Tidbits of Arabic News translated into English

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Hans Blix on Syria's chemical weapons

I was half-heartedly listening to the news today, when they mentioned Hans Blix. Immediately, I was  at attention.

Hans Blix is Swedish (although the BBC Arabic did not mention that.) Hans Blix was the head of the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq in the years leading up to the war. They showed some flashback video from 2003:


Then they showed Dr. Blix today:


I was very excited by all this! The reason they were showing Dr. Blix was because he gave an interview to the BBC (in English) about Syria's chemical weapons. He said that it is very hard to inspect every nook and cranny to make sure every bit of weaponry is confiscated, that it had not been possible for him and his team in Iraq, and that it would not be possible for any inspector team in Syria today. 

It must have been a phone interview, because they only played a voice recording while showing this still frame on the screen. The flag in the background is the Syrian flag. 

I was watching the news intermittently today, but I caught this clip at the top of the news hour, two hours in a row at least, this afternoon. That makes an awful lot of Swedes having been on the BBC Arabic news lately!

Dr. Blix has a mushroom farm in Sweden. Wouldn't you like to be a bird so you could fly over and see what was what? In Dr. Blix's own words:

The mushroom clouds, they spurred me on,
To stop the wars that might ensue.
When I grew old I could not rest
Lest I had mushrooms at home, too. 

I sent Dr. Blix a very nice card ten years ago in April. But given the record of my ill luck, he probably didn't get it. And it was such a nice card.

Dr. Blix was also famously mentioned during the BBC interview of Arab singer Samantha Borghum.

PS. Today is September 11. I don't think anything about the anniversary was mentioned on the BBC. I was listening kind of on and off, so it wasn't covered significantly enough to the point where I would have noticed. The American news has not really been covering it, either.



No comments:

Post a Comment