posted April 15, 2007 12:46 AM            

WorldNetDaily.com

A 44-year-old bookstore owner, alternative-newspaper publisher and Green Party candidate is in hot water after telling a Canadian journal this week he "totally endorse[d]" an editorial he wrote four years ago praising the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon.

Kevin Potvin (Courtesy, Vancouver Sun)

Kevin Potvin, founder and publisher of The Republic of East Vancouver, a federal Green Party of Canada candidate in Vancouver-Kingsway, wrote his thoughts on the attacks shortly after they happened but held off publishing them in his paper until urged on by friends who felt the same way.

Titling his editorial "A Revolting Confession," Potvin wrote on Nov. 28, 2002:

"When I saw the first tower cascade down into that enormous plume of dust and paper, there was a little voice inside me that said, 'Yeah!' When the second tower came down the same way, that little voice said, 'Beautiful!' When the visage of the Pentagon appeared on the TV with a gaping and smoking hole in its side, that little voice had nearly taken me over, and I felt an urge to pump my fist in the air."

"This is a revolting confession," he wrote. "But it's what happened."

He continued: "I know lots of people were killed. But then again, I see lots of people getting killed whenever I turn the TV news on, and frankly, it doesn't really get to me any more ... Let's face facts. If the news on the morning of Sept. 11 was that 3,000 Tanzanians or Burmese had been killed, they wouldn't have broken in on regularly scheduled programming, or canceled football games, and there'd be no conversation about it the next day."

He also admitted he muttered "Go, Osama, Go!" to himself during and after the attacks that left just under 3,000 people dead.

Potvin's long-forgotten opinions were brought to light earlier this week by The Public Eye, a Canadian journal.

Asked for his reaction to the four-year-old editorial, Potvin refused to back down.

"There's a lot of sentences there that could be stripped of their context and be pretty damning," he said. "I guess I could do the slippery thing and say I'll go home and read it. Or I could also give you a wishy-washy answer. But, listen man, I've got to be honest with you. I totally endorse that. I want to caution you though, I endorse it in its totality. I know what I write. I write controversially all the time. And you can go anywhere online and find in my archives a sentence that is pretty condemning. And this one certainly has a whole bunch of them that are pretty bad sounding on their own ... But the concept (of the editorial) is people get killed all the time and we don't get bothered by that."

In the wake of the revelation, Green leader Elizabeth May said yesterday she may deny Potvin the right to run under the party's banner.

Potvin issued a brief statement earlier on Friday in Vancouver but refused to take questions from the press.

"I apologize for the way my essay of four years ago has been characterized. I stand strongly against all forms of violence and I always have," he said. "I was revolted by the imagery of that morning and openly shared my contemplation of the source and nature of that revulsion. Some sentences out of their context may appear insensitive."

May indicated she was unsatisfied with Potvin's statement, saying she expected him to issue a "significantly deeper" apology.

"I was just shattered by 9/11," May told the Vancouver Sun. "I could barely function for two weeks. The idea that somebody felt celebratory about it makes my stomach turn, so I will talk to him, I'll find out what his views are.

"The only thing that really completely precludes running for the Green Party of Canada is celebrating the deaths of innocents – Americans, Rwandans, Afghanistanis, Iraqis, I don't care," she said.

Following Potvin's news conference, the Green Party issued its own statement, rephrasing the apology from the candidate:

"Nearly five years ago, I wrote a piece on the tragedy of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center.

"Today, I would like to completely and unequivocally apologize for any offense or hurt that my writing may have potentially caused," the statement declares.