Wahid’s leadership and policies attracted much controversy amongst Indonesians. Eventually, he was alienated within his own party and removed from office in 2001.

During and after his presidency, he promoted religious and ethnic tolerance. He wrote a seminal article published in the Wall Street Journal on December 30, 2005 titled “Right Islam vs. Wrong Islam” in which he called on “people of good will of every faith and nation” to unite to defeat the ideology of religious hatred that underlies and animates terrorism. He advocated for relations with Israel. When the Iranian government held a Holocaust Denial Conference in 2006, President Wahid convened a counter conference in Bali to promote the true historical view.

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I must say that I am half impressed with the outcome – I was half expecting that the summit would be terminated by a walkout by disgruntled countries, but I am sure they realised that would be bad PR.

Instead, they have announced a non-binding declaration – a US-brokered deal with India, China, Brazil and South Africa - that they say will limit global warming to 2 degrees.

Here are a couple of links:

http://www.dnaindia.com/world/report_copenhagen-climate-summit-comes-to-an-end_1325458

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/climate-draft-accord-agreed-20091218-l1jo.html

I am trying to work the meaning and impact of the declaration. My understanding is that they have a few pledges from countries to achieve certain drops in CO₂ emissions by 2020, but the specific figures have not been disclosed.

Also, they may impose additional tax air and sea travel to raise billions of dollars yearly to assist island nations who believe that they are at risk of being submerged.

Naturally, most opposition and criticism is coming from countries that don’t thing the measures go far enough, and other countries who do not want to harm their economies atoning for the sins of the developed world.

More to come as things are clarified in the media.

Related posts:

1. ClimateGate: What It Means ‘ClimateGate’ is the name given to the controversy surrounding the leaking...

There has been some coverage in the Australian mainstream media, but most of it has completely ignored the meat of the issue, and instead focussed on ’computer hacking’ or how it could impede the Copenhagen climate summit. The most thorough coverage has been in the Australian newspaper and the blogs of News Ltd. columnists Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair.

For those of you that are unfamiliar, emails contained in these archives strongly suggest that academics at CRU have prepetrated widescale scientific fraud and engaged in highly unprofessional, if not criminal conduct. Furthermore, it casts a strong shadow of suspicion and doubt on their conclusions of future global climate catastrophe.

These practices include:

• Suppressing the views of dissenting scientists
• Mathematically manipulating climate data to hide features of the curve that disagree with alarmist opinions
• Knowingly incorporating poor quality, unreliable data into their research
• Subverting the peer review process
• Withholding and destroying information in response to Freedom of Information requests

I have no doubt that ClimateGate played a significant role in increasing opposition to the Australian ETS legislation and the fall of Opposition Leader  Malcolm Turnbull.

Plenty of great posts have been written that explain the content of these emails and surrounding issues in depth, so I will just include the links:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/global_warming_fraud_and_the_f.html

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html

http://biggovernment.com/2009/11/23/media-missing-the-plot-on-climate-gate-its-the-fraud-stupid/

http://uddebatt.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/climate-gate-%E2%80%93-all-the-manipulations-and-lies-revealed-15/

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574566124250205490.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_opinion

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/25/climategate-hide-the-decline-codified/

http://fascistsoup.com/2009/11/25/more-on-the-climategate-source-code/

Related posts:

1. Emissions Trading Scheme Set To Increase Food And Grocery Prices By 7% The Food and Grocery Council, together with large Australian retailers...

Barack Obama might have grand plans for his own vision of peace, but he has not made any sort of measurable achievement that deserves this kind of recognition.

In my opinion, the Nobel Prize for Peace completely lost all credibility long ago, judging from the long list of recent questionable [undeserving] recipients: Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Yasser Arafat, Mikhail Gorbachev, Henry Kissinger & Le Duc Tho.

My advice to the Nobel Committee: stick to prizes for solid science.

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Farouk Hosni’s campaign was hampered by a threat he made in the Egyptian parliament last year to personally burn any Israeli book he found in Egypt’s famous Library of Alexandria.

According to the linked article, “Critics also said that Mr Hosni was unfit to be UN guardian of culture because he censored books and films and stifled media freedom to support the authoritarian Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak”.

In true Arab Muslim style, he blamed his election loss on a “Jewish Conspiracy, cooked up in New York”.

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According to a New York Times article, “Hannibal Gaddafi had previously been busted in France and Italy for beating a woman and fighting a cop, and once for driving drunk down Paris’ Champs Elysee at 90 mph  – the wrong way.”

How do you think Hannibal’s dad Muammar reacted? By issuing an apology to the Swiss? By taking some perks away from his son? By paying compensation to the beaten servants?

No, of course not! He reacted like a typical Arab Dictator – he threw a tantrum like a 3-year old boy – that is, a 3 year old boy with money and autocratic power. Gaddafi’s regime did the following:

• Recalled Libyan diplomats From Switzerland
• Suspended visas for Swiss citizens
• Withdrew funds from Swiss banks
• Blockaded the Tripoli office of the Swiss food company Nestlé

And the Old Arab Favourite trick:

• Threatened to cut off oil deliveries to Switzerland.

Oh and also they kept two Swiss businessmen as ‘guests’ [hostages] until Libya received an apology for poor little Hannibal’s arrest.

Now as you can imagine, such financial pressure can even crack most principled of people, especially the Swiss who are known for their love of other people’s gold. Two weeks ago, Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz travelled to Tripoli to issue a grovelling apology, hoping to pacify madman Gaddafi and get their businessmen back.

In true Arab style, Libya reneged and the businessmen are still there. Now Merz, having made a fool out of himself, is apparently facing calls for his resignation from outraged Swiss citizens.

But that’s not all. Gaddafi is still angry as hell and he now plans to demand the dissolution of Switzerland when he next addresses the United Nations. If Gaddafi can sway enough of his fellow Arab, Muslim and African dictatorships, maybe he’ll muster a UN majority to pass a Switzerland dissolution resolution.

After all, similar tactics got Taiwan kicked out of the UN in 1971, and get Israel criticised every other week for defending itself from destruction at the hands of its Arab Muslim Neighbours. That’ll teach the Swiss who’s boss!

Related posts:

1. Aspiring Egyptian Book Burner Loses Bid To Head UNESCO Long-serving Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosny has lost his bid...

The Herald article, written by middle-east correspondent Jason Koutsoukis, completely ignored the evidence and judge’s reasoning for this judgement, instead preferring to use cheap emotive descriptions to portray the Arabs as victims of ‘Club-wielding’ Israeli police and noting that there were ’19 minors’, as well as quoting other peoples’ smears and criticism of Israel.

For a mainstream newspaper, this shows a complete lack of journalistic standards and readers deserve better.

Regrettably, when it comes to Israel, this is the norm for the mainstream media, and this explains why ordinary people, who have not gone out of their way to research Middle-East history, can easily be manipulated to be hostile to Israel – the only Western, democratic state in the region and a historic ally of Australia.

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In the media, it has been reported that a 17-year old British ‘autistic’ teenager from Yorkshire was attempting to set up a new Channel Islands-based airline that would service most of Europe.

He pulled this off by creating a number of bogus websites, and using virtual office services in a number of countries and writing convincing letters and emails to air industry bosses, which led to telephone conversations and face-to-face meetings.

His mistake came undone after an aviation magazine, who ran an article on his business, got suspicious and started snooping – his biggest mistake was using his own voice to impersonate several different people. In my opinion, he should have invested in one of those voice changing gadgets and learnt to speak and switch between several British regional accents.

His real name has not been published, but he is referred to one of the pseudonyms he used – Adam Tait.

The reports said that he was autistic, but I find this very hard to believe considering the number of social interactions he had. At worst, he would probably have suffering from some form of Aspergers syndrome, in which individuals are high-functioning.

Here are a few articles that tell the story in details:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/transport/article6719191.ece
http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/4487857/
http://www.muscletalk.co.uk/17yearold-with-autism-pulls-off-identity-stunt-of-the-decade-m3504726.aspx

Still, I am not convinced that he would have failed. I wish they had let this go on a bit more and see where he would have gotten up to. I do believe that creative young people have to struggle to get a fair go and face many forms of discrimination in society.

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His artistic contributions to pop music will withstand the passage of time. His trademark ‘moonwalk’ is widely known and imitated by many (including me), and some of his most played songs on video hit shows  include ‘Thriller’, ‘Beat It’, ‘Billy Jean’ and ‘Bad’.

He was not a living god, but a human being with imperfections. It is my opinion that media gossip about his private life was a mixture of truth and fiction, his prominence and eccentricity fuelling opportunistic individuals seeking attention and money.

Perhaps his suffering children and family may now live a more normal life, with fewer media intrusions.

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Recently in the news, there has been nothing new, just repetitions of the same themes over and over – economic bailouts, corporate fraud and distraction politics. As a result, I have become desensitised and no longer feel any shock.

I will comment on two piece of related news: Bernie Madoff’s $50bn Ponzi Scheme and Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. How are they connected? They are both scams.

Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme

For many years, New York investment manager Bernie Madoff  operated a hedge fund that consistently returned 12% per annum to investors for many years.

Early this month, it all fell apart when investors wanted out. The fund turned out to be a Ponzi Scheme that merely used new investors capital to pay distributions to previous investors.

This has been described as the “world’s biggest corporate fraud by a single individual”, resulting in estimated losses of $50 billion US dollars. I personally doubt that he acted alone.

Incredibly, the alarm bells were raised as far back as 9 years ago when an analyst named Harry Markopolous sent a report to the SEC titled “The World’s Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraid”. It is not clear if the SEC took any action on this.

How did he get away with it? I’m not sure, but he did have many friends in high places – after all, he was a former chairman of NASDAQ.

Regulators generally don’t care about small investors, but now that some  rich and prominent people got hurt, perhaps the SEC will start taking corporate transparency seriously.

Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd set a token 5% Carbon Dioxide reduction target for the year 2020. Expectations were as originally as high as 15% and some were demanding a reduction of 25%.

Clearly, he wanted to maintain his popularity by doing something to appease the Climate Change believers,  but not dare risk anything to further exacerbate our economic problems.

So what was has been achieved by this? Apart from the fact that Global Warming Alarmism is bullsh**, China’s own CO2 emission growth will of course outstrip our savings within several months. Even if we ignored China, the flawed computer models (that others believe in) indicate that a much much larger cut would be needed to reverse a warming tread.

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Jesse’s death is a tragedy and my heart goes out to his family and friends. Sadly, in their anger, they place blame on three parties – the book author Richard Dawkins, the Professor who recommended the book to Jesse and the secular public school system.

Instead, they are ignoring the underlying issues that may have led this to happen – after all, a normal healthy person does not commit suicide after reading a book!

I believe that the real factors are:

• Jesse’s fear of being ostracised or isolated by his family and friends. Would Jesse have been able to discuss the book with his father, a ‘retired military chaplain’, without being shouted at or abused?
• His sheltered upbringing may have prevented him from being exposed to multiple different belief systems that would have built up his mental ability to deal with uncertainty and doubt.
• It is also possible that he was suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness like depression or anxiety that he masked by sheltering in his religious observance.

There are a few points in the article which I will also answer:

“One of his friends, and his uncle (they did not know each other) both told me that Jesse called them hours before he took his life and that he had lost all hope because he was convinced that God did not exist, and this book was the cause,” Keith Kilgore told WND.

Religion was clearly a pillar of Jesse’s identity. I can understand why his spirits were broken by a book that convinced him that his religious beliefs were illogical and that his past observance had been a waste of time.

Does this mean that the correct course of action was to kill himself? Of course not! Jesse clearly drew the wrong conclusions from the book. Here are some conclusions that a person of healthy mind could have made:

• “I was misguided, but it was not my fault – I was brought up that way.”
• “I am glad I found this out at a young age”
• “I can live out the rest of my life free of unnecessary restraints”
• “I can be still be a kind, virtuous person – even more so, as I am now doing what I personally think is right, and not just because I fear the wrath of god”
• “I will talk this over with my local priest or a counsellor and see what they think”
• “I can still maintain my relationships with my family and friends by going to church and celebrate religous holidays with them”

He was pretty much an atheist, with no belief in the existence of God (in any form) or an afterlife or even in the concept of right or wrong,” the relative wrote. “I remember him telling me that he thought that murder wasn’t wrong per se, but he would never do it because of the social consequences – that was all there was – just social consequences

Absence of religion does not imply that there is no morality. For example, the Golden rule ’Do unto others as you would have others do unto you’ has a solid logical basis and does not need a god to back it up.

If one reads the Bible (and many other religious texts), there are in fact plenty of examples of religiously sanctioned murder that are considered highly unacceptable and immoral in secular western societies, e.g. the stoning to death of homosexuals, idolaters and others.

“I’m all for academic freedom,” Keith Kilgore said. “What I do have a problem with is if there’s going to be academic freedom, there has to be academic balance.

“They were undermining every moral and spiritual value for my [son],” he said. “They ought to be held accountable.”

He suggested the moral is for Christians simply to abandon public schools wholly.

I’m glad that he supports academic balance – unfortunately in this case the balance came in the form of Richard Dawkin’s book - a large undigestible chunk, too big for Jesse to swallow after being brought up immersed in religious dogma. If he wanted proper balance, it should have happened from a young age.

It is the job of a responsible education system to present truthful information and teach the ability to discern fact from fiction. Moral and ‘spiritual’ values need not be based on falsehood.

During my childhood, I was educated in an Australian public school. On Friday’s, we would have a 1-hr period set aside for religous education, where representatives of various faiths would come in and teach those who followed their respective religions. Why can’t religious schools have a weekly 1hr period where an atheist can put forward their case?

“Here’s another thing,” he continued. “If my son was a professing homosexual, and a professor challenged him to read [a book called] ‘Preventing Homosexuality’… If my son was gay and [the book] made him feel bad, hopeless, and he killed himself, and that came out in the press, there would be an outcry.

“He would have been a victim of a hate crime and the professor would have been forced to undergo sensitivity training, and there may have even been a wrongful death lawsuit.

I find this most amusing. American Christian churches frown upon homosexuality, don’t they? And there are books on preventing homosexuality that are readily available, aren’t there?

In order for a book to be implicated in a hate crime, the book would have to incite readers to illegally discriminate against or mistreat people. Does Dawkin’s book advocate such a view? I haven’t read it, but I don’t think it did.

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As an outsider I will make the following comments:

It appears that McCain’s faux pas was having Sarah Palin as his running mate. In my opinion, the Republican’s decision to have a female vice president was a gimmick needed to counter the Democrat’s choice of a black president, i.e. promoting the emancipation of black people vs promoting the emancipation of women. Unfortunately, the Republicans did not appear to choose a suitably qualified person and Palin quickly became an object of ridicule in the media.

Considering the current financial crisis and ongoing international conflicts, the incumbent party would have needed to make a superhuman effort to retain power – that made things easier for the Democrats.

I do hope that Barack Obama will prove to be a good leader and not just the outcome of an ‘affirmative action’ mindset.

My concerns at the moment are that the new Government will go soft on fighting religious fundamentalism and preventing the nuclear arming of fanatical regimes like Iran. Russia and China may continue to gain power and influence, unhindered by US intervention.

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Most media coverage has sought to educate the public as to what short-selling is and debate whether the growth of the practice is a cause or merely a symptom of the financial crisis gripping the world. Questions have also been raised as to whether it should be permitted or not.

Despite this, I have not seen anybody attempt to explain how short-selling has been abused in the last year to lead us to the situation we have today.

This article aims to uncover how short-selling has been abused as a tool of market manipulation and deception on the Australian Markets (the ASX). Before continuing, it is essential that you understand the following terms: short-selling, hedge fund, short-position, long-position, margin calls and stop-loss order.

The Swindle in a Nutshell

Hedge funds and other large short-term speculators have been short-selling stocks in vulnerable companies without disclosure, using stock borrowed from investment funds with large portfolios, with the intention of triggering margin calls and stop-loss orders to further propel the fall and cause a collapse in market confidence, allowing them to buy back stocks at bargain basement prices and make massive profits at everyone else’s expense.

Short-Selling in Australia

Prior to the last Sunday, short-selling could be carried out in two ways:

• Naked shorting – placing a sell order, without having any shares to deliver
• Covered shorting – selling shares that have been borrowed from another party, to be returned at a later date

Naked shorting was the most restricted – it was only permitted in specific leading large-cap stocks, and the number of short positions was supposed to be limited to 10% of the shares on issue in the stock. Brokers were always supposed to report their clients’ naked short positions to the ASX, and prevent them from opening prohibited ones.

In practice, if a naked position was opened and closed on the same day, these restrictions would be almost  impossible to enforce. Even when naked short positions were properly reported, the only people who would know would be other brokers who receive the complete market depth information from the ASX, unlike most retail investors who receive only a limited subset.

In contrast, covered short-selling using borrowed stock went largely unreported. To the rest of the market, a covered short is indistinguishable from a regular sell order, as the stock is ultimately delivered to the buyer at settlement. The only parties who know the true origin of those shares are the stock broker that initiated the sale, and the party who lent the shares.

The Origin of Borrowed Shares

One can borrow shares from anyone prepared to lend them.

Hedge funds usually borrow stock from investment funds with large long-term holdings. The biggest stock lenders are superannuation (retirement) funds, who receive fees in exchange for this service. It has been reported that for some fund managers, 30% of all their holdings are being lent out at any point in time.

One could say that that fund managers are allowing their investors’ assets to be used as a weapon against them. Most people who have their superannuation invested in shares are completely unaware that their holdings are being lent out in this manner.

The Avalanche Effect

If someone sells enough shares in a given stock in a sufficiently large quantity, it will overwhelm the bidders and force the market price down. As the share price falls, there is an increasing probability that margin calls and stop-loss orders will be triggered, further adding to selling pressure, creating an avalanche-like effect, causing the share price to fall even further.

The only way to counter a false oversupply caused by undiclosed shorting is for someone to know, or suspect that something fishy is going on, and fight back by buying. In this currently depressed market, not many people would have the stomach for that action. Most participants would interpret a sudden increase in selling as a precursor to the announcement of bad news to the market.

Vulnerable Shares

To maximise the likelihood of success, the hedge fund must choose a share that is vulnerable to this kind of manipulation. The best candidates are:

• Mid to large cap shares in companies that are commonly held as long-term investments
• Shares with good liquidity – a large daily volume traded, to ensure that the hedge fund can enter and exit their position quickly.
• Shares in companies who have rivals that have announced bad news, which could be perceived to affect their sector as a whole. For example, the Investment Bank Babcock and Brown’s (BNB) recent troubles that may have provoked rumours and speculation about their rival Macquarie Bank (MQG) whose shares experienced wild volatility recently.
• Those companies who are experiencing difficulties or are in negotiations with creditors or buyers, e.g. ABC Learning.
• Shares in companies that margin lenders lend against and are are available for trading by CFD providers – that maximises the opportunities for triggering margin-calls and stop-loss orders, fuelling the avalanche of selling.

It is also possible for someone to intentionally spread false rumours to create a fall. Whilst this is effective, it is illegal and could result in prosecution, and it is not strictly necessary if the above steps are followed.

The Aftermath

This swindle results in a number of detrimental effects. Many of these are of course typical of any sort of wide-spread market manipulation.

Short-term Effects:

• Investors are forced to exit long-term positions that they would otherwise keep and take losses at artifically depressed prices. Margin lenders may choose to remove these stocks from their ‘allowed stock lists’, forcing geared investors to pay out the entire debt on the share.
• Triggering of clauses in commercial contracts that are conditional on the value or performance of shares in the company that has been ‘attacked’. This usually results in a win/lose situation for the parties to the contract. Examples: Cancellation of dividend reinvestment plans, derailing takeover bids and mergers

Long-term Effects:

• Loss of morale amongst employees of the companies whose shared have been manipulated, as many employess receive shares or stock options as part of their remuneration.
• Loss of faith in the integrity of the stock market
• Increased bearish sentiment
• Depressed economy and business confidence

Long-Term Remedies

Assuming that short-selling will be permitted again, the following remedies may prevent a recurrence of what has been happening:

• Making identical information available to all participants

 All participants in the stock market should be entitled to obtain the same level of market depth information, whether they be stock brokers or retail investors.

• Complete disclosure of all short positions

If a party is opening a short position, everybody should be able to see this this when viewing the market depth. For example, if I place an sell order to short 10,000 BHP shares at $40, this would appear in the market depth on on the offer side, with a symbol ‘S’ printed next to the quantity, so people know that I am not just a normal shareholder disposing of my stock.

At least once a day, the ASX should publish the total number of short positions in a given stock to allow participants to view the degree of bearish sentiment. This is already done for financial derivatives like options and futures. There is no reason why this should not be done for shares.

• Banning of Naked Shorting

People who wish to short-sell a stock should be limited to the quantity of shares that have arranged to borrow in advance, even if their intention is to perform a day-trade. This would prevent attempts to ‘flood’ the market.

• Accountable Stock Lending

Investors should be able to choose whether their fund managers lend their stock out to other parties. If an investor chooses to allow this, then they should receive their fair share of these profits as part of their income distribution.

Devil’s Advocate (Responses to Expected Criticism)

1.  Could the same argument be not be made about margin lending? After all, this allows people to buy shares with money they do not have, and many people do this for short-term gain as well.

The physical market is by definition asymmetric. There are a finite number of shares issued in a company, and people can either own some or not own it. The above logic would only apply if there were an equal number of long and short positions in the market.

The opposite of a stop-loss order is called a start-gain order, and there are very few of those.

This in contrast to the options and futures derivatives markets which are zero-sum games played between counterparties with opposing views.

2. Is this a conspiracy theory?

No, just an example of how intelligent people can find ways to exploit weaknesses in a system for their own personal gain. Think of it as cheating.

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For those of us outside the USA, we can poke fun at both sides.

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The US Democratic Senator for Ohio, Dennis Kicinich explained his own reasons for rejecting the bailout in an interview with the community media network, Demoracy Now!.

I agree with the need to stabilize the market, but it should be done in a way that is fair to the American public. Just as when a criminal is released on bail, he or she is subject to stringent conditions, so should the corporations being bailed out.

If a corporation wishes to receive some kind of Government assistance, e.g. the Government taking over its bad debts, there is no way that they can be permitted to keep any of the ‘booty’. Possible conditions could include the following:

• NO payouts for executives that choose to resign or retire
• Cancellation of all outstanding stock options issued to executives
• Any stock issued to executives in the last 5 years should be returned to the corporation
• Confiscation of personal assets purchased with bonuses awarded to executives over the last 5 years

This of course should happen independently alongside a comprehensive investigation of all lending and risk management practices with criminal charges laid against those suspected of fraud.

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For those not in the know, short selling is the act of selling stock one does not own, with the aim of buying it back at a lower price and profiting from the difference. This strategy is used to make money in a falling market, or when one expects a fall in the near future.

Large hedge funds have been blamed for abusing short selling to manipulate the market and contributing to the deterioration of world stock prices. 

The US ban applies to 799 stocks, and will initially last for 10 days, but may be extended. The UK ban applies to 32 companies and will last until the beginning of January 2009.

In Australia, our own so-called regulator ASIC has stated that we already have restrictions on short selling. Many people would consider this laughable.

I have an article that’s been sitting on the back-burner concerning my opinion of the role of short selling in the world stockmarket turmoil. It will follow next.

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Google News erroneously reprinted an old article from 2002 concerning United Airlines, which faced deep financial problems at the time. This caused a run on its NASDAQ-listed stock UAL, leading to its share price falling from $12 to $3, after which the stock was suspended from trading. This caused a drop in its market capitalisation of $1.14 billion. The stock has since recovered to over $10, but its market capitalisation is still down over $300 million from before the old article was published.

Google News regularly searches and indexes online news sites around the world. In turn, many other online news sites grab headline from Google News. The automated nature of this process provides many opportunities for false information to be widely disseminated.

With the growth of Social Bookmarking sites and News Aggregators, people wishing to manipulate the market, or spread any kind of propaganda now have a very powerful tool at their disposal.

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But does this reality make the anthropogenic global climate change believers start having some doubts?

Of course not! It appears that they now say that a combination of phenomena – the La Niña effect and “Atlantic Multidecadal Information” will buy us another decade or so of unusually cold temperatures - plenty of time to concoct a new explanation to resolve their past inconsistencies.

Related posts:

1. ClimateGate: What It Means ‘ClimateGate’ is the name given to the controversy surrounding the leaking...

In summary, a Palestinian Arab man, Khalil Hanun, was imprisoned after refusing to vacate a property that a court ruled, was owned by somebody else. Oh, and the other party happened to be Jewish.

In any normal country, when a squatter or bad tenant refuses to leave following an eviction order, would this person not expect to be arrested, fined or imprisoned? And would this normally be considered newsworthy? No it wouldn’t, but standards are different when the action involves Israel.

The only valid, objective questions essential to resolving this matter are:

1. Did the group of Jewish people purchase the property from the Ottoman Turk authorities who were sovereign at the time? Yes or No?

2. Under what law or capacity did the UN Relief and Works Agency act when giving the Palestinian Arabs  possession of the land, considering that it was occupied by Jordan at the time?

The answers to these two questions are sufficient to determine the outcome of this case, without introducing emotive racist or nationalist arguments.

But if Mr Koutsoukis were truly interested in balance, he may also have wished to mention the following:

• Jersualem was a united city until one half was captured by Jordan (formerly Transjordan) during the 1948 war, following their decision to take part in the Arab attack on the newly declared state of Israel. Jordan annexed the area in 1949, but this was not internationally recognised, except by Pakistan and Great Britain.
• The area, Sheikh Jarrah, was historically a Jewish neighbourhood until Arab rioters drove them out in the 1920′s. Jordan drove out the Jewish inhabitants from the remaining part of Jerusalem under their control during the 1948 war.
• Israel recaptured Jerusalem at the end of the 6-day war in 1967, many of the neighbourhoods that were rebuilt are in fact former Jewish areas.

I do not know all the facts, so I will keep an open mind. I wish Mr Koutsakis and his ilk would do the same.

Updated 8:09pm, 19-8-2008: Other sources on the net refer to them as the ‘Al-Kurd family’.

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In November 2003, he was arrested at the airport, as he was leaving Bangladesh on his way to a conference in Israel promoting co-existence between Muslims and Jews, and has been imprisoned ever since.

His has been accused of being “anti-Islamic” and “defaming Bangladesh”. Anti-Israel sentiment is strong in this impoverished country, despite the fact that Bangladesh has little to do with Israel, neither sharing any borders, nor being an Arab country.

I hope those civil rights advocates in the mainstream media who rush to defend the rights of captured Al-Qaida members and other fanatics, may spare just a few words for Mr Choudhury.

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