{"id":448,"date":"2009-12-31T02:42:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-31T10:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=448"},"modified":"2009-12-31T02:42:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-31T10:42:00","slug":"no-freedom-for-israeli-whistleblower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2009\/12\/31\/no-freedom-for-israeli-whistleblower\/","title":{"rendered":"No Freedom for Israeli Whistleblower"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nobody has questioned that Israel has nuclear weapons for decades, making the following article particularly offensive.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><font color=\"#000000\"><a href=\"http:\/\/s217.photobucket.com\/albums\/cc83\/TomCat1948or2\/Blog%202009\/NoFreedomforIsraeliWhistleblower_1AA7\/mordechaivanunu.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"border-right-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px; display: inline; border-top-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px\" title=\"mordechai-vanunu\" border=\"0\" alt=\"mordechai-vanunu\" align=\"left\" src=\"http:\/\/s217.photobucket.com\/albums\/cc83\/TomCat1948or2\/Blog%202009\/NoFreedomforIsraeliWhistleblower_1AA7\/mordechaivanunu_thumb.jpg\" width=\"244\" height=\"148\" \/><\/a> Mordechai Vanunu, who served 18 years in prison after he revealed Israel&#8217;s secret nuclear program, has been placed under house arrest pending criminal charges for allegedly breaching the terms of his 2004 release, which includes <strong>a ban on contacts with foreigners<\/strong>. <\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#000000\">A police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said Vanunu was accused of meeting with &quot;a number of foreigners&quot;. The spokesman, however, did not specify who the foreigners were or where they came from.Vanunu&#8217;s lawyer, Avigdor Feldman, said his client had been arrested because his romantic attachment to an unnamed Norwegian woman had come to the attention of the authorities.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#000000\">&quot;Vanunu was arrested [for] <strong>a relationship between a man and a woman<\/strong>, with a Norwegian citizen,&quot; he told Reuters. &quot;He is not being accused of giving any secrets. She is not interested in nuclear business &#8211; she&#8217;s interested in Mordechai Vanunu [and he] is probably interested in her.&quot;<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#000000\">The woman has reportedly been interrogated by police but has not been charged with any offence.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#000000\">Vanunu has fallen foul of the no-foreigners rule before. In 2007, he was sentenced to six months in jail for talking to non-Israelis.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#000000\">Vanunu, a former technician at Israel&#8217;s Dimona nuclear plant, was <strong>first jailed in 1986 after he passed on information about Israel&#8217;s nuclear program to the Sunday Times<\/strong>. The Israeli authorities argue that he may have kept back some information which could still be of use to a hostile foreign power.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#000000\">His dilemma is compounded by the fact that <strong>most Israelis do not approve of his actions and want no contact with him<\/strong>. Vanunu says the feeling is mutual and he would prefer to live abroad, but is banned from doing so&#8230;<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#000000\">&#8230;After talking to the Sunday Times, Vanunu was tracked down in Rome where he was kidnapped by Israeli intelligence agents and brought back to Israel to stand trial.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#000000\"><strong>Israel has never publicly acknowledged its nuclear weapons arsenal<\/strong>\u2026 [<em>emphasis added<\/em>]<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Inserted from &lt;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/headline\/2009\/12\/30-1\" target=\"_blank\">Common Dreams<\/a>&gt;<\/p>\n<p>At the time of Vannu spilled the beans on Israel\u2019s nuclear weapons program, nobody credible had doubted it&#8217;s existence for several years.&#160; While Vannu did break the law, he did so as an act of civil disobedience, occasioned by Israel\u2019s lack of integrity by continuing to deny what we already knew.&#160; For Israel, letting Vannu go now would prove far less damaging than continuing to expose their own hypocrisy through vengeance.&#160; It is also an embarrassment for the US.&#160; How can Muslim nations take us seriously when we tout nuclear nonproliferation, while winking at Israel\u2019s nukes?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nobody has questioned that Israel has nuclear weapons for decades, making the following article particularly offensive. Mordechai Vanunu, who served 18 years in prison after he revealed Israel&#8217;s secret nuclear program, has been placed under house arrest pending criminal charges for allegedly breaching the terms of his 2004 release, which includes a ban on contacts <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2009\/12\/31\/no-freedom-for-israeli-whistleblower\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}