Acharit HaYamim

Could these people get any more hypocritical or creepier?

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2008/03/10/sot.lewis.mich.fl.should.count.cnn

George Habash, murderer of dozens, dies and the admiration of David Hirst of the Guardian knows no bounds:

In his later years, George Habash, who has died of a heart attack aged 81 or 82, was often known as "the conscience of the Palestine revolution". He had been one of the very earliest founding fathers of that movement, which pioneered armed struggle and revolutionary violence as the sole means of liberating Palestine. Since it first emerged, in the 1960s, as a potent new force on the Middle East stage, the movement suffered all manner of vicissitudes, and its ambitions were eventually reduced, almost out of recognition, to an endless series of surrenders to the exigencies of Pax Americana.

I feel bad encouraging anyone to actually make it through this post-revolutionary drivel, but the end of this just has to be read to be believed:

He stood down as PFLP leader in 2000, four years before the death of Arafat, and six years before the Islamicists of Hamas won their electoral victory. Pax Americana, meanwhile, continues to make paltry progress in its regional diplomacy, and many of those who now so grudgingly support it may well in due course conclude that the "conscience of the revolution" had always been right in opposing it - and the whole concept of Palestinian moderation.

For the Guardian, the problem is always that the Palestinians, even the self-described terrorists among them, are just too damn moderate.

"For the first time, passengers in Germany can fly completely in the nude."

Oh, thank god.

Where else could a cheat who devastated a large national institution/employer be considered a hero? From today's Observer:

He is the man who nearly broke the bank ... and who is fast becoming a hero to millions of his compatriots.

Jérôme Kerviel, the 31-year-old trader whose fraudulent stock market transactions last week cost his employer, Société Générale, £3.7bn, was yesterday in a Paris police station after being taken into custody around 2pm by French financial police, who drove him past journalists and photographers waiting at the gates hidden in the back of a Renault. His face has not been glimpsed in public since the scandal broke; it's now known that he had left his own flat and laid low at his brother Olivier's. His home and his workplace were both searched by police this weekend.

Lawyers for Kerviel said yesterday that their client was 'entirely prepared to co-operate with the authorities'.

France has been polarised by the unlikely figure of the taciturn, clean-cut man behind the biggest 'rogue trader' scandal of all time. Some 300 miles west of Paris, in his home village of Pont l'Abbé on the Brittany peninsula, Kerviel is a hero - particularly with the ladies in the hair salon his mother used to own.

'He was your ideal son-in-law,' said 62-year-old Martine Le Pohon, who remembers Jérôme helping his mother out on Saturdays at Un Monde Imagin' Hair. 'And if it turns out that he has stood up to the system to the tune of €5m, well, as far as I am concerned, that makes him even more ideal.'

Maryvonne Even, 40, said Kerviel was a scapegoat. 'He was probably caught fiddling - a bit - and the bosses decided to blame him for all their losses,' she said.

But this is not just local Breton solidarity. In France, where there is profound popular distrust for big finance, strong opposition to 'international capitalism' and a belief in the 'French model' as opposed to 'savage Anglo-Saxon liberalism', the views of the ladies in Pont l'Abbé are widespread.

For Isabelle Mercier, 44, queuing outside a Société Générale branch in Paris, the 'rich and the powerful' always find someone to blame: 'Anyone who is a threat to them is eliminated one way or another.' Mohammed Benali, a market trader at the nearby Marché d'Aligre, agreed. 'It is time the bosses and the rich were taken down a peg,' he said.

Some go further. The French Communist party compared Kerviel to Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish army officer whose disgrace after being unjustly accused of espionage is one of the greatest and most divisive causes célèbres in the nation's recent history. On the internet, scores of admiring comments have been posted on impromptu websites. The affair has been politicised further by the revelation that Kerviel had been an activist for France's ruling right-wing UMP party. The government of Nicolas Sarkozy, already under fire for being too close to major financial figures, has been forced on to the defensive. For Michel Sapin, the Socialist party's economy spokesman, the scandal was 'the symbol of mad money'.

Details continue to emerge of how Kerviel became the biggest individual financial fraudster in history. Described as a 'fragile soul with an extraordinary talent for dissimulation' by his bosses, he grew up in an impeccably kept modern semi-detached house with a dainty rosebed and white picket fence on the outskirts of Pont l'Abbé.

Kerviel's mother, Marie-Jose, sold her salon two years ago when her husband, a metalwork teacher, died from cancer. His death badly affected the young man, whose wife left him shortly afterwards. Neighbours said Mrs Kerviel had gone to Paris to see her son 'several days ago'.

On his most recent CV, obtained by The Observer, Kerviel lists his hobbies as sailing and judo. Philippe Orhant, his former judo teacher, described the young man as 'a very centred, focused personality'. Nicolas Gessant, a former schoolmate, said Kerviel had not been particularly brilliant at school. 'He was a good mate; fun. But it was when he started studying economics for the baccalauréat that his talent came out,' Gessant said. Kerviel studied at Nantes University and then at Lyon. Joining 'SocGen' in 2000, he spent two years in the back office learning about security systems. From 2002 to 2004, he was a 'trading assistant', working on the complex European derivative products SocGen had pioneered.

'He spoke very little, answering questions with nothing more than a yes or a no,' said one colleague. Yet he rose steadily, becoming a trader in March 2004 on the relatively low salary of £75,000. According to friends, he had not taken a holiday since last April.

Daniel Bouton, Société Générale's chief executive, described Kerviel's elaborate efforts to hide his activities as being like a 'mutating virus'. 'The nature of his fictitious and fraudulent operations were constantly evolving,' Bouton said in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro published yesterday. 'And when the control systems detected an anomaly, he managed to convince control officers that it was nothing more than a minor error.'

The crisis broke nine days ago, on a Friday evening. Kerviel had already left the La Défense offices of the bank for his modest flat in the upmarket western Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine when he was called on his mobile phone. An anomaly in one of his trades had been discovered. Other such problems had been discovered before but the young trader had always been able to explain them away as banal arithmetical errors. Unaware of the gravity of the situation, managers arranged a meeting with Kerviel for the next morning. At 3am on Sunday, Jean-Pierre Mustier, head of SocGen's investment banking unit, finally began to realise the extent of the disaster. Kerviel had exposed the bank to potential losses of tens of billions. Throughout Sunday all the trader's transactions were traced and at 6pm the board was convened and informed. The decision was taken to close the positions Kerviel had taken as soon as possible.

'It was like The Towering Inferno. On Friday they realised there was a fire in the basement. On Saturday and Sunday they realised how big it was. Then they called the fire brigade and from Monday to Wednesday everyone worked at putting it out,' said a source close to the bank.

Even at this late stage, the losses could have been limited. According to bank sources, Kerviel had begun to take increasingly risky positions, betting on the movements of the market in 2007, covering himself by inventing fictitious transactions that would, if they had actually existed, balanced the risks he was taking. Constantly staying one step ahead of the bank's own security staff through luck, guile and his own knowledge of the systems that were meant to be monitoring him, he would have actually made the bank money if he had closed his positions on 31 December.

Kerviel's motives are still unclear. Some have argued he was hoping to boost his bonus - a mere £1,200 last year - others that he was involved in a massive insider-trading ring. For the moment, there is no evidence of either.

Bouton called Kerviel's motives 'incomprehensible'. Come January, it appears Kerviel had begun to deliberately take losing positions, perhaps hoping to rebalance the books before discovery of his unauthorised profits. But he had not bargained for the collapse of the markets in the first days of 2008. His position had suddenly become a potential loss of bankrupting scale.

For SocGen, secrecy was paramount. If what was happening had leaked, they faced a run on the bank and total disaster. French regulatory authorities were informed - but not the government itself. The bank maintains that it began to unwind the positions taken by Kerviel on Monday morning, a delicate operation that continued until late on Wednesday. If the markets had risen on Monday, SocGen would have lost relatively little. But they did not. Asian markets plunged, the European markets followed and, with Wall Street shut, SocGen found itself selling at a growing loss. By Wednesday, with the mini-crash staunched by the American interest rate announcement, the bank had lost huge sums of money but avoided total disaster.

French officials last week disputed accusations that the scandal had at least aggravated the falls that shook markets last week - or that it was partly responsible for the American Federal Reserve's decision to slash interest rates.

In Pont l'Abbé, the sheer sums involved shocked people as much as the involvement of a local boy. In the hair salon, Nadine Kergna, 29, was unconvinced of Kerviel's guilt. 'I have friends who went to school with Jérôme. They just can't believe it, because basically he was very very ordinary and this sum of money is beyond our comprehension.'

It is what happened to these 'incomprehensible sums' that French prosecutors are now trying to understand.

Astonishingly, it could have all been so different

For traders, timing is everything. And Jérôme Kerviel almost got away with it. If he had closed his trading positions on Friday 18 January - before last week's wild stock market gyrations - one of the world's largest banks would not be nursing a €4.9bn loss today. And, some financial experts believe, the US Federal Reserve would not have made its biggest cut in interest rates for 25 years last week.

Kerviel was a junior trader, earning less than £75,000 a year. His job was to trade equity index futures - bets on future movements of stock markets. Ordinarily, such trading is low risk and the maximum any of his trades could lose the bank was $20m. This weekend an altogether different picture of Kerviel - hitherto portrayed as a hapless amateur way out of his depth - is emerging.

The allegations are that the trader made a series of unauthorised trades gambling on future share prices throughout 2007. He used knowledge of processing trades gained from having been a back office clerk to set up trades using false identities. He then allegedly hacked into the bank's computer system to circumvent the compliance team that monitor traders' accounts .

Thanks to his unauthorised trades last year, he was sitting on a profit of about €1bn. This month, to avoid being found out, he made massive bets on share price movements which he hoped would lose enough money to wipe out his profits. Unfortunately for Société Générale - and global stock markets - these bets backfired spectacularly.

With fears over recession and the credit crunch, pundits forecast share prices would continue to fall at the start of the year. So to cancel out his profits, in early January Kerviel deliberately bet on markets rising. When SocGen discovered his fraud last weekend, his positions were in the red by about €1.5bn - similar to the profit he had made the previous year.

Details of all his trades are not known. But if he had closed his bets before Monday's extraordinary market plunges, it's possible he could have got away with his deception. Having uncovered the fraud, SocGen resolved to 'close' - or settle - his bets on Monday. It could not have chosen a worse day. Stock markets suffered their largest falls since the terror attacks of 11 September. Kerviel had bet against markets falling, but could not have anticipated they would fall so sharply.

With so many traders trying to cancel Kerviel's bets, it's likely the bank contributed to the panic. SocGen only announced the fraud once it had closed all Kerviel's remaining positions on Wednesday. The bank has been criticised for not sitting out the turmoil and quietly unwinding the trades once markets recovered. But it's unlikely SocGen could have kept the fraud secret for long. If the losses had become public before the positions were closed, SocGen would have risked a run similar to that which paralysed Northern Rock.

Tim Webb, industrial editor

You go, Shirley:

Atlanta mayor takes political shot at Bill Clinton
During the MLK service, Franklin addresses Clinton's reference to Barack Obama's rise as a 'fairy tale'

By AARON GOULD SHEININ
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 01/21/08

With former President Bill Clinton standing not 20 feet in front of her, Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin took what appeared to be a political shot at the former president's comments about Barack Obama's candidacy.

Speaking at the 40th annual MLK commemorative service at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Franklin said the country is on the "cusp of turning the impossible into reality. Yes this is reality, not fantasy or fairy tales."

Clinton, in supporting his wife Hillary's bid for the Democratic nomination, recently took heat for using the term "fairy tale" to describe Obama's depiction of his stance on the war.

Franklin has endorsed Obama, who spoke from the same pulpit at Ebenezer on Sunday.

Today, after Franklin's remarks, the crowd of more than 2000 rose to its feet - except for Bill Clinton, who sat in his front pew seat and clapped politely.

Five seats to Clinton's left sat another former Arkansas govenor, Republican Mike Huckabee, also seeking his party's nomination as president. He stood at the end of Franklin's remarks.

During his address, Clinton responded to Franklin's remarks. "Mayor Franklin already took care of the political stuff. I wouldn't have said it quite the way she did but she got it all out there."

Earlier in her address, Franklin said the country was nearing a historic occasion when it could elect as president, "a former first lady, a Mormon, a Baptist preacher, and yes, a black man."

The first lady is Hillary Clinton, the Mormon is Republican Mitt Romney, the Baptist preacher is Huckabee, and the "black man" is Obama.

Yeah, bowl me over with a feather. From Commentary Magazine:

Joel Pollak (no relation) reports on his blog that Charles Enderlin, the France 2 television reporter implicated in the Mohammed al-Dura fabrication, admitted at a talk at Harvard last night that the famous scenes of Yasser Arafat donating blood after the 9/11 attacks were, like the footage of the IDF killing al-Dura, staged:

Enderlin said the event had been staged for the media to counteract the embarrassing television images of Palestinians celebrating in the streets after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.

The blood donation story made headlines around the world. It was reported by esteemed news agencies like the BBC, and photographs of Arafat lying with an outstretched arm ran on many front pages. But the whole scene was staged, Enderlin said. Arafat didn’t like needles, and so the doctor put a needle near his arm and agitated a bag of blood. The reporters took the requisite photographs.

Arafat, it’s worth noting, died in 2005 of AIDS, and it is thus a good thing that he didn’t actually donate blood. Is it possible that the reputation of the international press corps in Israel, especially its European members, could get any worse?

I understand the importance of internal context and the different cultural readings of events. Honest. For instance, some call the September 11 hijackers terrorists; others think they were just irritable flight school students, etc. Different approach. However, there is a fundamental level of objective logic that is required for useful discourse that one assumes transcends culture. For example, if I go to the bakery and ask for a new toilet, I would expect a fairly uniform reaction whether I am in Birmingham or Bucharest or Burj-al-Arab. Similarly, if I ask someone if they believe in Jesus and then they punch me in the face and say "no, I believe in Jesus", there is reason to believe either that the basic logic of the situation has escaped one of us, or I am in a Monty Python sketch.

Which makes reading the Arab press frustrating, to say the least.

Here's an article from today's Al-Jazeera online about Hezbollah Scout troops detailing some of their wholesome activities. In addition to the traditional physical fitness and computer skills training, the young cubs are educated in the finer points of anti-Israeli jihad and "martyrdom" operations.

Dr Bilal Naim, president of the Mahdi Scouts, told Al Jazeera that the group places importance on telling Scouts about the work of the Islamic Resistance, Hezbollah's armed wing.

"After 15 or 16 years old, we say to everybody that the Islamic Resistance is one of the foundations that defends against Israel and that the jihad [struggle] against Israel is one of the concepts of Islam," he said in the district of Haret Hreik, Beirut.

...

Some of the younger Scouts, quite unprompted by their adult leaders, told Al Jazeera that they were already certain of their loyalty to the party.

"We want to be good Muslims and defend our land against Israel," 14-year-old Adel Ahmar said.

His friend Hussien Hamade, also 14, said that he shared the same view.

"Al-Mahdi Scouts told us to be martyrs defending our land from all the countries that attack us," he said.

"We should defend our country through the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon and be martyrs finally."

All well and good. I was an active member of Bnei Akiva, which may not have been quite so vociferous about the actual murder/suicide part, but certainly made it clear that defending Israel and dying for its cause were noble endeavors. So we can all agree that we have a scouting organization that is focused on indoctrinating Lebanese youth in Hezbollah philosophy, right?

The claims of indoctrination have been rebuffed by the Scout group, which has called the report "an organised attack [which] aims at erasing the culture of the resistance," in its own published response.

See, this is what boggles my mind. This group has as its stated purpose indoctrinating children with pro-Hezbollah, um, doctrine. Yet if you acknowledge that fact, you are part of a Zionist cabal. How do these people function? When you order a coffee, do they throw it in your face? It's like "1984", just with less cool drugs.