Czechs providing balances

I can't get enough of those Czechs.

First it was their president, Vaclav Klaus, laughing at global warming fanatics, those proposing mega-bailouts in the recession, and disparaging the European Union itself -- as he takes over the EU's presidency.

My favourite excerpt from that story is how Klaus refuses to fly the European flag over his castle -- and how he cut down a snooty French Eurofanatic who demanded that he did:

"No one has ever spoken to me here in this tone. You aren't on the barricades of Paris. I have never heard anything so insolent in this hall," Klaus spluttered. "The way Cohn-Bendit speaks to me is exactly the way the Soviets used to speak."

The Eurolovers at the Guardian didn't like that -- they jabbed at him by saying he "spluttered" those words. But I bet Czechs loved it, as did Euroskeptics throughout the continent.

Then the magnificently named Karl Johannes Nepomuk Josef Norbert Friedrich Antonius Wratislaw Mena von Schwarzenberg (his friends just call him Karel), Klaus's foreign minister, said what any foreign minister in a former Soviet colony would say:

Let us realize one thing: Hamas steeply increased the number of rockets fired at Israel since the cease-fire ended on December 19. This is no longer acceptable.

Now Klaus is sending Schwarzenberg as the EU's official mediator in the Israel-Hamas conflict. That surely must be the first time in a generation that someone sympathetic to Israel's right to national self defence has been dispatched from a busy-body international organization to "mediate".

The Czech Republic sounds like a pretty good place -- and Prague can now count amongst its residents John O'Sullivan, the former editorial pages boss of the National Post (and advisor to Margaret Thatcher), too! No wonder he loves it there.

By the way, Canada's official statement on the matter was pretty good, too. Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon issued a statement saying:

Israel has a clear right to defend itself against the continued rocket attacks by Palestinian militant groups which have deliberately targeted civilians. First and foremost, those rocket attacks must stop.

That's pretty good stuff. In a subsequent statement reported by the press (I can't find it on the DFAIT website), Cannon said:

the deliberate and constant targeting of civilians by Hamas was the main reason for these unfortunate events.

And this:

Minister Cannon repeated Canada's call to all parties to reach a sustainable and durable ceasefire

which has a pretty clear subtext: a short-term hudna -- where Hamas can regroup and rebuild before attacking again -- is not a desireable outcome.