Supreme Court keeps Vanunu in Israel
Israel's Supreme Court ruled on Sunday that convicted nuclear traitor Mordechai Vanunu
may not leave Israel.
The High Court of Justice on Sunday rejected the petition of Mordechai
Vanunu, the man who leaked information regarding Israel’s reported
nuclear weapons program in 1986, to leave the country via the West Bank.
The
court said that while it agreed with Vanunu that his situation should
be examined periodically and with rigor to ensure that restrictions on
him were not being maintained unnecessarily, it believed the state had
met its standard of proof for maintaining the restrictions at this time.
At
Wednesday's hearing on the issue, Vanunu’s lawyer, the charismatic and
colorful Avigdor Feldman, thundered away at the state, saying, “This man
is not allowed to leave a country that does not want him in it and in
which he does not want to be.”
He added that Vanunu merely wanted to leave the country to marry his girlfriend and live out his life quietly.
Vanunu
was formerly a technician at the Dimona nuclear plant who was
imprisoned for 18 years for divulging secrets related to Israel’s
purported nuclear weapons program.
Since his release from prison
in 2004, Vanunu has had a range of highly unusual restrictions placed on
his movement and his right to interact with other persons, particularly
foreigners and the press.
The High Court has numerous times
approved these restrictions, and Vanunu has numerous times violated
them, sometimes being temporarily penalized or reprimanded.
Could someone traveling abroad please bring this man some deodorant on their return? That stuff is very expensive here....
Actually, Vanunu is lucky he wasn't executed.
Labels: Israeli nuclear capability, Mordechai Vanunu, treason
Why is Vanunu a hero while Pollard is demonized
Giulio Meotti asks a good question: Why is Israeli nuclear 'whistleblower' Mordechai Vanunu a hero in the West, while American spy for Israel
Jonathan Pollard is demonized?
Unlike Vanunu, a traitor who endangered the security of Israel at a time when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Iran’s ayatollahs, Libya’s Gaddafi and Syria’s Assad were making every effort to develop weapons of mass destruction, Pollard is recognized as the source of Israel’s preparedness for the Iraqi missile attacks during the Gulf War.
Pollard, then employed by US Naval Intelligence, realized that satellite maps of poison gas and other unconventional weapon sites being built by Israel’s Arab enemies were clearly aimed at the destruction of the Jewish state. This was six years before the Gulf War, when Syria, Libya, Iran and Iraq have all built huge “aspirin factories,” as Muammar Gaddafi called them.
The dictators stockpiled huge quantities of chemical weapons, including the Nazi-invented sarin. If Pollard became convinced that the Jews of Israel were facing a possible second Holocaust, Vanunu worked to make it possible. But if Pollard today is demonized as an Israeli right-wing “fanatic” (Robert Friedman of The Washington Post) or “an aberration” (Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg), Vanunu is celebrated as a romantic Israeli icon.
The different treatment tells us much not only about treason celebrated, but also about Western newspapers’ anti-Semitism and Israel’s fate in a time of new chemical, nuclear and biological threats. Some 29 years after Saddam’s 39 missiles landed in Israel, forcing Israelis to put on their gas masks, Iran’s Ahmadinejad promises to wipe out the "dead rats," as he called the Israelis.
Twenty years after Saddam threatened to "burn half of Israel," Pollard began his 27th year in solitary confinement, Vanunu is a symbol of good and the Jewish state remains the only "bunkered" democracy in the world, now even more relentlessly ghettoized.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Giulio Meotti, Jonathan Pollard, Mordechai Vanunu
Israel is holding Gazan engineer
Israel has admitted that it is holding
Dirar Abu Sesi, the chief engineer of Gaza's power plant. Israel Radio reported on Tuesday morning that Abu Sesi is being held at Ashkelon's Shikma prison. Beyond that, there is a gag order on the case. Other reports have indicated that Abu Sesi was
abducted from a train in the Ukraine where he had gone with his Ukrainian wife and six children to seek Ukrainian citizenship. This is from the first link.
Abu Sisi is the manager of the only power plant in the Gaza Strip. He is not known to have any direct ties with Hamas or other terrorist organizations, although it is likely that his senior position was the result of political affiliation.
In interviews to foreign reporters, Abu Sisi’s wife Veronika, blamed the kidnapping on the Mossad, claiming they did it to sabotage the Gazan power plant and that he was being held at the Shikma Prison in Ashkelon. She denied that he had any ties to Hamas.
Little is known about the circumstances surrounding Abu Sisi’s disappearance during a visit to Kiev with his family, but his sister Suzanne Abu Sisi, 45, told Reuters her brother had been abducted from a train in Ukraine last month, then taken to an Israeli prison.
“Friends there told us Dirar had been seized by six people who had abducted him from the train en route between Kharkhov and Kiev,” she told Reuters. “We know now that he is in prison in Israel, so they were the ones who abducted him. We do not know why they did it.”
Suzanne Abu Sisi, who lives in Gaza, said her brother had gone to Ukraine with his Ukrainian wife and six children to apply for citizenship there.
The Mossad does not go around kidnapping people for no reason. Think
Mordechai Vanunu, another person who was kidnapped by the Mossad overseas. I am sure that there is much more that we don't know about this story than what we do know.
Labels: Dirar Abu Sesi, Mordechai Vanunu, Ukraine
