JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY HEIDI BLAKE IN THE TELEGRAPH

What a blind piece of writing.

The only “rogue” state in the Middle East is Israel.

Israel has about 150 nuclear warheads, several delivery systems, and a working factory for fissionable material which no one is even allowed to visit.

The same Israel which keeps thousands in jail illegally, attacks every neighbor that it has, relentlessly keeps taking the land of others in an elaborate system of slow-motion ethnic-cleansing, and practices a brutal apartheid.

Now, there is indeed a genuine threat to world peace.

Instead of dealing head-on with a genuine threat to the world, Israel’s illicit nuclear weapons, this article stirs up nonsense about boogeymen, a truly irresponsible game.

What the article actually does is serve Israel’s narrow interests, removing the focus from the world’s outstanding nuclear rogue state, Israel, a state which has supported no international laws or treaties or regulations in building its terror weapons, has stolen, bribed and killed to get its weapons. It is moreover a country which has wheeled-and-dealed in nuclear weapons technology with another rogue state in the past, South Africa.

Israel’s shadow falls on everything for a thousand miles around, and it has a withering effect on the whole region.

Israel has a direct effect on the nature of government in the region. It does not want democracies to emerge, because it is comfortable with autocrats like Mubarak who do not challenge its interests.

It never once tries to respect its neighbors, never once honestly seeks peace, and blubbers on and on about Islamists and terror and its being the region’s only democracy.

What kind of democracy is it that behaves this way? It’s a rather good thing there are no other democracies of this kind.
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From another reader:

“Israel, an island of liberal democracy on the forefront of a wild Muslim-Arab world”

Sorry, that is arrogant, unthinking, and uninformed.

Israel is by no measure a “liberal democracy.”

There is no Bill or Charter of Rights, nor can there ever be one in a state based on ethic/religious identity.

And minorities of many descriptions are treated unfairly and badly in Israel.

And you cannot have a Jewish democracy anymore than you can have an Islamic democracy or a Hindu democracy. Once you place limits on who has access in a democracy, you no longer are speaking of genuine democracy.

I just love that comic-book stuff about a “wild Muslim-Arab world,” a 21st century version of “the yellow peril.”

You could not cite a more stunning example of pure prejudice.

Unfortunately, it represents the attitude Israel works very hard to foster in the world, always hoping to so prejudice everyone’s thinking that Israel can do just as it pleases.

Well, we’ve seen – especially in the last decade – what Israel does when it does as it pleases. Cluster bombs on civilians, four hundred children killed, piracy on the high seas, a cruel blockade to starve people out, a continued brutal occupation, refusal to talk to anyone but a pathetic figure like Abbas who doesn’t even properly hold office, passing the most prejudiced and unfair laws, assassinating anyone who disagrees, refusing even to talk to a cleanly-elected government, torture, seizing the property of others, and practices which people of unqualified credentials to speak have called apartheid – Jimmy Carter, Bishop Tutu, and Nelson Mendella.

And we all know what Lord Acton said about power and absolute power.
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From another reader:

‘”Israel has about 150 nuclear warheads…”
‘Really?
‘If you have accurate data, information and not speculation, why don’t you share it with the rest of humanity…??’

Glad to share, but sorry you are not yourself better informed.

Jimmy Carter gave us that number a year or so ago.

Need I remind you that Carter was President of the United States, is a nuclear engineer, and was a commander of an American ballistic-missile submarine?

He is well connected with international leaders and intelligence sources, and many say he has the highest I.Q. of any president in the last century.

He doesn’t say things he doesn’t know.

Of course, actual pictures of some of Israel’s facilities and even a mold for fissionable material were published in the Sunday Times a few decades ago.

The man responsible for those pictures – an Israeli nuclear technician – was drugged and kidnapped by Israeli agents and spent many years in prison. He still lives under strict limits and threats.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JUDITH TIMSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The only part of this piece worth reading is the way Judith Timson starts it with her and the kiddies having a gay old time at a past Pride Parade, describing it the way some suburban housewife might describe the family’s being at Disney World. She only left out Granny.

“The mood was celebratory on that early summer day as we stood shoulder to shoulder with a gay elementary-school vice-principal….”

Note the use of words like “celebratory” and “early summer day” to set a mood.

And don’t you just love the “shoulder to shoulder” bit, as though Ms. Timson were describing a World War II rally for Rosie the Riveter or describing her participation in a March on Selma Alabama in the 1950s?

This is a classic technique of the propagandist: it might be called the benign, fairy dream, and its purpose is merely to serve as a prop to be knocked over by what follows.

The insincerity here almost grips one like an unwanted waft of heavy cheap cologne.

Gay Pride’s history is not like that at all.

Anything resembling Ms. Timson’s fairy story is a very recent, rather sanitized occurrence. I lived in Toronto during the days of police raids and arbitrary arrests. And anyone knows, or should know, that the Pride Parade was early on treated in Toronto as a somewhat shameful, reluctantly-permitted event.

Much like the way Toronto always had, years ago, a grim King Billy Parade instead of a joyous St. Patrick’s Parade.

The point is that gay people have a history of fighting injustice and oppression, and many of them are still at it, and those latter are the ones who insisted on the right to express themselves on Israeli apartheid.

And I’m sorry, Ms. Timson, but the word “apartheid” is absolutely accurate. We have Nelson Mandela, Bishop Tutu and Jimmy Carter as just some of our star witnesses for the state of affairs in Israel, all honourable men with an intimate understanding of injustice and abuse, Jimmy Carter, by the way, having been labelled an anti-Semite in Israel for stating the plain truth.

Once Jews very much shared that quality we see in many gays, ready to defend the downtrodden, but today it does seem a majority of them serve as apologists for abuse and injustice and killing instead, just so long as the abuse and injustice and killing are done by Israel.

This is a shameful column, written to defend the indefensible, but I’m thankful there are a lot of others, brave gay people in Toronto, ready to stand both for free speech and against oppression.

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY PATRICK MARTIN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Patrick Martin, it is difficult to believe that you are that naive, so are you being dishonest?

The evidence for Israel’s nuclear weapons is overwhelming.

First, a short while back, Jimmy Carter flatly stated that Israel has about 150 nuclear warheads.

As a former president, former commander of an American missile submarine, and a nuclear engineer, I think it fair to say his testimony is as solid as it gets.

Two, Mordechai Vanunu’s strange odyssey surely was another piece of solid gold evidence.

His photographs of the interior of Israel’s bomb factory were published in the Sunday Times (they even included the mold for the hollow implosion-sphere), and they were never impeached by any scientist. Quite the opposite, they were confirmed.

Since Israel afterward sent a team of agents who drugged and kidnapped Vanunu, sent him for many years to prison, and keeps him still under heavy restrictions, surely to any analyst’s mind, his claims were only confirmed further.

Again, we have the public assertions of Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld who has gone on record saying Israel’s nuclear missiles were able to reach the major capitals of Europe.

We also have the testimony of Mohamed El Baradei, a scientist and nuclear expert and former head of the IAEA, that Israel has nuclear weapons.

The New York Times Magazine, many years ago, did a feature story of how Israel came to build nuclear weapons. The French were a key part of the effort, at that time France playing a role for Israel a little like the U. S. today as a key weapons supplier and guarantor.

We know today, too, that Israel stole nuclear materials and secrets from the American weapons establishment to assist its efforts.

Israel not only illegally built weapons but was the world’s first dangerous proliferator. It had a secret pact with South Africa to assist their building nuclear weapons in exchange for secure access to important resources and other considerations.

A spy satellite actually captured the flash of what was almost certainly a joint Israeli-South African nuclear test in the Indian Ocean. A very limited number of reports, all fine-type stuff, after the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa, mentioned America’s removing the nuclear material from South Africa.

We know that President Kennedy became aware that Israel was working on nuclear weapons through the CIA. He was totally opposed to Israel’s becoming a nuclear power, but he did not live to alter the course of history. More than a few have speculated that Israel’s secret services were behind the assassination for just this very powerful motive.

Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, proved one of Israel’s best friends in the White House. The weapons program continued, and when Israel attacked the USS Liberty, a spy ship in the Mediterranean, killing a great many of the crew and likely hoping to embroil the U.S. in the Six Day War, Johnson suppressed the story which only gradually came out afterwards.

There is much other evidence – in total, rarely would even a major intelligence agency ever have collected such an overwhelming case.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

RESPONSE SENT TO MARGARET WENTE ON A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL WHERE COMMENTS WERE NOT PERMITTED

If you truly believe what you say, then you should be open to public comment.

It is actually, in this day, rather pathetic to write a piece like yours and hide from comments.

Apart from what the overwhelming majority of humane people feel at seeing and hearing regularly Israel’s ghastly behavior, we have the words of two men of shining credentials in the matter, Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela, who have said on more than one occasion that Israel has re-created apartheid.

That excellent man, Jimmy Carter, has said much the same. Of course, he was instantly labeled an anti-Semite, a favorite shabby trick of the apologists for Israel’s ugly behavior.

About three thousand souls – including 400 children and a fine Canadian doing his UN duty – have been murdered in the last couple of years in Lebanon and Gaza by Israel. Gaza is treated like a Middle Ages city under siege, not even being allowed the products to rebuild Israel’s destruction.

People who have had homes and farms for centuries in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have their families destroyed regularly as their property is seized by people born in New York or Toronto or London, and the behavior is simply called “facts on the ground.”

Walls are built on the land of others, water is diverted, people living in their own place are abused endlessly by numberless checkpoints and humiliations.

The reasons many people focus on Israel’s behavior are simple.

One, we cannot avoid hearing and seeing it constantly while we do not see what goes on in rural India or parts of South America. We hear of every election, every cabinet change, and every violent act. This is not the case with a place like Ecuador, a country of roughly the same population.

Two, Israel constantly represents itself as a modern democratic state, but its behavior towards its neighbors is that of a ghastly third-world country. We all expect more of modern states than we do places like Ecuador.

Three, Israel’s behavior seriously threatens peace in the world, having as it does its own illegal nuclear weapons and the thermonuclear support of the United States. There is no other way to look at Israel’s many calls for Iraq to be invaded (answered by Bush), Syria to be attacked and Iran to be attacked.

Checkpoints, walls, computerized machine-gun towers, invasions, sieges, mass arrests, kidnapping, torture, assassination, abuse of power over regulations in building and utilities, and constant threats – there is no rational defense of all that ugliness.

All Israel has to do is accept its borders and respect its neighbors to have genuine peace, but it does neither of these things. Its borders expand like ooze over the land of others, and it treats its every neighbor with contempt.

You simply defend what is indefensible.