Baby boomers will remember an old saying, ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me”. Well, name calling, after a fashion, sure seems to have hurt the feelings of the powers-that-be in Saudi Arabia, so much so that they violently knee-jerked reacted to a Canadian foreign policy tweet that said, “Canada is gravely concerned about additional arrests of civil society and women’s rights activists in #Saudi Arabia, including Samar Badawi. We urge the Saudi authorities to immediately release them and all other peaceful #human rights activists.” (Samar Badawi is a prominent women’s rights activist who helped lead the campaign to grant Saudi women the right to drive). You would have thought Canada had declared war on their country as Saudi Arabia accused our country of, “blatant interference in the Kingdom’s domestic affairs”, then expelled our Ambassador, suspended flights to Toronto, cut off new business transactions and investments linked to Canada, and announced it would relocate thousands of Saudi scholarship students studying in Canada. That last one takes the cake. Uproot and punish young people going to school here, and all this because of a tweet. And to think Eastern Canada imports oil from Saudi Arabia rather than have a pipeline supply from Western Canada. Sometimes I think the world has gone nuts, and notice I didn’t mention the chief nut of all nuts.
That’s Coffeetalk. I’m Vic Dubois.