Wednesday, May 24, 2006

GUENTER GRASS LAMBASTES BUSH AND BLAIR M&CNews: "Guenter Grass, the German novelist who won the Nobel Literature Prize in 1999, attacked US President George Bush as a 'hypocrite' Tuesday, telling a writers' congress in Berlin that Washington had nurtured terrorism. In a speech to the annual International PEN meeting, the 78-year-old leftist author said Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were 'like priests who have blessed the guns and carried death along with the Bible into distant lands'. He charged that Washington had arbitrarily declared some dictatorships to be 'rogue states', saying this was part of a 'fundamentalist structure of power'. 'Politics does not get more stupid and more dangerous than this,' said Grass, who charged that the United States was war-mongering, flouting the rules of the civilized world and encouraging terrorism. He said it was 'even threatening to repeat a war crime' by using nuclear weapons. To applause from an audience of 450 writers from 80 nations, he charged that the rest of the world was 'pretending it could do nothing about this'. He said both the United States and Britain were 'hypocrites' whose policies encouraged terrorism when they said they were were opposed to it. They had 'nurtured' al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and now wanted to defeat him by force." His speech (in German). 5:46:06 PM

© Copyright 2006 Hetty Litjens.