's email list to send out his own screeds, including Le Daro, And ScottRoss while others have gone off the reservation by leveling harsh criticisms of Israel's actions and a few have started to demand they be taken off Liblogs altogether. And of course there's James Curran being pilloried by the unholy alliance of Warren Kinsella, Cherniak and Ezra Levant.

Curran and I have tangled in the past, I find him to be a loudmouth and a bit of a snide douchbag - combative and hyper partisan if you prefer - but I don't believe for a second that he's an antisemite and allegations that he is are deliberately disingenuous attempts to chill criticism of the behaviour of the state of Israel in the Canadian blogosphere.

At this point I find it unimaginable that any Liberal bloggers with any integrity, self respect or pride whatsoever find Cherniak's iron fisted control over the Liblog aggregate at all tenable. I will be shocked if this whole situation doesn't lead to alternate Liberal blogger aggregators being set up to offer them an alternative.