Iranian officials on a visit to Belgium have upset their hosts by trying to ban alcohol from the lunch table and refusing to shake women's hands.
Belgium's parliament speaker, Herman De Croo, decided to cancel a lunch rather than hosting a meal with no wine.
Strict Islamic teaching instructs Muslims to avoid looking at alcohol, as well as to avoid drinking it.
Belgian Senate president Anne-Marie Lizin later cancelled talks with the visitors over the handshake issue.
From the BBC
"We tried to find a solution, but they held fast to their position of not wanting to shake her hand," spokesman Patrick Peremans said.
The Senate said the meeting with the 12-strong delegation had been called off because of the "continued refusal" of Ms Lizin's counterpart to shake her hand.
From The American Prospect's Tapped, via Atrios
Larry Diamond, a former senior adviser to the coalition government in Iraq and a current fellow at the Hoover Institution, lays out where America went wrong in Iraq in a piece in today's San Jose Mercury News:
....One young political appointee (a 24-year-old Ivy League graduate) argued that Iraq should not enshrine judicial review in its constitution because it might lead to the legalization of abortion....
No matter what the religion fundamentalists are all nut bags.
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