This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com:

• In historic shift, Mahmoud Abbas gives up 'right of return' for Palestinians
• Arab public opinion turns dramatically against Iran
• New charges put Barclays at center of climate change financial scam
• Global warming unchanged since 1997

In historic shift, Mahmoud Abbas gives up 'right of return' for Palestinians

In an interview on Israeli television, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas effectively gave up the "right of return" in negotiations with Israel on a Palestinian state. During the 1948 war between Jews and Arabs, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled their homes in what is now Israel, and many of their descendants still live in refugee camps in countries in the region. The "right of return" is a demand that all of these refugees should be allowed to return to their ancestral homes, and this has been a constant but unrealistic demand in all negotiations. 

However, Abbas was asked about his birthplace, Safed, now a town in northern Israel. He said: "I am a refugee but I am living in Ramallah. I believe that the West Bank and Gaza is Palestine. And the other parts is Israel. I want to see Safed. It is my right to see it but not to live there."

By saying that it is no longer his right to live in Safed, he's essentially conceding that the right of return is unrealistic.

However, a number of other Arab leaders decried Abbas' statement. Gaza's Hamas ruler Ismail Haniyeh said: "It is not possible for any person, regardless of who he is ... to give up a hand's width of this Palestinian land, or to give up the right of return to our homes from which we were forced out."

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said:

"Abbas’s statements where he considered that Palestine is just the occupied territories in 1967 are unpatriotic statements and means cancelation for the 'right of return.' These statements reflect Abbas’s culture and will never reflect the stand of the Palestinian nation."

As we explained in "24-Oct-12 World View -- Qatar breaks Gaza blockade and replaces Iran as Hamas's benefactor" recently, Hamas is displacing the Palestinian Authority as the most important representatives of the Palestinians in the Arab world. BBC and AP

Arab public opinion turns dramatically against Iran

When analyzing current events from the point of view of Generational Dynamics, I'm less interested in what politicians say than in what generations of people think, as it's the latter that will determine events. Particularly important to note is a dramatic change in public opinion, when it occurs, because it could portend a war or other change in public policies. 

A Cairo conference last week, widely covered in Arab television and print media, examined the "Iranian Agenda in the Arab World." In the past, most Arab public opinion was sympathetic to Iran, perceiving it as a victim of the "Great Satan" (United States) and Israel.

But this sympathy for Iran has entirely vanished in the Arab world, as a result of Iran's support of Syria's president Bashar al-Assad, and his regime of torture and extermination of innocent Arab women and children. The general view in the Arab world is that there is no excuse whatsoever to support al-Assad, and such support couldn not even be justified if it served the purpose of resisting Israeli occupation.

The conference concluded that Iran and Israel are two faces of the same coin:

• They're both occupying Arab lands.
• They both humiliate Palestinians.
• They both violate all kinds of international laws.
• They both use espionage and spies to destabilize Arab countries.
• Both countries operate with a Mafioso mentality in the region.
• Neither is interested in the prosperity of the region.
• They both strongly oppose any comprehensive and just peace, and play hard to prevent it.

Currently Iran occupies islands that belong to the UAE, claims that Bahrain in its entirety is an Iranian province that must be taken back, uses its arms and militias as proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain, Palestine, Kuwait, Syria and other countries, divides Arab societies on sectarian faults and inflames sectarian sentiments. 

This is a good time to repeat my expectation that in the coming Clash of Civilizations world war, Iran will be allied with India, Israel, Russia, and the West, while the Sunni Arab countries will be allied with Pakistan and China. Journal of Turkish Weekly

New charges put Barclays at center of climate change financial scam

A couple of days ago I posted "30-Oct-12 World View -- Banksters desperately seek to save Europe's carbon trading system", relating the "climate change" financial scam to manipulation of Libor by Barclays Bank. The article focused on the plan by Barclays bankster Louis Redshaw to create hundreds of trillions of dollars in carbon trade derivative securities, and use them to make more money than Barclays was making with interest rate swaps, which Barclays was manipulating by manipulating the Libor rate in the 2005-2008 time period. 

On Wednesday, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proposed fining Barclays $470 million for a different scam: During the years 2006-2008, Barclays was manipulating the prices of electricity in California. They would take a daily loss on the trading of physical electricity in the California markets, but make a lot more money in "financial swaps" -- synthetic securities that were also tied to the prices of electricity. So they used two fraudulent transactions to bet against themselves. They would lose a little money by "crapping on" physical electricity trades, and they would make a lot more money by collecting on the synthetic security trades.

The Barclays traders were veterans of Mirant, one of the companies involved with the Enron scandal that was fined hundreds of millions of dollars for manipulating power prices in the California power crisis of 2000-2001.

So now we have the following:

• Barclays was manipulating Libor in 2007 to make money on interest rate swaps.
• Barclays was manipulating energy prices in 2007 to make money on financial swaps related to energy.
• Barclays wanted to make money in 2007 by selling financial swaps related to carbon trading (which could also have been related to their manipulation of energy prices)

So Barclays Bank apparently was at the center of the whole "climate change" financial scam. Undoubtedly scammers like Al Gore were poised to make millions if they could get this trading scheme off the ground.

The one thing that the scam needed most of all was United States passage of the "cap and trade" law that would pour billions of dollars into the banksters' scheme. In 2007, the climate change scammers were absolutely furious at President Bush, and were screaming at the tops of their lungs about how he was sabotaging the world and humanity for not backing the law. But what they were really furious about is that he was sabotaging their million dollar commissions and bonuses. In reality, the climate change scammers couldn't have cared less if some South Pacific islanders drowned; in fact, they'd welcome it, because killing off a few islanders would only make them more money.

I think that this is potentially a very big international news story, but no one in the media is going to investigate these allegations because the climate change myth and Al Gore have achieved god-like status, and I certainly don't have the resources or contacts to investigate it in depth myself, as much as I'd like to. Reuters and U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (PDF) and FT Alphaville and Reuters

Global warming unchanged since 1997

There has been no net global warming in the last 16 years and, in fact, the global temperature today is the same as it was in 1997. Climate change scammers always talk about how the Arctic is getting warmer, but they ignore the Antarctic, which has been setting records for coldness and sea ice. Basically, the climate change scammers and the mainstream media are lying about scientific data, by purposely omitting the Antarctic from their claims. Daily Mail and Forbes

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