(Originally posted at Bene Diction Blogs On, May 15, 2010]
Youth evangelist Faytene Kryskow has a letter in today's National Post newspaper, seeking a correction in Don Martin's column about The Armageddon Factor, which mentions her.
You may remember that about a week or so ago now that I was amazed to read what Marci McDonald apparently heard when hearing Faytene Kryskow speak in Toronto at the March 2008 Toronto Missionfest.
McDonald reports:
Winding up her spiel at Missionfest, she summons the crowd to political activism with an unusual pitch. “Imagine an army of young people, five million strong,” she says. “Imagine their passion to arise as a youth force that effectively decided who would get elected to political office–a force so powerful that it literally began to change their nation.” Her audience is warming to her message when it takes a bizarre turn. “This actually happened,” They called themselves the Hitler Youth and they changed the face of their nation and the world.” As her listeners sit in stunned silence, she delivers her closing call to arms: “If they could mobilize their cause to become that mighty with the power of evil backing them,” she tells the crowd, “how much more could we accomplish with the power of God backing us up.”
National Post columnist Don Martin was also stunned that Faytene could be so misguided as to make such a reference, and led off his column on the book with this reference, and made a couple other remarks about Kryskow as well.
Well, today Faytene Kryskow has a letter in the National Post asking for a correction and mentioning that she is going to make a formal written complaint to Random House Canada, McDonald's publisher.
I don't know if the National Post's editors edited her letter severely for length, but what I find odd is that she is disputing whether she has met Stockwell Day at his home (as reported in McDonald's book and quoted in the Martin item.) Certainly she has a right to have that fixed...but isn't it strange that she has nothing to say about the quote which led his column?
If I hadn't used a dumb analogy to the Hitler Youth, that is the first thing that I would be citing as that is the most damaging to my own causes. But Kryskow lets it pass, assuming she didn't say anything about it in an unedited letter to the newspaper.
Is Faytene hoping that people will assume that since she may have spotted one error, that by implication everything is incorrect, including the original report of the "Hitler Youth" gaffe? Perhaps she may want to brazen this through, without apologizing.
I believe that Don Martin is much wiser than I am, and has noticed this for himself.