Centrerion Canadian Politics

Foreign Affairs and the crazy Scandinavians

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Two scary items in the news today: the passing of an ultimatum deadline concerning four hostages in Irak, including two Canucks, and Mohammed El Baradei's winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
The first item is scary because, obviously, it means that the hostages are in even graver peril than they were prior to the passing of the deadline. Considering also that Canadian diplomacy is ridiculously ineffective in helping Canadians detained abroad, as this man's story shows, and that the NGO they were affiliated with, Christian Peacemaker Teams is merely seeking to appease the terrorists with sympathetic press releases reminiscent of the Stockholm Syndrome, these people are in a really crummy situation.
The second item is the trend towards making the Nobel Peace Prize insignificant. Mohammed El Baradei has called for Israel to give up its nukes, or its capacity for building them (Israel neither acknowledges nor denies it has nukes, in an effort to deter its enemies from attacking, all while not giving them a justification for building their own).
Israel has been invaded several times by its neighbours, in a series of unsuccesful attempts at destroying it. The Arab League has called for its destruction (as had the PLO and the PA, formerly headed by Yasser Arafat, another Nobel Peace Prize winner...).In other words, El Baradei wants Israel to put itself at the mercy of its enemies, by getting rid of its deterrent - the Nuclear Ambiguity policy. When you have a fool like that getting the Prize, it makes you wonder what the people up in Oslo (i.e. the Nobel Awards Committee) are thinking.
Oslo and Stockholm... there's something about the far northern climate that makes people think funny.
foreign affairs, nuclear weapons

posted by lecentre @ 1:13 p.m.