Mordi Vanunu -

[Robicat]

I was staggered at Mordicai Vanunu's courage and strength in calling on the international community to address Israel's WMD, upon leaving prison after 18 years (11 in soliitary confinement).

A man of of faith and courage. To speak in the face of an oppressive state that has done a lot to attaempt to destroy him for daring to speak a truth that had been hidden by the state.

Pray that God will protect him from those who plot against him, and that outside prison he will continue to experience God's grace and truth.

 

[Rocinante]

Amen.

 

[Rocinante]

Whoever he is.

 

[Robicat]

Whoever he is.

Try google....

 

[Ebed-Yahweh]

I hope this helps:

'Proud' Vanunu vows to fight on

Mordechai Vanunu has been freed after an 18-year jail sentence for leaking Israel's atomic weapons secrets.
To jeers and cheers from a crowd at the southern Israeli prison, he said he was proud of his actions but had suffered "very cruel and barbaric treatment".

He said: "Israel doesn't need nuclear arms. My message today to the world is: Open Dimona reactor for inspections."

A Christian convert, Mr Vanunu's first stop was St George's Anglican cathedral in Jerusalem where he went to pray.

Mr Vanunu had emerged from Shikma prison in Askhelon shortly after 1200 (0900GMT) looking happy and waving to hundreds of Israeli and foreign supporters gathered outside the gates.


To those who are calling me a traitor, I say I am proud and happy to do what I did
Mordechai Vanunu

A smaller counter-demonstration by Israelis shouted abuse as he made Victory-V signs with both hands.
Answering questions in English from reporters, Mr Vanunu said he was "not totally free" because of the restrictions Israel had placed on him, including a ban on travel outside the country.

But he said he wanted to go to the United States, get married and start a family.

He said he had been treated harshly because of his conversion to Christianity and he no longer had any secrets to publish.


HAVE YOUR SAY
It's a citizen's duty to reveal the wrong doings of his country
Marc, Quebec, Canada

Restrictions

Despite his protestations, the authorities say Mr Vanunu still possesses information that could jeopardise Israel's security.

"He is a man sentenced to prison for treason and he has repeatedly said he will go back to his old behaviour... [Israel] has to take precautions to prevent that from happening," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Jonathan Peled.

Mr Vanunu is not allowed to have a passport, is forbidden to approach ports and airports, and has been told not to talk to foreigners without permission.


Mr Peled told the BBC that he was allowed to talk to the international media, as long as he did not talk about his work at the Dimona plant.
"We have to strike the correct balance between safeguarding his personal liberty and looking after Israel's national security interests," Mr Peled said.

On the basis of the information he gave to the UK's Sunday Times newspaper in 1986, analysts concluded Israel had scores of nuclear warheads.

Israel maintains a policy of "strategic ambiguity" about its supposed nuclear arsenal and it has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which would open Dimona up to international al scrutiny.

Supporters had gathered outside the jail, waving banners and calling Vanunu a "hero of peace". But many in Israel see him as a traitor who has endangered the country.

Israel said it could have placed much tougher post-release restrictions on Mr Vanunu - and the length of time the current regime will remain in force depends on his behaviour.


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/3645225.stm

Published: 2004/04/21 10:56:28 GMT

© BBC MMIV

 

[Tangnefedd]

I think he is a brave man.

A huge fuss is made of the supposed WMD's belonging to Iraq, by the US, yet they are happy for a state like Israel to have them, it doesn't make any sense!

 

[Ebed-Yahweh]

But wait, there's more:

Dimona Nuclear Reactor

An Israeli nuclear installation is located about ten kilometers to the south of Dimona, the Negev Nuclear Research Center. Its construction commmenced in 1958, with French assistance. The official reason given by the Israeli and French governments was to build a nuclear reactor to power a "desalination plant", in order to "green the Negev". The purpose of Dimona is widely assumed to be the manufacturing of nuclear weapons, and the majority of defence experts have concluded that it does in fact do that. However, the Israeli government refuses to confirm or deny this publicly, a policy it refers to as "ambiguity".

The Dimona reactor went on-line some time between 1962 and 1964, and with the enriched uranium produced there, perhaps together with some enriched uranium acquired through mysterious means (see Plumbat Operation), the Israel Defence Forces most probably had their first nuclear weapons ready before the Six-Day War. Although the Israeli government has always claimed it has been used for peaceful purposes, the United States overflew the site with U-2 aircraft to sample the air for radioactive by-products.

When the United States intelligence community discovered the purpose of Dimona in the early 1960s, it demanded that Israel agree to international inspections. Israel agreed, but on a condition that US, rather than IAEA, inspectors were used, and that Israel would receive advance notice of all inspections.

Some claim that because Israel knew the schedule of the inspectors' visits, it was able to hide the alleged purpose of the site (manufacturing of nuclear weapons) from the inspectors, by installing temporary false walls and other devices before each inspection. The inspectors eventually informed the U.S. government that their inspections were useless, due to Israeli restrictions on what areas of the facility they could inspect. In 1969, the United States terminated the inspections.

In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, a former technican at Dimona, revealed to the media some evidence of Israel's nuclear program. Israeli agents kidnapped him from Italy, drugged him and transported him to Israel, and an Israeli court then tried him in secret on charges of treason and espionage, and sentenced him to eighteen years imprisonment. At the time of Vanunu's arrest, The Times reported that Israel had material for approximately 20 hydrogen bombs and 200 fission bombs. Israel acquired submarine-launched nuclear missiles by late 2003.[1]

Dimona's reactor was defended by batteries of Patriot missiles in anticipation of strikes from Iraq in 2002–3.

(From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimona)

 

[Ebed-Yahweh]

This is interesting also:

Plumbat Operation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Plumbat Operation (1968)

A combined Lekem-Mossad operation, codenamed "Plumbat," was undertaken in support of the Israeli nuclear weapons effort. A German freighter disappeared along with its cargo of some 200 tons of uranium oxide (Yellowcake). When the freighter reappeared in a Turkish port, the cargo was missing; it had been transferred at sea to an Israeli ship. The name Plumbat came from the labelling of the oil drums that were used to transport the uranium oxide. Plumbat meaning lead.

 

[jameseb]

I think he is a brave man.

A huge fuss is made of the supposed WMD's belonging to Iraq, by the US, yet they are happy for a state like Israel to have them, it doesn't make any sense!

There's a HUGE difference there: Iraq has used its WMD's; Israel hasn't.

 

[MediocrityInAction]

There's a HUGE difference there: Iraq has used its WMD's; Israel hasn't.

And if it no longer has any, it never will.

 

[Ebed-Yahweh]

Israel is currently the only confirmed nuclear power in the Middle East.

The actual size and composition of Israel's nuclear stockpile is uncertain, and is the subject of various estimates and reports. It is widely reported that Israel had two bombs in 1967, and that Prime Minister Eshkol ordered them armed in Israel's first nuclear alert during the Six-Day War. It is also reported that, fearing defeat in the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Israelis assembled 13 twenty-kiloton atomic bombs.

Israel could potentially have produced a few dozen nuclear warheads in the period 1970-1980, and might have possessed 100 to 200 warheads by the mid-1990s. In 1986 descriptions and photographs of Israeli nuclear warheads were published in the London Sunday Times of a purported underground bomb factory. The photographs were taken by Mordechai Vanunu, a dismissed Israeli nuclear technician. His information led some experts to conclude that Israel had a stockpile of 100 to 200 nuclear devices at that time.

By the late 1990s the U.S. Intelligence Community estimated that Israel possessed between 75-130 weapons, based on production estimates. The stockpile would certainly include warheads for mobile Jericho-1 and Jericho-2 missiles, as well as bombs for Israeli aircraft, and may include other tactical nuclear weapons of various types. Some published estimates even claimed that Israel might have as many as 400 nuclear weapons by the late 1990s. We believe these numbers are exaggerated...

...Based on plausible upper and lower bounds of the operating practices at the reactor, Israel could have thus produced enough plutonium for at least 100 nuclear weapons, but probably not significantly more than 200 weapons.

Some type of non-nuclear test, perhaps a zero yield or implosion test, occurred on 2 November 1966 [possibly at Al-Naqab in the Negev]. There is no evidence that Israel has ever carried out a nuclear test, although many observers speculated that a suspected nuclear explosion in the southern Indian Ocean in 1979 was a joint South African-Israeli test.

(From http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/)

 

[Ebed-Yahweh]

Jewish Bulletin of Northern California

August 7, 1998

Bias permeates Israeli films, festival panelists say here
SARAH COLEMAN

Bulletin Correspondent

Traditionally, Israeli cinema has not been known for its complex and nuanced portrayals of Arabs and non-Ashkenazi Jews.

They have been shown "like children or criminals" or as "characters with no background or history," said Israeli filmmaker Sini Bar-David, director and co-producer of "The South: Alice Never Lived Here," shown at the recent San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

Bar-David, whose film depicts discrimination against non-Ashkenazi Jews in Israel, spoke at Berkeley's UC Theatre last week at a panel discussion titled "Israeli Cinema Now: Ethnicity and Politics."

The discussion, also part of the film festival, drew an audience of around 100, bringing together independent filmmakers and actors representing different ethnic voices in today's Israeli cinema.

Its celebratory purpose was compromised, however, when arguments broke out between Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi panelists...

...For Bitton, who immigrated to Israel from Morocco when she was 11 and attended film school in Paris, discrimination against non-Ashkenazi Jews in Israel was still rampant. She recalled the discrimination she'd faced as an aspiring filmmaker in the 1970s.

"Believe me, it was absolutely impossible for me [to attend film school in Israel] at that time," she said. "Even if my family had been able to afford it, there was no chance I would be accepted into a school."

Looking at Bar-David, who attended film school in Israel, Bitton acknowledged that "things have changed." But she still felt that "people keep denying the simplest facts" about discrimination against Sephardic and Mizrahi (Mideastern) Jews in Israel.

(For more of the article go to: http://www.jewishsf.com/bk980807/etbias.htm)

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2000
WORLD
Nicole Gaouette (gaouetten@csps.com)
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Israelis debate the definition of a 'true' Jewish state

Religious Israelis plan rally today in support of convicted leader of an ultra-Orthodox party.

When the verdict was reached last month, an Israeli Supreme Court judge read it over the radio.

This means of delivery put Aryeh Deri in exclusive company - including Adolf Eichmann and John Demjanjuk, both tried and convicted for Nazi war crimes.

•Why line is fading between politics and piety
•Wage political war not holy war

But Mr. Deri, a leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas political party, begins serving a three-year sentence next week for more mundane misdeeds: fraud and bribery. His followers say the court's heavy-handed actions were a clear case of discrimination against the Sephardim, Jews of North African and Middle-Eastern origin that Shas represents.

(For more of the article go to: http://search.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/09/01/p7s1.htm)

Colorlines
For Jews Only: Racism Inside Israel
An Interview with Phyllis Bennis
by Max Elbaum

CL: You are painting a picture of an Israeli government, with the support of a substantial part of its Jewish population, which aims toward permanent subordination of Palestinian Arabs within its borders, along with domination over something that might be called a Palestinian state but what would really amount to a dependent Bantustan. Essentially the same vision that motivated apartheid South Africa.

PB: Yes. And there are even more complexities. Within Israel there are really four levels of citizenship, the first three being various levels of Jewish participation in Israeli society, which are thoroughly racialized. At the top of the pyramid are the Ashkenazi, the white European Jews. At the level of power the huge contingent of recent Russian immigrants--now about 20 percent of Israeli Jews--are being assimilated into the European-Ashkenazi sector, though they are retaining a very distinct cultural identity.

The next level down, which is now probably the largest component of the Jewish population, is the Mizrachi or Sephardic Jews, who are from the Arab countries. At the bottom of the Jewish pyramid are the Ethiopian Jews, who are black. You can go into the poorest parts of Jewish West Jerusalem and find that it's predominantly Ethiopian.

This social and economic stratification took shape throughout the last 50 years as different groups of Jews from different part of the world came, for very different reasons, to Israel. So while the divisions reflected national origins, they play out in a profoundly racialized way.

The Yemeni Jews in particular faced extraordinary discrimination. They were transported more or less involuntarily from Yemen to Israel. On arrival they were held in primitive camps, and many Yemeni babies were stolen from their mothers and given for adoption to Ashkenazi families. In the early 1990s a high-profile campaign began to try to reunite some of those shattered families.

Beneath all these layers of Jews come the Palestinian citizens.

A rigid hierarchy, highly racialized both within and between religious or national groups, orchestrates Israeli social life. Much of it is legally enforced. The most significant difference between this scenario and other similar ones is in the world's perception of the Israeli reality. For the overwhelming majority of the world's population, South Africa was always considered a pariah state. But Israel is not in that position. Israel is given a pass, if you will, on the question of racism. Because Jews were victims of the Nazi Holocaust, there's a way in which Israeli Jews are assumed to be either incapable of such terrible racialized policies, or that it's somehow understandable because of what Jews went through.

But the new intifada has refocused attention on the nature and extent of Israeli racism, among other things. You have new reports from Amnesty International looking at the Israeli treatment of its own Palestinian citizens--minors, children, being arrested, beaten and held for days. Israel treats Palestinians, inside or outside the Green Line, as being less human than Jews. This is rooted in the very definition and Basic Law of the Israeli state. And the new intifada may give us a chance to challenge that apartheid character.

(For more of the article go to: http://www.arc.org/C_Lines/CLArchive/story_web00_04.html)

 

[Hix]

Israel is currently the only confirmed nuclear power in the Middle East.

Israel is the only confirmed democracry in the Middle East also.

 

[Ebed-Yahweh]

Actually, Zionist Israel is a fascist/Marxist state posing as a democracy.

 

[Hix]

Tell that to the 1 million Israeli arabs, the 500,000 Israeli christians/messianic Jews and the 200,000 Israeli Druze people (who live in the Golan heights).

Il bet youve never even been to Israel, you know absolutely nothing. Recent polls show that the non-Jews in Israel never want it to be returned to Arab control becuase it is a democracy with a 1 person = 1 vote rule, the only of its kind in the Middle East. The Arabs and Jews live side by side in Haifa with no problems, and all have the same rights etc.

So dont make comments as such without some form of proof, preferably not one you got off some internet propaganda site.

Next youl be telling us America only poses as a democracy too....
Shalom and G-d bless
~Hix~

 

[jameseb]

And if it no longer has any, it never will.

True, but I fully support Israel's right to have a nuclear deterrence.

 

[Robicat]

There's a HUGE difference there: Iraq has used its WMD's; Israel hasn't.

Britain use WMD against the Kurds under Churchill, USA advisiors approved all of Saddams WMD firepplans in the Iran Iraq war. Oh and USA used WMDs against a couple of cities in Japan. What was that about a huge difference?

The only hugh difference is between us and them.

The in a democracy like Israel possession of WMD should not be a state secret. And US Aid to Israel supports the whole process of nuclear armament, for it's own reasons.

 

[jameseb]

Britain use WMD against the Kurds under Churchill, USA advisiors approved all of Saddams WMD firepplans in the Iran Iraq war. Oh and USA used WMDs against a couple of cities in Japan. What was that about a huge difference?

Well, gee, since you wish to get a lil' rude about it, let me say it to you one more time.... ISRAEL NEVER USED WMD'S. ....And next time, don't try to tell me about the UK's and America's use of WMD's as if I had made a statement about that....


Did you get the huge difference that time, bud?

 

[Robicat]

Israel is the only confirmed democracry in the Middle East also.

So what? The only Nuclear weapon used habve been employed by so called democracys. Anyway how democratic is a democracy where a nuclear arsenal is hidden from the people who vote.

Don't be deceived Israel is a state run by it's security aparatus.

 

[jameseb]

Don't be deceived Israel is a state run by it's security aparatus.

Nevermind.... I see what this discussion is really about.