A whistle blower mightier than Israel:
Vanunu’s only crime was to warn the world of the madness that had
caused the leadership of his country, Israel, to stockpile up to 200 nuclear
weapons.
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?section=Opinion&OID=49260"He has been incarcerated for almost 18 years, 12 spent in solitary confinement, yet he remains freer than his tormentors could ever hope to be--the government of Israel, which continues to languish in the prison of its singular cowardice.
His name is Mordechai Vanunu, whistle blower extraordinaire and the world’s first independent nuclear inspector. On April 21--the day before Earth Day, a fitting occasion--Vanunu will walk out of Israel’s Ashkelon Prison with his conscience intact and his motive no less urgent.
The prisoner of conscience is a family hero, an icon of the global peace movement, a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize and a citizen of the world. If only for the message that Vanunu continues to carry and the example of his sacrifice, the Philippine government should be sending a peacekeeping force not to Iraq but to Israel. To receive Vanunu. To embrace him. To provide palpable support to a man who best embodies what is presumed to be a collective aspiration of the world the abolition of all nuclear weapons.
From 1976 to 1985, Vanunu had been a technician at Dimona, Israel’s nuclear installation in the Negrev desert. It was at Dimona where he learned of and documented Israel’s secret production of plutonium for nuclear weapons.
The world learned of Israel’s clandestine armory when the London Sunday Times published Vanunu’s interviews and photographs as its banner story on October 5, 1986. Photographs that revealed nuclear weapons devices, neutron bombs, deliverable warheads and “the underground plutonium separation facility where Israel was producing 40 kilograms annually.” In 1986. When America was still in bed with Saddam.
Vanunu’s only crime was to warn the world of the madness that had caused the leadership of his country, Israel, to stockpile up to 200 nuclear weapons. An act of conscience for which Vanunu would be kidnapped and drugged--five days after the Sunday Times published his interview--and shipped to Israel to be sentenced in a secret trial to 18 years’ imprisonment
Israel started the nuclear arms race in the Middle East yet today it remains the only country in the Middle East that is not party to the treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. Israel is the world’s sixth largest nuclear power yet the Dimona nuclear weapons factory, which Vanunu exposed, and Israel’s biological and chemical weapons factory in Nes Zion, remain closed to international inspection." (more)
"We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves." Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983
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