Mannie Blog, LGS, SPAIDS, InterSection, Israel/Palestine, Jewish Issues

The Jews around the world who are screaming traitor at Vanunu are Jews who live in countries other than Israel. Their ties are not to the countries they live in, but these zionist bigots will not leave the comfort of their places of residence and move to Israel where all the action is of which they approve.
The hypocrisy of it all is breath-taking, but the media in their countries of residence won't actually point it out to them in case they offend Israel!
Well, after George W Bush's open acquiescence in everything Sharon is doing in Palestine, one can't expect anything different. After all, Israel's strength lies in the USA's continued support and supply of money and military equipment!

This item was on the Index on Censorship web site and also relates to what the world - other than Israel - thinks about the Vanunu affair. Maybe it will be referred to one day in the same way as the Dreyfuss affair was in France at the beginning of the 20th century:

Free expression award for nuclear whistleblower

Index on Censorship has presented its 2004 Special Award for Most
Courageous Defence of Freedom of Expression to Mordechai Vanunu, the
Israeli whistleblower who revealed the scale of Israel's secret nuclear
weapons programme to the world. The Award was presented to Mordechai's
brother Meir at the annual Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression
Awards on 22 March. Mordechai Vanunu worked as a nuclear technician at
Israel's top secret nuclear weapons plant at Dimona in the Negev desert;
in 1986 he revealed to the Sunday Times details of ITel Aviv's secret
nuclear weapons programme. Shortly afterwards he was kidnapped, tried in
secret and sentenced to 18 years imprisonment. He is shortly due for
release, but even after his years of detention, 11 of them in near total
isolation, Israeli state and military officials are reluctant to let him
free. Meir said "This is an important award to a man whose actions are
based on the issue of censorship. Censorship on the nuclear issue and
censorship of what has happened to him for the last eighteen years. I
informed Mordechai of the award and he was very pleased and wished he
could¦ receive the award himself. Sadly instead he is now back in solitary
confinement." It's widely believed that Vanunu does not pose a real
security threat to Israel, and that the Israeli government's real
motivation is a desire to avoid political embarrassment for itself and its
allies, especially the United States. "An open admission that Israel has a
nuclear weapons programme would bring into play the 'Symington Amendment'
to the Foreign Assistance Act, which forbids the US from giving military
aid to countries illicitly acquiring nuclear weapons," noted Index on
Censorship's editor-in-chief Ursula Owen. Israel is still the largest
beneficiary of US military aid. Vanunu's release date is set for 21 April
2004. There are late efforts among hardliners within the Israeli
government to extend his confinement or severely limit his freedom after
release. "Mordechai Vanunu was sentenced to 18 years in prison for
allegedly jeopardising the security of the state of Israel. His crime was
speaking out about Israel's secret nuclear programme," said Owen.
"Nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize, for many people he has
come to symbolise, in his long, often solitary, confinement, the
intractable problem of state secrecy that continues to blight all efforts
towards world nuclear disarmament." Vanunu's award was presented to Meir
by Peter Hounam, the journalist who broke the former nuclear technician's
story. It was the last of seven Index on Censorship awards presented at
the special evening at London's City Hall. The Index on Censorship
Whistleblower of the Year Award went to Indian engineer Satyendra Kumar
Dubey, murdered after he spoke out against corruption. A joint award from
Index on Censorship and the London Guardian newspaper, presented in memory
of veteran political journalist Hugo Young, went to award-winning
photo-journalist Kaveh Golestan, who risked his life to bring back
pictures of poison gas attacks on Iraqi Kurdish villages in 1998. He was
killed by a landmine in Northern Iraq last year. The Index Film Award went
to Lee Hirch's celebration of musical resistance to apartheid, Amandla!,
the Index Book Award to Mende Nazer & Damien Lewis for Slave, Mende's
account of her capture and enslavement for seven years and the Index Music
award went to Daniel Barenboim and the late Edward Said for their work to
found an orchestra of Israeli and Arab musicians. The Index on Censorship
Censor of the Year award went to US Attorney General John Ashcroft -
citing his swipes at civil liberities, due process, privacy and public
dissent in the name of the 'war on terror'. The judges were Man Booker
prize nominated novelist Monica Ali, award winning musician Nitin Sawhney,
Film critic Mark Kermode, journalist Ann Leslie and Index patrons Caroline
Moorehead and Geoffrey Hosking. Comment on this article. Links: The
world's best-known and most efficient 'secret' manufacturer of weapons of
mass destruction is not Iraq, not even North Korea, but Israel. Neil
Sammonds comments. Free Vanunu Campaign website. 1998 public appeal on
behalf of Vanunu by 27 leading scientists, including several Nobel
laureates, published by the New Yorker magazine. Timeline of events.

This article by Uri Avnery was published by Arabic Media Internet Network on 24 April 2004, and was very revealing in what Avnery had to say. I think it is worth printing the whole article:
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AMIN: Main Page > English News > Uri Avnery

April 24, 2004

Vanunu: The Terrible Secret

By: Uri Avnery*

In the darkness of a cinema, a woman’s voice: “Hey! Take your hands off!
Not you! YOU!”

This old joke illustrates the American policy regarding nuclear armaments
in the Middle East. “Hey, you there, Iraq and Iran and Libya, stop it! Not
YOU, Israel!”

The danger of nuclear arms was the main pretext for the invasion of Iraq.
Iran is threatened in order to compel it to stop its nuclear efforts.
Libya has surrendered and is dismantling its nuclear installations.

So what about Israel?

This week it became clear that the Americans are full partners in the
creation of Israel’s “nuclear option”.

How was this exposed? With the help of Mordecai Vanunu, of course.

Throughout the week, a festival was being celebrated around the prisoner,
who was released on Wednesday.

The Security Establishment has not stopped harassing him even after he has
sat in prison for 18 years, 11 of them in complete solitary confinement –
a treatment he himself described on leaving the prison as “cruel and
barbaric”. After he was “set free”, far-reaching restrictions were imposed
on him (e.g. he is forbidden to leave the country, is restricted to one
town, cannot go near any embassy or consulate, may not talk with foreign
citizens). All this under the colonial British emergency regulations that
were condemned at the time by the leaders of the Jewish community in
Palestine, as “worse then the Nazi laws”.

Not, God forbid, because of any desire for revenge!

The security people declared from every podium that this is not revenge
for all the shame Vanunu caused the security services, and is by no means
just more persecution, but an essential security requirement. He must not
be allowed to leave the country or to speak with foreigners and
journalists, because he is in possession of secrets vital to the security
of the state.

Everybody understands that he has no more secrets. What can a technician
know after 18 years in jail, during which technology has advanced with
giant steps?

But gradually it becomes clear what the security establishment is really
afraid of. Vanunu is in a position to expose the close partnership with
the United States in the development of Israel’s nuclear armaments.

This worries Washington so much, that the man responsible in the State
Department for “arms control”, Under Secretary John Bolton, has come to
Israel in person for the occasion. Vanunu, it appears, can cause severe
damage to the mighty super-power. The Americans are afraid of sounding
like the lady in the dark cinema.

(By the way, this John Bolton is an avid supporter of the group of
Zionists neo-cons who play a central role in the Bush theater. He opposes
arms control for the United States and its satellites, and was installed
in the State Department against the wishes of the Secretary of State
himself.)

In the short address Vanunu was able to make to the media immediately on
his release, he made a strange remark: that the young woman who served as
bait for his kidnapping, some 18 years ago, was not a Mossad agent, as
generally assumed, but an agent of the FBI or CIA. Why was it so urgent
for him to convey this?

From the first moment, there was something odd about the Vanunu affair.

At the beginning, my first thought was that he was a Mossad agent.
Everything pointed in that direction.

How else can one explain a simple technician’s success in smuggling a
camera into the most secret and best guarded installation in Israel? And
in taking photos apparently without hindrance? How else to explain the
career of that person who, as a student at Beer-Sheva University, was
well-known as belonging to the extreme left and spending his time in the
company of Arab fellow-students? How was he allowed to leave the country
with hundreds of photos? How was he able to approach a British paper and
to turn over to British scientists material that convinced them that
Israel had 200 nuclear bombs?

Absurd, isn’t it? But it all fits , if one assumes that Vanunu acted from
the beginning on a mission for the Mossad. His disclosures in the British
newspaper not only caused no damage to the Israeli government, but on the
contrary, strengthened the Israeli deterrent without committing the
government, which was free to deny everything.

What happened next only reinforced this assumption. While in London, in
the middle of his campaign of exposures, knowing that half a dozen
intelligence services are tracking his every movement, he starts an affair
with a strange women, is seduced into following her to Rome, where he is
kidnapped and shipped back to Israel. How naive can you get? Is it
credible for a reasonable person to fall into such a primitive trap? It is
not. Meaning that the whole affair was nothing but a classic cover story.

But when the affair went on, and details of the year-long daily
mistreatment of the man became public, I had to give up this initial
theory. I had to face the fact that our security services are even more
stupid than I had assumed (which I wouldn’t have believed possible) and
that all these things actually had happened, and that Mordecai Vanunu was
an honest and idealistic, if extremely naive, person.

I have no doubt that his personality was shaped by his background. He is
the son of a family with many children, who were quite well-to-do in
Morocco but lived in a primitive “transition camp” in Israel, before
moving to Be’er-Sheva, where they lived in poverty. In spite of this, he
succeeded in getting into university and got a master’s degree, quite an
achievement, but suffered, so it seems, from the overbearing attitude and
prejudices of his Ashkenazi peers. Undoubtedly, that pushed him towards
the company of the extreme left, where such prejudices were not prevalent.

The bunch of “security correspondents” and other commentators who are
attached to the udders of the security establishment have already spread
stories about Vanunu “imagining things”, his long stay in solitary
confinement causing him to “convince himself of all kinds of fantasies”
and to “invent all kinds of fabrications”. Meaning: the American
connection.

Against this background one can suddenly understand all these severe
restrictions, which, at first sight, look absolutely idiotic. The
Americans, it seems, are very worried. The Israeli security services have
to dance to their tune. The world must be prevented by all available means
from hearing, from the lips of a credible witness, that the Americans are
full partners in Israel’s nuclear arms program, while pretending to be the
world’s sheriff for the prevention of nuclear proliferation.

“And the lady cried: “Not you! YOU!”

* An Israeli author and activist. He is the head of the Israeli peace
movement, "Gush Shalom".

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HIV infections are on the increase in Australia during the last two or three years. Research indicates that venereal diseases such as syphilis are also on the rise at an alarming rate.
These increases would seem to be because of the refusal of many gay men to continue to use condoms.
Somewhere along the line, the AIDS councils around the country must take some of the responsibility for the failure of their safe sex programmes.
In New South Wales, the AIDS Council (ACON) conducted some community forums a few years ago to gauge community responses to changes ACON wanted to make to its charter of care and education of HIV/AIDS. Those of us who chose to go to the forums aired our views and we were told that the executives on the Council would take views into account when making their policy changes.
In the event this did not occur and when ACON went public with its new policies, HIV/AIDS took a back seat. ACON was nervous it would lose its government funding and was determined to prevent this happening.
Now we are confronted by people writing letters to the gay papers saying people who criticise barebacking are "Safe Sex Police" and asking if this was gay Nazi Germany.
These are the sorts of people who, when - not if - they become infected with HIV - will demand that the community assist them, medical and volunteer workers alike, to help them maintain themselves in the lifestyle to which they would like to continue to be accustomed.
ACON has failed to get safe sex messages across, and irresponsible, thoughtless, reckless and selfish people such as those who attack people who criticise their barebacking lifestyle, shold be made to realise that when they need and want assistance it will not be forthcoming.
Somewhere, sometime, we have to take responisblity for our actions, and this sort of activity must be stopped by us "SAFE SEX POLICE".

Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli whistle-blower who told the world what they already suspected about Israel's nuclear weapons programme (Israel has some of the world's largest "weapons of mass destruction" arsenals - supported and assisted by that other WMD superpower and Israel's main ally the USA) was released from an Israeli jail after serving 18 years for "treason". 11 of those years were in solitary confinement in a space not much larger than a coffin! And this in a country that tells the world it is the only democracy in the Middle East. Ask some of its residents whether they believe they live in a democracy, and the answers may surprise!
Vanunu has now been released into a much larger prison, but a prison nevertheless. It is a prison in which he will have no citizen's rights, he is not allowed to leave Israel for at least the next year, and in which the restrictions placed on him almost make his ex-prison a better option than the present one!
Vanunu has served his sentence - indecently excessive in any reasonable legal interpretation of what crime he is supposed to have committed, but the Israeli government and its supporters on all sides of the political divide are almost unanimous in supporting.
Vanunu wants to leave the country and start a new life in the USA but the Israeli government will not allow him to leave, at least for the next year. After that?? Who knows? The only thing one knows is that no government can be trusted, least of all one which has behaved with such blatant disregard for human rights for so many years over the issue of the Palestinians, and, at least, over Mordechai Vanunu.
The scandal of it is that the outside world has sat back all these years and done nothing about it - so much for the so-called western democracies!

Because I do not want to censor what responses I get to letters I write, it is necessary for me to put in here replies I receive which have views very different from mine.
Here is a reply from someone who takes exception to my ideas for solutions to the Israel/Palestine problem:
Sorry this reply is so late. I am also an ex-South African Jew, living in
Sydney. You say that "The solution lies in a post-apartheid South African
type state in which several different and diverse ethnic groups live
together as one nation". There are many major flaws and potential problems
here. Let me clarify - you are for a one-state solution and against a
two-state solution? First, Israel, as a Jewish state, a haven for Jews
worldwide, a symbol of strength of our nation and people, will end. The
Palestinians, coupled with over 1 million Israeli Arabs, will far
outnumber their fellow Jewish citizens. Two, this scenario will leave
Israeli Jews vulnerable to anti-Semitism and possible restrictions on
access to religious sites (during the Arab occupation of East Jerusalem
pre-1967, Jews were barred from visiting the Western Wall). Three, most
Palestinians would baulk at the idea of living amongst Israelis, or should
I say Jews.

South Africa was different in that a white-minority was occupying a black
majority, giving them no equal rights as citizens. You say Israel is
indifferent to their fellow non-Jewish citizens... how many Arab MP's are
in the Knesset??? They are equal citizens, have the right to vote, have
the right to education and health... it baffles me how you compare the
Apartheid regime to the current Israeli government. Furthermore, South
Africans were separated according to the colour of their skin... however,
they were all viewed as being South African. In the Middle East situation,
you are talking about two completely different people and religions.
Israel is an independent country, and the Palestinian's should be by now.
Integrating the two would be both stupid, impractical, lack international
and local support, and very dangerous.

The only way forward is to embrace the two-state solution, which both the
Israeli's and Palestinians are trying to achieve. Only then will Israel be
free from terror, and the Palestinians be free from occupation.

Regards,

Adam Weinberg

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I also hope to put in here an analysis which the Australian Jewish Democratic Society sent me from Noam Chomsky in the form of a question and answer session. It makes very interesting reading and challenges a great many long held vies on the crisis in that troubled area.

It has been two weeks since I last made an entry to this blog, the reason being that I have been very busy placing counters on all my web pages. It has been a worthwhile exercise because it has enabled me to look at who has been looking at the various web pages and also what people have been looking at.
The web pages are at:
Mannie and Kendall's Home Pages
and there is a whole variety of topics to suit all interests - mostly of course political, with one or two exceptions.
One of the main exeptions is my genealogical page, which so far only has my search for my father's younger brother's disappearance as its main objective. I may enlarge this at a later date to include other genealogical items.
I hope to get busy with posting further items in the next few days as things become normal after a very busy period which included two film festivals in Melbourne - Queerscreen and Seniors films, and I went to 12 altogether - most of very great interest on a variety of topics.