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Mordechai Vanunu
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Vanunu, a Western hero

Op-ed: Why is Israeli nuke whistleblower hailed, while Pollard is being demonized?

"Mordechai Vanunu deserves freedom from Israel," British newspaper The Guardian recently editorialized, after Israel’s Supreme Court barred the nuclear whistleblower from emigrating on the grounds that he still poses a threat to national security.

 

The International League for Human Rights, one of the old glories of European pacifism, awarded Vanunu its latest medal bearing the name of Carl von Ossietzky, the German journalist who died in prison during the Nazi regime.

 

So it goes in the industry of human rights: Just as Ossietzky paid the price for the articles on Nazi rearmament, Vanunu is now paying for revealing the secrets of Israel’s atomic bomb. Both have apparently made "an honorable service to peace."

 

Bleeding-heart leftists, European bureaucrats and anti-nuke demonstrators complain how shameful it is that Vanunu the "idealist" is still isolated. Free him now, they demand. The Guardian editorializes that "in exposing a secret which needed to be told he has shown a higher duty to wider humanity."

 

Only naiveté or perversion can transform a traitor into a hero. But to better understand Vanunu’s status, let’s compare him to another Jewish spy: Jonathan Pollard, the only individual in the United States found guilty of spying for a friendly power who has ever served a sentence of more than four years.

 

Unlike Vanunu, who is revered by all foreign correspondents in Jerusalem and is a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, Pollard is now in a room so small that when he sits on the bed and stretches his arms he touches both walls - yet he has been betrayed by most Jewish intellectuals ("he is a viper," wrote Marty Peretz of the New Republic.)

 

A symbol of good

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.

 

Giulio Meotti, a journalist with Il Foglio, is the author of the book A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel's Victims of Terrorism

 

 

 


פרסום ראשון: 12.01.11, 18:04
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