Posted on 12/06/2008 2:19:00 PM PST by ScaniaBoy
Prague - Czech President Vaclav Klaus' meeting with leaders of the European Parliament Friday ended in a rift, a transcript of the meeting released by his office showed.
The president, who is an outspoken critic of the European Union and its reform treaty, was angered by questions from Daniel Cohn- Bendit, the head of the European Greens.
Klaus' aide told reporters after the meeting that the president considers Cohn-Bendit's behaviour 'a big provocation.'
According to the transcript, Cohn-Bendit first presented Klaus with an EU flag, which the president has so far refused to hang at his seat, Prague Castle.
The president's spokesman recently said the policy would not change during the Czech Republic's six months at the helm of the European Union.
The lawmaker, who was a student leader in the 1968 riots in France, went on an attack, the transcript showed.
'The Lisbon Treaty: I am not interested in your opinions. I want to know what you will do once it is approved by the lower house and the Senate,' Cohn-Bendit said.
He also asked Klaus how he could meet with Irish businessman and anti-EU activist Declan Ganley, who rallied opposition to the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland, when it was unclear 'who pays him'.
'I have to say that nobody has talked to me in such a manner and such a tone in six years (in office),' Klaus countered according to the transcript, adding: 'You are not on Paris barricades here.'
Klaus then asked European Parliament's President Hans-Gert Poettering to skip Cohn-Bendit's questions, which Poettering declined to do.
'No, we have plenty of time,' the transcript cited him as saying. 'My colleague will continue because anyone of us...can ask what they want.'
As the country prepares to assume the rotating leadership of the EU on January 1, the government has faced questions whether the eurosceptic president would embarrass the Czech Republic and the European Union during the presidency.
The Czech president's role however is largely ceremonial and the government agreed that Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek will represent the country as EU's president-in-office.
'The presidency will be conducted by the government, represented by the prime minister,' Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg said. Poettering said in Prague on Friday that Klaus was welcome to visit the parliament in February. Premier Topolanek alone will address the parliament as the EU's new head in January.
A longer transcript of the debate between Vaclav Klaus and the marxist pedophile greenie Daniel Cohn-Bendit, EU parliament president Hans-Gert Pöttering and Irish member of the EU parliament Brian Crowely can be found here at the blog EUReferendum.
The debate at the Prague Castle is also commented by Lubos Motl at the Reference Frame.
Vaclav Klaus: A global warming sceptic, a free market proponent, and a man who dares to stand up against the anti-democratic EU - what is there not to hate? /sarc
It would be great to see the European Union house of cards collapse. It is a top-down micromanagement boondoggle.
Klaus was the man who said it best: “Socialized medicine and full-pension retirement at 55 isn’t going to work!!!”
The Czechs are a small country who have their rights trampled and their country sold-out by larger European States and movements many times in the last century.
They are right to be prickly about being talked-down to by Brussels.
While I definitely have opinions about all of this, I believe that the appropriate public posture for Americans to take with regard to the internal political issues of the EU is one of benign neglect. Just as I believe that the appropriate public posture for Europeans to take with regard to internal political issues of the USA is one of benign neglect.
In other words, this is none of our business.
I would take Klaus as our President as he calls global warming a big fraud and he is just as much a U.S. citizen as you know who.
US politicians should maintain a low profile regarding the EU. This has not always been the case. In 1975 when the UK had a referendum whether to remain in the European Community the US secretly supported the yes camp.
President Bush has several times publicly stated that he thinks Turkey should become a member of the EU. (That is akin to a European politician stating that Mexico ought to be allowed to join the USA.)
Of course European politicians ought not to comment on ongoing elections in the US.
However, just as it is important for us Europeans to understand what is going on in the US it is important for you to understand what the EU is all about.
And of course as a private person I feel that I have the right to hold an opinion - and voice it - on what is happening in the world.
Socialism's motto.
Good for Vaclav not hanging the EU flag.
On the other hand, watch out for 0 hanging the UN flag somewhere we won’t like.
Sounds like my kind of guy. Why not Klaus for head of the Republican party?
Klaus is a good man. He never knuckled under to the Communists and is a thorn in the side of the Euro-unionists. Europe needs more leaders like him.
No one personifies this as well as Daniel Cohn-Bendit. If you don't know his history have a look here.
Let me just quote two items:
"Twenty-two years later, Carlos was arrested in Khartoum, Sudan, by the French counterintelligence service (DST), with whose director, Yves Bonnet, I had earlier cooperated after leaving Romania. Carlos was immediately taken to Paris, where he was charged with killing two French police officers in 1979; he was sentenced to life in prison. During interrogation, Carlos asserted that his deputy for the OPEC operation had been German terrorist Hans Joachim Klein, codenamed "Angie," who had killed an OPEC security man and an Austrian policeman during that attack. Carlos also testified that the weapons used for the OPEC operation had been kept in an apartment in Frankfurt/Main, where Klein was then living with two other "red revolutionaries" of those days, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Joschka Fischer.
and this in Daniel Cohn-Bendit's own words (from a book he wrote in 1976):
"It happened to me several times that certain kids opened my fly and began to tickle me. I reacted differently according to circumstances, but their desire posed a problem for me. I asked them: 'Why don't you play together? Why have you chosen me, and not the other kids?' But if they insisted, I caressed them even so."
(This happened while he was working in a nursery school.)
As you wrote: Leftism is a mental disorder.
Don't know about that. The EUrotopians seem rather intent on exporting their socialism.
yitbos
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