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 GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

You do not have to be “conspiracy-minded” to believe that Doctor Kelly did not kill himself.

The associate of Doctor Kelly’s, Mai Pederson a military interpreter, who recently revealed facts about his physical state – some injured part of his arm meant he could not wield a knife and made it impossible for him to cut his own wrist –  is not a “conspiracy-minded.” She says he also had been advised quietly he was on a hit list. She also tells the story of the red laser site which appeared on his forehead on a walk together in Baghdad, something which made him take the threat seriously.

The relative of Doctor Kelly who said absolutely that that just was not his temperament is not a “conspiracy-minded.”

The expert doctors who’ve said he could not have died the way it is said that he died are not “conspiracy-minded.” The vessel cut could not even have bleed him to death.

The term “conspiracy theorist” often used instead of “conspiracy-minded” is actually one that, in my view, automatically marks out its user as dishonest.

It is a way to condemn all people who question the facts of something as borderline paranoids.

It truly is a term without meaning too, displaying for those who are careful of words its user’s lack of thinking.

We do, after all, have genuine conspiracies by governments with large interests. To say otherwise is to display ignorance.

This has always been true in history, but today the stakes are higher than ever in matters of international affairs for some countries.

It is, for example, open knowledge that Israel sends dozens of agents abroad in elaborate schemes to murder those deemed enemies.

And what of the years-long cover-up in Britain of the true events around Bloody Sunday?

What of the case, a few years ago, of a half-dozen American nuclear warheads being shipped across the country? Every outside expert says that the checks and balances make such an “accident” impossible?

What of the downing of the fourth hi-jacked plane on 9/11 over Pennsylvania? It was almost certainly shot down, likely on Cheney’s orders, because multiple debris fields stretched for miles, something impossible in the kind of crash claimed.

What of Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty, spy ship, during the Six Day War? When Israel finally got around to explaining it, it claimed an “accident”? A two-hour attack against a well-marked ship, one Israel had been advised would be on station and when the lead Israeli pilot made an initial low enough pass slowly to acknowledge crew members waves? Taking the ship out of commission cut off American information of the battle field and gave General Dayan the time to turn around his armor to complete the conquests of the Six Day War, the effort to secure Greater Israel, the results of which we suffer to this day.

What of Israel’s nuclear weapons program? Years of intense, high-level deception.

What of South Africa’s nuclear weapons program?

By the way, I wonder how many readers know that Doctor Kelly was one of the technical team assigned to take possession of South Africa’s nuclear warheads when the apartheid regime ended? Doctor Kelly knew many damaging secrets.