Damn Champion or Damn Slimy?
Malaysia is really champion.

Given their weakness for theatrics and hyperbole, I was musing the other day as to what would they resort to this time in the spirit of the Anwar mattress-in-the-courtroom affair.  Well, they didn't disappoint: they produced a blog entry as evidence in an ICJ trial.

Wait, wait, it gets better: what's more, the blog itself is most likely fake.

Unsurprisingly, the photo that the Malaysians submitted as 'evidence' from the blog... is probably also fake.

This is the photo from the blog, that was submitted to the court (L) and the picture submitted by Singapore (R):


It is obvious that one of the photos was doctored, either to give the impression that Pedra Branca was closer to the mainland than it really is [blog photo fake], or that it is much further from the mainland than it really is [Singapore photo fake].  So which is which?

Simply Jean (in the link above) made a clever observation that in the latest entry, the anonymous author of the blog clearly plagiarised the Wikipedia entry on lighthouses, changing the name of 'Cape May Lighthouse' to 'Pulau Batu Puteh Lighthouse'.  But it's really shoddy plagiarism, because if you click on the link at Pulau Batu Puteh Lighthouse, it still goes to the Cape May Lighthouse entry at Wikipedia!  And it's so obvious that there is a hidden agenda behind the blog, because the rest of the entry was reproduced verbatim from Wikipedia, so why was there a need to change 'Cape May' to 'Pulau Batu Puteh', not even 'Pedra Branca', as the Wikipedia entry is titled?

Our AG Chao said, "This blog site is a most unusual one.  It was created only last month.  There is no information on the identity of the blogger and the photograph used by Malaysia was only put on the website on Nov 2, 2007, four days before the start of these oral proceedings."

That's not all; if you go at the blog in question, you will notice a few interesting things.

Firstly, the first entry in the blog was on 28 Oct 07.  Indeed, if you go to the user profile, you will see that, as AG Chao has said, it was only created in Oct 07, probably on the 28th—which is barely a week before the commencement of proceedings (presumably when Malaysia realised that their case was rather weak, perhaps?)

Secondly, there have only been 12 entries in the blog, with the last entry on 9 Nov 07.  However, the 12 entries are spread over 3 days, each about a week or so apart: 4 entries on 24 Oct (within 28 minutes), 7 on 2 Nov (within 15 minutes), and 1 on 9 Nov, which is the one plagiarised from Wikipedia.  In the past 1½ weeks since the last entry, there has been silence.

Thirdly, unlike what you would mostly expect of blogs, this blog contains absolutely nothing other than entries on lighthouses—indeed, the blog's username itself, Leuchtturm, means 'lighthouse' in German.  Of the 12 entries, only 2 of them have any form of text, of which one is the aforementioned plagiarised entry from Wikipedia, and the other is a short 4-paragraph 135-word entry on the history of lighthouses.

The remaining 10 entries consist of nothing other than photographs of lighthouses which are furthermore all uncaptioned—save one, Horsburgh, which is captioned as 'Pulau Batu Puteh Lighthouse' and not 'Horsburgh Lighthouse' [just to be nitpicky, there is a distinction: 'Pedra Branca/Pulau Batu Puteh' refers only to the island proper, the lighthouse is named 'Horsburgh Lighthouse'].

On this note, of the many thousands of lighthouses with "unique designs" that "reflect a country's culture and background", not a single lighthouse is featured twice—save one, Horsburgh, which is featured no less than THREE times.  "No two lighthouses [are] alike" indeed!

I would not be surprised if not a single entry will appear after 23 Nov 07, or perhaps after the ruling is delivered next year.

So, given the dodgey circumstances surrounding this blog site, from which Malaysia has submitted a photo as 'evidence', whose photograph submitted to the court is more likely to be the doctored one?  The only question that remains now is whether the Malaysians submitted the photograph from the blog bona fide, not knowing that it was doctored (which would be damn champion), or whether the Malaysians were aware or perhaps even were responsible for the photograph being doctored (in which case they would be unbelievably slimy).

Looking at the blog itself, I'd opt for the latter.  I have always known that Malaysian courtroom tactics were a joke, but I never thought they'd sink so low in an international court.

§ Technorati tags: darwin award; observations