Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi (you are pretty much free to spell it however you please) has, like many a faded pseudo-celebrity before him, managed to leverage scandal into some much-needed attention as of late.
His most recent move, according to Foreign Policy’s blog, is impressively absurd:
A UN spokesman tells the Swiss News Agency that Libya submitted a proposal to the General Assembly calling for the dissolution of Switzerland last month. The proposal was never accepted or circulated because the U.N. Charter prohibits countries from threatening the existence of other member states.
Switzerland, Gaddafi says, was “formed of an Italian community that should return to Italy, another German community that should return to Germany, and a third French community that should return to France.”
Furthermore, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Gaddafi has a particular hate-on for the Swiss, ever since his son and daughter-in-law were arrested last year in Geneva for assault. The charges were later dropped, and the Swiss president even went to Tripoli to apologize for the whole thing, but Gaddafi clearly knows an opportunity to get ink when he sees one.
