[Shadow_Group] Fw: Arafat and Vanunu: Two Prisoners of War

[shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca]

Paranoid Times.

Arafat and Vanunu: Two Prisoners of War
Israel's move against Mordechai Vanunu, the man who exposed their nuclear
secrets, couldn't have been timed better
by Justin Raimondo
November 12, 2004
 
The death of Yasser Arafat overshadows the re-arrest of Mordechai Vanunu,
and it was, as they say, no accident: Arafat had barely breathed his last
gasp when 20 to 30 heavily armed Israeli police commandos stormed the
Anglican cathedral of St. George in Jerusalem, seized Vanunu, and
confiscated his computer, while their superiors absurdly yelped that he
had "leaked classified information."
 
Yes, the Israelis get really mad about the leaking of classified
information - unless it's their own agents in the U.S. who are on the
receiving end. But the funny part - if black humor suits your tastes - is
that the "secrets" he is alleged to have "leaked" have been known for
nearly 20 years. The thuggery of the Israeli "International Crimes Unit"
that desecrated a Christian church will only serve to remind the world
what Vanunu revealed all those years ago. This act underscores the brazen
hypocrisy of Israeli whining about Iran's efforts to obtain nuclear
weapons - when everyone knows Israel has as many as 200 to 400
nuclear-armed missiles aimed at Arab capitals, and - who knows? - perhaps
at a few European ones as well.
 
As a worker at Israel's Dimona nuclear weapons facility - supposedly
devoted, like today's Iranian equivalents, to the pursuit of "peaceful"
nuclear power - in the mid-1980s, Vanunu had first-hand knowledge of
Israel's weapons of mass destruction - and his conscience would not
permit silence. He gave an interview to British journalist Peter Hounam,
and the story, complete with photos, was published in the Sunday Times of
London: the truth about Israel's "nuclear ambiguity" was out.
 
In retaliation, the Mossad, with the aid of one of their "American"
female assets, Cheryl Bentov, lured him to Rome, kidnapped him, and
dragged him off to Israel, where he was tried, convicted, and served out
his 18-year sentence, much of it in solitary confinement. Released with
the proviso that, like the Soviet Jews once held captive by the Kremlin,
Vanunu is not allowed to leave the country, and may not speak to the
media, or publish his own thoughts and opinions.
 
So much for the myth of Israel's much-vaunted "freedoms," which are
supposed to make it a part of the West. Like Iran, Israel is a religious
theocracy dressed up in "democratic" trappings and afflicted with
delusions of military grandeur.
 
The extremists who control the Israeli government live in mortal fear
that Vanunu, having once exposed their limitless hypocrisy, will continue
to do so at the most inopportune time imaginable - when Israel is
kvetching about Iran's alleged pursuit of nukes, while Tel Aviv sits atop
the sixth largest stockpile of nuclear weapons on earth.
 
America claims the right to launch a preemptive war against any Arab
nation even suspected of trying to acquire nuclear arms, yet Israel is
allowed weapons of mass destruction that would make the International
Atomic Energy Agency's toes curl. So why not bring the inspectors into
Israel? Why are they exempt from the "rules" that others must obey?
 
These are questions the Israelis would much prefer nobody asked, and they
are less likely to be raised if Vanunu is silenced or gotten out of the
way, one way or another. Because the truth is that Israel, and not Iran,
is far more likely to use nukes - in "self-defense," of course - and turn
much of the Middle East into a radioactive wasteland. Contemplate the
words of the influential Israeli Rabbi Zelman Melamed, who wrote:
 
"It is not impossible that the Jewish people will have the ability to
threaten and put pressure on the entire world to accept our way. But even
if we acquire the power to seize control of the world, that is not the
way to realize the vision of complete redemption."
 
Yeah, but it'll do until the Messiah arrives. The rise of religious
fanaticism in Israel parallels the development of the same phenomenon in
the Arab world. While the Committee of Rabbis in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza
protests the dismantling of any settlements, and declares that "Everyone
who has faith in his heart ... will not countenance betrayal of the
divine promise of the Jewish people," Professor Hillel Weiss, writing in
Ma'ariv, interprets this fatwa as follows:
 
"The purpose of the armed struggle is to establish a Jewish state in all
the territory that will be captured, from the River Euphrates [in Iraq]
to the Egyptian River [Nile]."
 
The Committee of Rabbis, armed with nuclear weapons - is this really a
good thing?
 
With the Israeli ultra-nationalist right on the march, and threatening
civil war, a nuclear-armed Israel is far more dangerous than nuclearized
Pakistan, where fundamentalists of a different sort are held in check by
Pervez Musharraf with U.S. assistance. But what sort of leverage does the
international community, including the U.S., have over the Israelis? We
don't even know what they have - because they won't sign on to the IAEA
or submit to inspections. Yet Iran must submit - or face sanctions and a
possible U.S. (or Israeli) military strike.
 
The Israelis are in a position to blackmail both the Iranians and the
Americans. They can threaten Tehran with nuclear annihilation - or
threaten the U.S. with unilaterally taking out Iran's reactors and
plunging the entire region into war. With U.S. troops, as it were, in the
midst of it.
 
If anything, the Iranian acquisition of a similar arsenal will deter
their opposite numbers in Tel Aviv from ever using the nukes we know they
have. Because, right now, there is nothing to stop Ariel Sharon - or some
other even more extreme and excitable Israeli politician - from launching
a nuclear attack on Tehran. The close proximity of some 150,000 American
troops in Iraq may give them pause for a few seconds. However when it
comes to ensuring their own survival, in the end they won't fail to put
Israel first.
 
That's all too understandable: what country doesn't put its own interests
first? Answer: the United States of America, whose lopsided Middle
Eastern policy is unfailingly Israeli-centric.
 
The huge propaganda campaign launched by Israel even before Arafat
stopped breathing is designed to demonize the Palestinians, and anyone
who treats them as anything other than Israel's helots. The disgusting
orgy of death-worship that has greeted his demise - from bloodcurdling
weirdness over at a site deemed by Yahoo to be racist, to Jeff Jacoby in
the Boston Globe dancing on the man's grave, to this circle jerk over at
"Reason" magazine - is yet more provocation, much like the work of Theo
van Gogh, the David Duke of Dutch film. Israel's amen corner wants
Muslims worldwide to read and hear about this sort of nonsense: anything
to stoke the fires of hate and create the enemy that extremists on both
sides require.
 
Central to the hateful festivities surrounding Arafat's death is the myth
of the missed opportunity, the completely false conception that Arafat
was offered a good deal by former Prime Minister Ehud Barack, and Bill
Clinton, and, because of a psychological inability to make the transition
from revolutionary leader to "statesman," failed to take it while the
taking was good. This is utter balderdash, as a simple glance at a map of
what the Palestinians were offered - here and here - graphically reveals.
Alexander Cockburn put it well:
 
"Bill Clinton has always been one for the phony reconciliation, the
win-win solution, the photo-op deal. The defining moment of his diplomacy
was the 'handshake' between Rabin and Arafat, offered to the world as the
insignia of a decent settlement brokered by America."
 
But it was nothing of the sort, as Cockburn notes. The Palestinian
"nation" was to be a series of disconnected bantustans, surrounded
entirely by Israeli military posts and "settlements" populated by
ultra-Zionist fanatics. All water, roads, communications, and other vital
command posts of this "independent" entity would be controlled by the
Israelis. Some independence!
 
As Michael C. Desch wrote in The American Conservative:
 
"In the Palestinians' view, they had surrendered 78 percent of historic
Palestine to Israel when they recognized Israel as a sovereign state at
Oslo in 1993; in return, they expected that they would get the remaining
22 percent (the West Bank and Gaza) as part of the final agreement. Yet
the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands continued to deepen and
expand after Oslo and the Israeli government began to interfere ever more
intrusively in the lives of ordinary Palestinians."
 
If Palestinians were black, instead of a rich nut-brown, the UN would
have imposed strict sanctions long ago, and in the U.S. the Israeli
government would be as reviled as the white South African or Rhodesian
regimes that lorded it over their native African majorities. As it is,
Israeli propaganda seeks to depict any and all Arabs, and practically all
Muslims, as terrorists, a definition that suits Osama bin Laden just
fine. The Israelis have been particularly eager to smash all
manifestations of secular Arab militance, in a perfect complement to bin
Laden working the other side of the street.
 
Arafat was no saint, but then the only saints in that part of the world
are already buried in their graves. It's a rough neighborhood, and by
local standards the PLO leader was no better or worse than most of his
Israeli counterparts, whose crimes fall in the category of state
terrorism as opposed to the more freelance variety practiced by the other
side. After all, the Israeli state was founded by groups that employed
terrorism as a tactic, who bombed hotels full of innocent civilians,
massacred Arab villagers, and drove the remaining Palestinians off the
land. These are the very same people, by the way, who claim that they are
a bulwark against terrorism - even as they carry out a brutal policy of
state terrorism in the sight of the whole world.
 
This goes beyond mere arrogance, or ordinary hubris - there is a leering,
jeering, positively sinister quality to this style of argument, and in
the sneering tone affected by Israel's amen corner as they claim moral
superiority over their Arab and Muslim enemies. We're a democracy!, they
bray, as they step on the necks of their Palestinian prisoners, spit at
Christians in the streets of Jerusalem, and threaten their neighbors on
every side. All must disarm in the face of their nuclearized
belligerence, and submit to Israeli expansionism - or face the wrath of
the United States. Their terrorism is "self-defense," or, in the case of
the U.S. in Iraq, "liberation" - while Arafat's, or Islamic Jihad's, or
the Mahdi Army's is barbarism pure and simple.
 
The Israelis should shut up about terrorism, look at their own bloody
history, and change the name of their country to "Blowback." The worst
error the Western powers ever made, even more than the colonization and
conquest of the Middle East, was the Balfour Declaration. Since that time
we have had nothing but trouble, and the conflict it created has
increased exponentially with the passage of time until it threatens to
engulf the whole world in a maelstrom of hate and retribution. When oh
when will it ever end - and why must we in the United States be a part of
it?
 
It is time, high time, that we got out of it, because our alliance with
Israel certainly does not serve our national interests. Israel is a
tyranny, not the Athens but the Sparta of the Middle East: a militarist,
socialist, ethno-nationalist monstrosity that represents the single
greatest danger to the peace of the region. The Balfour Declaration has
functioned as a kind of curse, an incantation that has cast a dark shadow
over the Holy Land - and the world. Anyone who points this out - Arafat,
Vanunu, whomever - is subjected to a merciless campaign of demonization,
such as we now see unfolding over the corpse of the fallen Palestinian
leader. No doubt Arafat would consider it a badge of honor.
 
In any case, there is not much honor to be found in that part of the
world, and no amount of American intervention is going to change that. As
American politicians buy into the Israeli narrative of Arafat the
Monster, the American people ought to realize that there are even worse
monsters out there - and some of them are our allies.
 
Both Arafat and Vanunu were prisoners of Israel's war on the Middle East,
and much of the world: one is now dead, and the other is a target. The
campaign to demonize them, no matter how well-financed (with American tax
dollars) and ubiquitous, is too crude to succeed. Whatever else might be
said about this unlikely pair, they certainly made all the right enemies.
 
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=3970<http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=3970>
 


==============================================
     IF YOU'RE NOT PARANOID, THEN
     YOU'RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION!
==============================================
To Post: ParanoidTimes at yahoogroups.com<mailto:ParanoidTimes at yahoogroups.com>
Home Page: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ParanoidTimes<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ParanoidTimes>
Subscribe: ParanoidTimes-subscribe at yahoogroups.com<mailto:ParanoidTimes-subscribe at yahoogroups.com>
==================================================
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107,
this material is distributed without profit or payment to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving
this information for non-profit research and educational
purposes only.  For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml<http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.resist.ca/pipermail/shadowgroup-l/attachments/20041113/0ae7b943/attachment.html>