The brave Pete Bethune has been given a two-year suspended for five years by a Japanese court. Pete was found guilty of assault - by throwing stink bombs made of rancid butter at the whalers – while outside the court there were protestors waving banners demanding that he should receive a tougher sentence. However, compared to the destruction of the vessel Andy Gil by whalers, his stink bombs are positively benign.
Sea Shepherd spent more than $500,000 defending Captain Bethune in an attempt to mitigate his sentence. He had been facing up to 15 years in prison, and after his suspended two-year sentence, he has now been deported back to New Zealand.
Pete has saved the lives of 528 whales and exposed the cowardice and brutality of Japanese whalers.
Recently, at the International Whaling Commission in Morocco, Japan tried to bribe members from small, poor countries in completely underhand and abhorrent ways - with call girls and money - a shocking example of how low the whalers will sink in their backward and revolting attempts to preserve this despicable practice. Surprisingly, even Barrack Obama was going to support the return of commercial whaling.
However, now that the world has spoken and rejected this, we need to close the loop holes that allow 'scientific whaling' to continue, and whale meat to find its way into Japanese shops.
Those small poor countries were join because of USA and UK bribed them. and that time Those SAMLL and POOR countires representative for IWC were all USA or UK citizen. USA and UK still were thinking those SAMLL POOR countries are theire colonies. Therefore those SMALL POOR countries started to talk owen opinion, USA UK start to insult SMALL POOR countries.
ReplyDeleteNo Eiji, you are missing the point. International news organisations, including Al Jazeera who are hardly apologists for the British/American cause reported:
ReplyDelete"The Sunday Times said it had evidence suggesting that six countries including Grenada and Ivory Coast were willing to sell their votes at the International Whaling Commission (IWC), in return for favours. [...] The other countries named by the paper are St Kitts and Nevis, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati and Guinea."
It has to be said that NONE of the six "Small, Poor Countries" did sell their votes, and so nothing we wrote can be seen as derogatory towards them.
If the claims are true, Japan has behaved despicably. However, it has to be said that Japan has denied the claims, and in Britain, (and indeed what remains of the British Empire) one of our main tenets of belief is the presumption of innocense. So, however high the evidence is heaped against them, an English Gentleman will always assume that someone is innocent until proven guilty.