um... in NYC kids get killed by cops for just being kids, you butthole.
Ali was arrested on March 17, after more than a dozen Israeli soldiers stormed the family's home at 2:55am. The army held the family in one room for an hour, telling them nothing about why they were there.
Finally, Ali was told to put his shoes on, and "kiss [his] mother", before the soldiers took him away. Later that morning, a police officer called to tell the family the boy was being held at the Jalame military detention centre, giving no other information.
"When the soldier said 'kiss your mother', I said: 'I don't need to kiss him because in one hour, he'll be coming back,'" said Shamlawi. "He's my youngest child. I can't let him go."
The charges
After days of interrogation at Jalame, Ali was transferred to Megiddo prison in northern Israel and, on April 29, more than a month later, the teenager and four others from Hares - all aged 16 and 17 - were formally charged over a stone-throwing incident.
The army alleges on the evening of March 14, the five boys threw stones at yellow-plated Israeli cars driving towards Tel Aviv along Route 5 - a highway to the Israeli mega-settlement of Ariel and other illegal settlements - for more than 30 minutes.
The five Palestinian teenagers each face 20 charges of attempted murder and a potential sentence of life imprisonment. They deny the rock-throwing accusations.
Has there ever been a war where innocent children have not been killed?
11,000 in Syria recently and if I remember my history correctly 10% of the victims of the WWII London Blitz were children.
War sucks and children die.
what I was implying in not so many words is whether or not the full-scale war being waged upon an impoverished and ill-equipped refugee population is at all in proportion to what is required or necessary.
um... in NYC kids get killed by cops for just being kids, you butthole.
Do they really? Or is this just your pathetic pc puppet persona with your fist up its arse talking out loud? I guess you never need the cops, you can talk tough and handle your own biz, correct?
...and Hamas is this think group with a fixed media strategy of self genocide.
It's called martyrdom and hasn't much to do with thinking but more with fanaticism.
The general populace of Gaza, the men women and children living in the only home they have, being killed by a billion dollar war machine they have no hope of defending themselves against did not choose to be martyrs.
No they didn't, it was Hamas who made this decision for them. The consequences for their missile fire was totally clear to them.
So Frank, how do you explain this? I'm not being antagonizing, I'm being serious here.
Israel attacked a UN-run school housing refugees in Gaza despite warnings that civilians were there, the UN has said.
The UN says this is the sixth time that one of its schools has been hit by shellfire since this conflict began. And I've been told by UN officials on the ground that they believe Israeli forces were responsible on each occasion.
Mr Gunness, from the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa), told the BBC that Israel had been told 17 times that the school in the Jabaliya refugee camp was housing the displaced.
"The last time was hours before the fatal attack," he said. "Our initial assessment is that it was Israeli artillery that hit our school."
He said there had been "multiple deaths" including women and children, adding that the attack caused "universal shame".
This is outright bombing of humanitarian workers and civilians. I can't see how the martyrdom argument can be used to defend this, or the other 5 times this has happened.
There were several confirmed cases of Hamas storing rockets in and around UN schools:
"The UN's discovery of arms caches in two of its schools in the past week has given Israel's assertions credence. "UNRWA [the UN agency for Palestinian refugees] immediately informed all relevant parties and issued a statement strongly condemning the abuse of its premises," said a spokesman, Chris Gunness. The UN agency UNRWA's shelters have been shelled on four occasions in recent days, despite officials giving precise coordinates to the IDF."
...and Hamas is this think group with a fixed media strategy of self genocide.
It's called martyrdom and hasn't much to do with thinking but more with fanaticism.
The general populace of Gaza, the men women and children living in the only home they have, being killed by a billion dollar war machine they have no hope of defending themselves against did not choose to be martyrs.
No they didn't, it was Hamas who made this decision for them. The consequences for their missile fire was totally clear to them.
So Frank, how do you explain this? I'm not being antagonizing, I'm being serious here.
Israel attacked a UN-run school housing refugees in Gaza despite warnings that civilians were there, the UN has said.
The UN says this is the sixth time that one of its schools has been hit by shellfire since this conflict began. And I've been told by UN officials on the ground that they believe Israeli forces were responsible on each occasion.
Mr Gunness, from the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa), told the BBC that Israel had been told 17 times that the school in the Jabaliya refugee camp was housing the displaced.
"The last time was hours before the fatal attack," he said. "Our initial assessment is that it was Israeli artillery that hit our school."
He said there had been "multiple deaths" including women and children, adding that the attack caused "universal shame".
This is outright bombing of humanitarian workers and civilians. I can't see how the martyrdom argument can be used to defend this, or the other 5 times this has happened.
There were several confirmed cases of Hamas storing rockets in and around UN schools:
"The UN's discovery of arms caches in two of its schools in the past week has given Israel's assertions credence. "UNRWA [the UN agency for Palestinian refugees] immediately informed all relevant parties and issued a statement strongly condemning the abuse of its premises," said a spokesman, Chris Gunness. The UN agency UNRWA's shelters have been shelled on four occasions in recent days, despite officials giving precise coordinates to the IDF."
From the same article you posted:
However, even if Hamas were violating the law on this matter, it would not legally justify Israel's bombing of areas where civilians are known to be.
"Any violation of these prohibitions shall not release the parties to the conflict from their legal obligations with respect to the civilian population and civilians, including the obligation to take the precautionary measures," the conventions say.
This article is also 6 days old and not referencing my original post. I don't know how anyone can even argue that killing sleeping children can be justified under ANY circumstances. The quote from the UN on this attack is "outrageous and unjustifiable" and "the world stands disgraced".
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said it was investigating the incident at the UN school. Initial inquiries showed that "Hamas militants fired mortar shells from the vicinity of the school, and [Israeli] soldiers responded by firing towards the origins of the fire", a spokeswoman said.
A UN source said there was no evidence of militant activity inside the school.
My understanding of the rockets/schools cases is that in the couple instances where they were found, the buildings were empty (not occupied by refugees) and the rockets were removed. I don't have time to search for the link atm (also on my phone) but iirc that was via the UN itself.
I haven't seen any evidence that the various hospitals and schools being bombed actually have anything besides people in them, except the slippery slope of "there were Hamas rockets being fired in the area"
@Staxwax bro, for a guy all about the true hippity hop u have a remarkably retrograde attitude about the police. In my neighborhood the police are just as often the problem as the solution. But I don't even know why I'm responding to this bullshit
...and Hamas is this think group with a fixed media strategy of self genocide.
It's called martyrdom and hasn't much to do with thinking but more with fanaticism.
The general populace of Gaza, the men women and children living in the only home they have, being killed by a billion dollar war machine they have no hope of defending themselves against did not choose to be martyrs.
No they didn't, it was Hamas who made this decision for them. The consequences for their missile fire was totally clear to them.
So Frank, how do you explain this? I'm not being antagonizing, I'm being serious here.
Israel attacked a UN-run school housing refugees in Gaza despite warnings that civilians were there, the UN has said.
The UN says this is the sixth time that one of its schools has been hit by shellfire since this conflict began. And I've been told by UN officials on the ground that they believe Israeli forces were responsible on each occasion.
Mr Gunness, from the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa), told the BBC that Israel had been told 17 times that the school in the Jabaliya refugee camp was housing the displaced.
"The last time was hours before the fatal attack," he said. "Our initial assessment is that it was Israeli artillery that hit our school."
He said there had been "multiple deaths" including women and children, adding that the attack caused "universal shame".
This is outright bombing of humanitarian workers and civilians. I can't see how the martyrdom argument can be used to defend this, or the other 5 times this has happened.
There were several confirmed cases of Hamas storing rockets in and around UN schools:
"The UN's discovery of arms caches in two of its schools in the past week has given Israel's assertions credence. "UNRWA [the UN agency for Palestinian refugees] immediately informed all relevant parties and issued a statement strongly condemning the abuse of its premises," said a spokesman, Chris Gunness. The UN agency UNRWA's shelters have been shelled on four occasions in recent days, despite officials giving precise coordinates to the IDF."
From the same article you posted:
However, even if Hamas were violating the law on this matter, it would not legally justify Israel's bombing of areas where civilians are known to be.
"Any violation of these prohibitions shall not release the parties to the conflict from their legal obligations with respect to the civilian population and civilians, including the obligation to take the precautionary measures," the conventions say.
This article is also 6 days old and not referencing my original post. I don't know how anyone can even argue that killing sleeping children can be justified under ANY circumstances. The quote from the UN on this attack is "outrageous and unjustifiable" and "the world stands disgraced".
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said it was investigating the incident at the UN school. Initial inquiries showed that "Hamas militants fired mortar shells from the vicinity of the school, and [Israeli] soldiers responded by firing towards the origins of the fire", a spokeswoman said.
A UN source said there was no evidence of militant activity inside the school.
I think we can all agree that this is fucked up no matter what side you are on.
Exactly ^^^^
For all the flaws of the UN, they have been doing a great job of housing civilians and securing the shelters in Gaza. There is no evidence (according to every credible report on the recent bombing I've read) that weapons were being held in the UN shelter before or at the time of the Israeli strike this morning.
Jews and Arabs live together in Israel. It's not just that they don't kill each other, but they actually work and go to school together and intermarry, etc. in lots of cities.
Jews and Arabs live together in the West Bank and Jerusalem also; in some locations it's harmonious, in most locations it's not. It's very unlikely that Jews would be safe in the West Bank or parts of Jerusalem were it not for the presence of the Israeli military.
In fact, in no areas where Israel's neighbors govern do Jews safely live. When Israel was established, Iraq, Labanon, Syria, Egypt and Yemen kicked out all the Jews. When Egypt took over Gaza they kicked out all the Jews. When Jordan took over Jerusalem and the W Bank the kicked out all the Jews.
In fact, it's a totally uncontroversial point: it's generally accepted by all parties (the PA, the US, Israel) that any future Palestinian state will be ethnically cleansed of Jews.
(there's some Israeli outliers who claim to want to live in the W Bank under PA rule rather than evacuate some of Judaism's holiest sites, but I quite frankly doubt they would follow through on this, and anyway such an arrangement has never been part of any negotiations).
so yeah, I stand by my statement to LaserWolf, that Jews and Arabs have proven themselves capable of living together in relative peace in certain areas where Israel governs.
whether they could do so under Palestinian rule looks very unlikely.
With respect, much of the above information is lopsided. The encroaching Israeli settlements of the West Bank are by design meant to have the long-term effect of taking control of as much of the West Bank as possible for Israel. We are witnessing ethnic cleansing in progress there right now, where Palestinians will be forced to the margins of their occupied territory if the current trajectory holds.
b/w
Many from the sizable Arabic / Muslim population living in Israel that you reference above are not Palestinian, but are from other countries in the region that live there for work / economic reasons.
I think it has been proven, that Hamas and Israel's enemies do not have the weapons, forces or will to annihilate Israel.
They not only have the will. It is their declared intention. They don't yet have the means but considering the current situation in Syria and Iraq this could potentially change fairly quick.
Ask yourself why does Hamas continue firing rockets that have such little military effect on Israel while causing such devastating retaliation? The only motivation for this is to use imagery as posted in this thread as propaganda and this propaganda apparently works. None of these children would be dead if Hamas wouldn't have fired those missiles. They sacrificed these people and they continue doing so.
Any comparison of this war/conflict to the Holocaust is just plain stupid and misinformed at an absurd level. If you have to ask why then -I'm sorry -but then you're just an idiot. Same goes for this apartheid and racial segregation bullshit.
Antisemitism in Europe has an old tradition that reaches back to long before the 3rd Reich and which as a latent undercurrent has survived ever since, just waiting for it to again become socially acceptable. Now we can witness it rearing its ugly head as Jewish stores are smashed and fire is being set to Synagogues.
Jews and Arabs live together in Israel. It's not just that they don't kill each other, but they actually work and go to school together and intermarry, etc. in lots of cities.
Jews and Arabs live together in the West Bank and Jerusalem also; in some locations it's harmonious, in most locations it's not. It's very unlikely that Jews would be safe in the West Bank or parts of Jerusalem were it not for the presence of the Israeli military.
In fact, in no areas where Israel's neighbors govern do Jews safely live. When Israel was established, Iraq, Labanon, Syria, Egypt and Yemen kicked out all the Jews. When Egypt took over Gaza they kicked out all the Jews. When Jordan took over Jerusalem and the W Bank the kicked out all the Jews.
In fact, it's a totally uncontroversial point: it's generally accepted by all parties (the PA, the US, Israel) that any future Palestinian state will be ethnically cleansed of Jews.
(there's some Israeli outliers who claim to want to live in the W Bank under PA rule rather than evacuate some of Judaism's holiest sites, but I quite frankly doubt they would follow through on this, and anyway such an arrangement has never been part of any negotiations).
so yeah, I stand by my statement to LaserWolf, that Jews and Arabs have proven themselves capable of living together in relative peace in certain areas where Israel governs.
whether they could do so under Palestinian rule looks very unlikely.
With respect, much of the above information is lopsided. The encroaching Israeli settlements of the West Bank are by design meant to have the long-term effect of taking control of as much of the West Bank as possible for Israel. We are witnessing ethnic cleansing in progress there right now, where Palestinians will be forced to the margins of their occupied territory if the current trajectory holds.
LaserWolf asked me if Jews and Palestinians live together.
I said only where Israel governs does this happen. Jews were cleansed from Gaza (by the Egyptians) and the W Bank and much of Jerusalem (by the Jordanians). And the Palestinian position has always been that their future state will be similarly cleansed of Jews. In contrast, around 20% of Israel is Arab-speaking, and they and their Jewish neighbors by-and-large don't kill each other.
these aren't controversial or "lopsided" statements; they're facts.
MusicaDelAlma said:
Many from the sizable Arabic / Muslim population living in Israel that you reference above are not Palestinian, but are from other countries in the region that live there for work / economic reasons.
No man. 20% of Israel is made up of full Arab-speaking citizens (mostly Bedouin, Druze, and Christian and Muslim Arabs referred to variously as "Palestinian" or "Israeli Arab" or "Israeli Palestinian" depending on who's doing the referring).
These are the Arab-speakers who remained in Israel after its establishment (a population that has since multiplied by nearly 11X).
This is outright bombing of humanitarian workers and civilians. I can't see how the martyrdom argument can be used to defend this, or the other 5 times this has happened
...
I think we can all agree that this is fucked up no matter what side you are on.
I didn't re-quote the whole thing once more as it would have become too hard to read.
Apparently the school was hit by tank shells and the Israeli claim to before have been fired upon by mortars "from close by". Whatever happened, it's clear that any combat in such a densely populated and chaotic environment with so many displaced civilians will be terrible. Especially when you have combatants mixed in with civilians. Nobody is denying the fact that war is a terrible thing where fucked up stuff happens. Do you think Hamas has any concerns about hitting civilians with their rockets? Should Israel just sit still and wait until Hamas has better weapons and be a more equal military opponent to result in a more even number of casualties?
I think it has been proven, that Hamas and Israel's enemies do not have the weapons, forces or will to annihilate Israel.
They not only have the will. It is their declared intention. They don't yet have the means but considering the current situation in Syria and Iraq this could potentially change fairly quick.
Ask yourself why does Hamas continue firing rockets that have such little military effect on Israel while causing such devastating retaliation? The only motivation for this is to use imagery as posted in this thread as propaganda and this propaganda apparently works. None of these children would be dead if Hamas wouldn't have fired those missiles. They sacrificed these people and they continue doing so.
Any comparison of this war/conflict to the Holocaust is just plain stupid and misinformed at an absurd level. If you have to ask why then -I'm sorry -but then you're just an idiot. Same goes for this apartheid and racial segregation bullshit.
Antisemitism in Europe has an old tradition that reaches back to long before the 3rd Reich and which as a latent undercurrent has survived ever since, just waiting for it to again become socially acceptable. Now we can witness it rearing its ugly head as Jewish stores are smashed and fire is being set to Synagogues.
Stop pretending as if you care about the Jews.
Should I instead pretend to care about the trolling attempts of some anonymous nobody
It's easy to say whatever you want on the internet, any child can do this. If this matters to anybody at all largely depends on who's saying it, so let's see what you have going for yourself:
-Your username already brands you as an idiot.
-I've never seen you post anything even remotely interesting.
-whatever few things you ever said related to music or records revealed an almost impressive degree of ignorance.
I'm sorry to have to tell you this but whatever you could say will never have more relevance than a random piece of spam mail. I'd put you on ignore but I'm worried this could make you feel somewhat special and there's clearly no need for that.
Should I instead pretend to care about the trolling attempts of some anonymous nobody
Just saw this joke and thought it might cheer you up Frank:
I was just behind Merkel at passport control in Athens last year.
Officer: Name?
AM: Merkel, Angela.
Officer: Country of origin?
AM: Germany.
Officer: Occupation?
AM: No, not this time.
Apparently the school was hit by tank shells and the Israeli claim to before have been fired upon by mortars "from close by". Whatever happened, it's clear that any combat in such a densely populated and chaotic environment with so many displaced civilians will be terrible. Especially when you have combatants mixed in with civilians. Nobody is denying the fact that war is a terrible thing where fucked up stuff happens. Do you think Hamas has any concerns about hitting civilians with their rockets? Should Israel just sit still and wait until Hamas has better weapons and be a more equal military opponent to result in a more even number of casualties?
Personally I don't think you take out a whole building filled with civilians to possibly get 1 or 2 bad guys. But hey, that's just me.
Or ever worse, whole neighborhoods.
Like this one in about an hour...
I don't care if you give 3 hours notice or even 24 hours. Where are these people to go? UN shelters? It's obvious those aren't safe either.
Should I instead pretend to care about the trolling attempts of some anonymous nobody
Just saw this joke and thought it might cheer you up Frank:
I was just behind Merkel at passport control in Athens last year.
Officer: Name?
AM: Merkel, Angela.
Officer: Country of origin?
AM: Germany.
Officer: Occupation?
AM: No, not this time.
I think it has been proven, that Hamas and Israel's enemies do not have the weapons, forces or will to annihilate Israel.
They not only have the will. It is their declared intention. They don't yet have the means but considering the current situation in Syria and Iraq this could potentially change fairly quick.
Ask yourself why does Hamas continue firing rockets that have such little military effect on Israel while causing such devastating retaliation? The only motivation for this is to use imagery as posted in this thread as propaganda and this propaganda apparently works. None of these children would be dead if Hamas wouldn't have fired those missiles. They sacrificed these people and they continue doing so.
Any comparison of this war/conflict to the Holocaust is just plain stupid and misinformed at an absurd level. If you have to ask why then -I'm sorry -but then you're just an idiot. Same goes for this apartheid and racial segregation bullshit.
Antisemitism in Europe has an old tradition that reaches back to long before the 3rd Reich and which as a latent undercurrent has survived ever since, just waiting for it to again become socially acceptable. Now we can witness it rearing its ugly head as Jewish stores are smashed and fire is being set to Synagogues.
Stop pretending as if you care about the Jews.
Should I instead pretend to care about the trolling attempts of some anonymous nobody
It's easy to say whatever you want on the internet, any child can do this. If this matters to anybody at all largely depends on who's saying it, so let's see what you have going for yourself:
-Your username already brands you as an idiot.
-I've never seen you post anything even remotely interesting.
-whatever few things you ever said related to music or records revealed an almost impressive degree of ignorance.
I'm sorry to have to tell you this but whatever you could say will never have more relevance than a random piece of spam mail. I'd put you on ignore but I'm worried this could make you feel somewhat special and there's clearly no need for that.
You're an anti-Semite, and one of the worst at that. One that pretends he supports Israel, yet in reality despises all Middle Eastern people (Arabs & Jews).
Should we forget your racist rants against Egyptians last year, in which you described the Middle Eastern religions as 'the Middle Eastern plague'?
Guess what, Judaism is essential to Jewish identity and culture, you hypocritical Nazi coward.
I was talking about Islam and Christianity as plagues. The main characteristic of plagues being that they spread aggressively and cause great harm. If you look at the history of these two main world religions you will not come around accepting the facts of how much death, pain and suffering these religions have caused all over the world and still continue to do so today. That's how they became world religions. By the sword. Judaism never forcefully converted entire people or even continents while both, Islam and Christianity completely destroyed whole cultures, making sure to even eradicate any trace of them if at all possible. This is why I'm perfectly fine with Judaism just the same as with a whole bunch of other, non-aggressive religions.
Don't even start me on how Hitlers strong Protestant believes fueled his anti-semitism. Without Christianity there would have been no Holocaust. Today the declared goal of Hamas is to eradicate Israel. Yet, people call Israel defending itself a new Holocaust. In the meantime you have german neo nazis take to the streets to support Gaza and Palestinian immigrants yell "Sieg Heil!".
You can call me an anti-christian or anti-muslim all day long, hell you can call me whatever, it doesn't matter to me one tiny bit what you think because clearly you are a hopeless idiot.
I'm out of this thread, your stupidity stinks up the place like a bad fart.
and this country that is hell bent on killing as many of the so called cockroaches in a bottle...... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4034765.stm
that has stolen plutonium from the united states while the feds just look the other way
fucking villainous nuclear armed religious maniacs/zelots / ZIONISTS
Deep beneath desert sands, an embattled Middle Eastern state has built a covert nuclear bomb, using technology and materials provided by friendly powers or stolen by a clandestine network of agents. It is the stuff of pulp thrillers and the sort of narrative often used to characterise the worst fears about the Iranian nuclear programme. In reality, though, neither US nor British intelligence believe Tehran has decided to build a bomb, and Iran's atomic projects are under constant international monitoring.
The exotic tale of the bomb hidden in the desert is a true story, though. It's just one that applies to another country. In an extraordinary feat of subterfuge, Israel managed to assemble an entire underground nuclear arsenal ÔÇô now estimated at 80 warheads, on a par with India and Pakistan ÔÇô and even tested a bomb nearly half a century ago, with a minimum of international outcry or even much public awareness of what it was doing.
Despite the fact that the Israel's nuclear programme has been an open secret since a disgruntled technician, Mordechai Vanunu, blew the whistle on it in 1986, the official Israeli position is still never to confirm or deny its existence.
When the former speaker of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, broke the taboo last month, declaring Israeli possession of both nuclear and chemical weapons and describing the official non-disclosure policy as "outdated and childish" a rightwing group formally called for a police investigation for treason.
Meanwhile, western governments have played along with the policy of "opacity" by avoiding all mention of the issue. In 2009, when a veteran Washington reporter, Helen Thomas, asked Barack Obama in the first month of his presidency if he knew of any country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons, he dodged the trapdoor by saying only that he did not wish to "speculate".
UK governments have generally followed suit. Asked in the House of Lords in November about Israeli nuclear weapons, Baroness Warsi answered tangentially. "Israel has not declared a nuclear weapons programme. We have regular discussions with the government of Israel on a range of nuclear-related issues," the minister said. "The government of Israel is in no doubt as to our views. We encourage Israel to become a state party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT]."
But through the cracks in this stone wall, more and more details continue to emerge of how Israel built its nuclear weapons from smuggled parts and pilfered technology.
The tale serves as a historical counterpoint to today's drawn-out struggle over Iran's nuclear ambitions. The parallels are not exact ÔÇô Israel, unlike Iran, never signed up to the 1968 NPT so could not violate it. But it almost certainly broke a treaty banning nuclear tests, as well as countless national and international laws restricting the traffic in nuclear materials and technology.
The list of nations that secretly sold Israel the material and expertise to make nuclear warheads, or who turned a blind eye to its theft, include today's staunchest campaigners against proliferation: the US, France, Germany, Britain and even Norway.
Whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu. Photograph: AP
Meanwhile, Israeli agents charged with buying fissile material and state-of-the-art technology found their way into some of the most sensitive industrial establishments in the world. This daring and remarkably successful spy ring, known as Lakam, the Hebrew acronym for the innocuous-sounding Science Liaison Bureau, included such colourful figures as Arnon Milchan, a billionaire Hollywood producer behind such hits as Pretty Woman, LA Confidential and 12 Years a Slave, who finally admitted his role last month.
"Do you know what it's like to be a twentysomething-year-old kid [and] his country lets him be James Bond? Wow! The action! That was exciting," he said in an Israeli documentary.
Milchan's life story is colourful, and unlikely enough to be the subject of one of the blockbusters he bankrolls. In the documentary, Robert de Niro recalls discussing Milchan's role in the illicit purchase of nuclear-warhead triggers. "At some point I was asking something about that, being friends, but not in an accusatory way. I just wanted to know," De Niro says. "And he said: yeah I did that. Israel's my country."
Milchan was not shy about using Hollywood connections to help his shadowy second career. At one point, he admits in the documentary, he used the lure of a visit to actor Richard Dreyfuss's home to get a top US nuclear scientist, Arthur Biehl, to join the board of one of his companies.
According to Milchan's biography, by Israeli journalists Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman, he was recruited in 1965 by Israel's current president, Shimon Peres, who he met in a Tel Aviv nightclub (called Mandy's, named after the hostess and owner's wife Mandy Rice-Davies, freshly notorious for her role in the Profumo sex scandal). Milchan, who then ran the family fertiliser company, never looked back, playing a central role in Israel's clandestine acquisition programme.
He was responsible for securing vital uranium-enrichment technology, photographing centrifuge blueprints that a German executive had been bribed into temporarily "mislaying" in his kitchen. The same blueprints, belonging to the European uranium enrichment consortium, Urenco, were stolen a second time by a Pakistani employee, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who used them to found his country's enrichment programme and to set up a global nuclear smuggling business, selling the design to Libya, North Korea and Iran.
For that reason, Israel's centrifuges are near-identical to Iran's, a convergence that allowed Israeli to try out a computer worm, codenamed Stuxnet, on its own centrifuges before unleashing it on Iran in 2010.
Arguably, Lakam's exploits were even more daring than Khan's. In 1968, it organised the disappearance of an entire freighter full of uranium ore in the middle of the Mediterranean. In what became known as the Plumbat affair, the Israelis used a web of front companies to buy a consignment of uranium oxide, known as yellowcake, in Antwerp. The yellowcake was concealed in drums labelled "plumbat", a lead derivative, and loaded onto a freighter leased by a phony Liberian company. The sale was camouflaged as a transaction between German and Italian companies with help from German officials, reportedly in return for an Israeli offer to help the Germans with centrifuge technology.
When the ship, the Scheersberg A, docked in Rotterdam, the entire crew was dismissed on the pretext that the vessel had been sold and an Israeli crew took their place. The ship sailed into the Mediterranean where, under Israeli naval guard, the cargo was transferred to another vessel.
US and British documents declassified last year also revealed a previously unknown Israeli purchase of about 100 tons of yellowcake from Argentina in 1963 or 1964, without the safeguards typically used in nuclear transactions to prevent the material being used in weapons.
Israel had few qualms about proliferating nuclear weapons knowhow and materials, giving South Africa's apartheid regime help in developing its own bomb in the 1970s in return for 600 tons of yellowcake.
Pictures of the secret Dimona nuclear reactor in Israel, showing where the plant has allegedly been camouflaged. Photograph: space imaging
Israel's nuclear reactor also required deuterium oxide, also known as heavy water, to moderate the fissile reaction. For that, Israel turned to Norway and Britain. In 1959, Israel managed to buy 20 tons of heavy water that Norway had sold to the UK but was surplus to requirements for the British nuclear programme. Both governments were suspicious that the material would be used to make weapons, but decided to look the other way. In documents seen by the BBC in 2005 British officials argued it would be "over-zealous" to impose safeguards. For its part, Norway carried out only one inspection visit, in 1961.
Israel's nuclear-weapons project could never have got off the ground, though, without an enormous contribution from France. The country that took the toughest line on counter-proliferation when it came to Iran helped lay the foundations of Israel's nuclear weapons programme, driven by by a sense of guilt over letting Israel down in the 1956 Suez conflict, sympathy from French-Jewish scientists, intelligence-sharing over Algeria and a drive to sell French expertise and abroad.
"There was a tendency to try to export and there was a general feeling of support for Israel," Andre Finkelstein, a former deputy commissioner at France's Atomic Energy Commissariat and deputy director general at the International Atomic Energy Agency, told Avner Cohen, an Israeli-American nuclear historian.
France's first reactor went critical as early as 1948 but the decision to build nuclear weapons seems to have been taken in 1954, after Pierre Mendès France made his first trip to Washington as president of the council of ministers of the chaotic Fourth Republic. On the way back he told an aide: "It's exactly like a meeting of gangsters. Everyone is putting his gun on the table, if you have no gun you are nobody. So we must have a nuclear programme."
Mendès France gave the order to start building bombs in December 1954. And as it built its arsenal, Paris solds material assistance to other aspiring weapons states, not just Israel.
"[T]his went on for many, many years until we did some stupid exports, including Iraq and the reprocessing plant in Pakistan, which was crazy," Finkelstein recalled in an interview that can now be read in a collection of Cohen's papers at the Wilson Centre thinktank in Washington. "We have been the most irresponsible country on nonproliferation."
In Dimona, French engineers poured in to help build Israel a nuclear reactor and a far more secret reprocessing plant capable of separating plutonium from spent reactor fuel. This was the real giveaway that Israel's nuclear programme was aimed at producing weapons.
By the end of the 50s, there were 2,500 French citizens living in Dimona, transforming it from a village to a cosmopolitan town, complete with French lyc├®es and streets full of Renaults, and yet the whole endeavour was conducted under a thick veil of secrecy. The American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in his book The Samson Option: "French workers at Dimona were forbidden to write directly to relatives and friends in France and elsewhere, but sent mail to a phony post-office box in Latin America."
The British were kept out of the loop, being told at different times that the huge construction site was a desert grasslands research institute and a manganese processing plant. The Americans, also kept in the dark by both Israel and France, flew U2 spy planes over Dimona in an attempt to find out what they were up to.
The Israelis admitted to having a reactor but insisted it was for entirely peaceful purposes. The spent fuel was sent to France for reprocessing, they claimed, even providing film footage of it being supposedly being loaded onto French freighters. Throughout the 60s it flatly denied the existence of the underground reprocessing plant in Dimona that was churning out plutonium for bombs.
Producer Arnon Milchan with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at the premiere of Mr and Mrs Smith. Photograph: L Cohen
Israel refused to countenance visits by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), so in the early 1960s President Kennedy demanded they accept American inspectors. US physicists were dispatched to Dimona but were given the run-around from the start. Visits were never twice-yearly as had been agreed with Kennedy and were subject to repeated postponements. The US physicists sent to Dimona were not allowed to bring their own equipment or collect samples. The lead American inspector, Floyd Culler, an expert on plutonium extraction, noted in his reports that there were newly plastered and painted walls in one of the buildings. It turned out that before each American visit, the Israelis had built false walls around the row of lifts that descended six levels to the subterranean reprocessing plant.
As more and more evidence of Israel's weapons programme emerged, the US role progressed from unwitting dupe to reluctant accomplice. In 1968 the CIA director Richard Helms told President Johnson that Israel had indeed managed to build nuclear weapons and that its air force had conducted sorties to practise dropping them.
The timing could not have been worse. The NPT, intended to prevent too many nuclear genies from escaping from their bottles, had just been drawn up and if news broke that one of the supposedly non-nuclear-weapons states had secretly made its own bomb, it would have become a dead letter that many countries, especially Arab states, would refuse to sign.
The Johnson White House decided to say nothing, and the decision was formalised at a 1969 meeting between Richard Nixon and Golda Meir, at which the US president agreed to not to pressure Israel into signing the NPT, while the Israeli prime minister agreed her country would not be the first to "introduce" nuclear weapons into the Middle East and not do anything to make their existence public.
In fact, US involvement went deeper than mere silence. At a meeting in 1976 that has only recently become public knowledge, the CIA deputy director Carl Duckett informed a dozen officials from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the agency suspected some of the fissile fuel in Israel's bombs was weapons-grade uranium stolen under America's nose from a processing plant in Pennsylvania.
Not only was an alarming amount of fissile material going missing at the company, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (Numec), but it had been visited by a veritable who's-who of Israeli intelligence, including Rafael Eitan, described by the firm as an Israeli defence ministry "chemist", but, in fact, a top Mossad operative who went on to head Lakam.
"It was a shock. Everyody was open-mouthed," recalls Victor Gilinsky, who was one of the American nuclear officials briefed by Duckett. "It was one of the most glaring cases of diverted nuclear material but the consequences appeared so awful for the people involved and for the US than nobody really wanted to find out what was going on."
The investigation was shelved and no charges were made.
A few years later, on 22 September 1979, a US satellite, Vela 6911, detected the double-flash typical of a nuclear weapon test off the coast of South Africa. Leonard Weiss, a mathematician and an expert on nuclear proliferation, was working as a Senate advisor at the time and after being briefed on the incident by US intelligence agencies and the country's nuclear weapons laboratories, he became convinced a nuclear test, in contravention to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, had taken place.
It was only after both the Carter and then the Reagan administrations attempted to gag him on the incident and tried to whitewash it with an unconvincing panel of enquiry, that it dawned on Weiss that it was the Israelis, rather than the South Africans, who had carried out the detonation.
"I was told it would create a very serious foreign policy issue for the US, if I said it was a test. Someone had let something off that US didn't want anyone to know about," says Weiss.
Israeli sources told Hersh the flash picked up by the Vela satellite was actually the third of a series of Indian Ocean nuclear tests that Israel conducted in cooperation with South Africa.
"It was a fuck-up," one source told him. "There was a storm and we figured it would block Vela, but there was a gap in the weather ÔÇô a window ÔÇô and Vela got blinded by the flash."
The US policy of silence continues to this day, even though Israel appears to be continuing to trade on the nuclear black market, albeit at much reduced volumes. In a paper on the illegal trade in nuclear material and technology published in October, the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) noted: "Under US pressure in the 1980s and early 1990s, Israel  decided to largely stop its illicit procurement for its nuclear weapons programme. Today, there is evidence that Israel may still make occasional illicit procurements  US sting operations and legal cases show this."
Avner Cohen, the author of two books on Israel's bomb, said that policy of opacity in both Israel and in Washington is kept in place now largely by inertia. "At the political level, no one wants to deal with it for fear of opening a Pandora's box. It has in many ways become a burden for the US, but people in Washington, all the way up to Obama will not touch it, because of the fear it could compromise the very basis of the Israeli-US understanding."
In the Arab world and beyond, there is growing impatience with the skewed nuclear status quo. Egypt in particular has threatened to walk out of the NPT unless there is progress towards creating a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. The western powers promised to stage a conference on the proposal in 2012 but it was called off, largely at America's behest, to reduce the pressure on Israel to attend and declare its nuclear arsenal.
"Somehow the kabuki goes on," Weiss says. "If it is admitted Israel has nuclear weapons at least you can have an honest discussion. It seems to me it's very difficult to get a resolution of the Iran issue without being honest about that."
Well....
1st, lets hope the current 72hr cease fire holds and is extended and leads to peace.
2nd, I have argued this before for 14pages, so let me just state it like this and then I am done:
No religion ever killed anyone. People kill in the name of religion, misusing religion as shield for their evil.
I was talking about Islam and Christianity as plagues. The main characteristic of plagues being that they spread aggressively and cause great harm. If you look at the history of these two main world religions you will not come around accepting the facts of how much death, pain and suffering these religions have caused all over the world and still continue to do so today. That's how they became world religions. By the sword. Judaism never forcefully converted entire people or even continents while both, Islam and Christianity completely destroyed whole cultures, making sure to even eradicate any trace of them if at all possible. This is why I'm perfectly fine with Judaism just the same as with a whole bunch of other, non-aggressive religions.
Don't even start me on how Hitlers strong Protestant believes fueled his anti-semitism. Without Christianity there would have been no Holocaust. Today the declared goal of Hamas is to eradicate Israel. Yet, people call Israel defending itself a new Holocaust. In the meantime you have german neo nazis take to the streets to support Gaza and Palestinian immigrants yell "Sieg Heil!".
You can call me an anti-christian or anti-muslim all day long, hell you can call me whatever, it doesn't matter to me one tiny bit what you think because clearly you are a hopeless idiot.
I'm out of this thread, your stupidity stinks up the place like a bad fart.
You made the 'Middle Eastern plague' comment in relation to circumcision, which is also practised by Jews.
I have no problem with you other than the fact you constantly insult other peoples cultures.
If you would have ever read the Old Testament, you'd know that it's full with stories of the Jewish people waging war with other nations, similar to what the Arabs did in the Quran. But that's life, war is an essential natural part of life and anyone denying that needs a reality check.
You made the 'Middle Eastern plague' comment in relation to circumcision
No I didn't.
Perhaps in relations to female circumcision and how it is still today propagandized by various Imams in West Africa, maybe, but I don't recall having had this discussion here.
Da Vinylmentalist said:
I have no problem with you other than the fact you constantly insult other peoples cultures.
I call them like I see them.
Da Vinylmentalist said:
If you would have ever read the Old Testament.
I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
Now stop putting things into my mouth that I didn't say. There are plenty of things I did say that you can get upset about, just see how much I care.
rootless' frieds and role models
fucking nazi cowards
United Nations officials described the killing of sleeping children as a disgrace to the world and accused Israel of a serious violation of international law after a school in Gaza being used to shelter Palestinian families was shelled on Wednesday.
At least 15 people, mostly children and women, died when the school in Jabaliya refugee camp was hit by five shells during a night of relentless bombardment across Gaza. More than 100 people were injured.
Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, said the attack was "outrageous and unjustifiable" and demanded "accountability and justice". The UN said its officials had repeatedly given details of the school and its refugee population to Israel.
Fighting in Gaza continued through the day despite a four-hour humanitarian ceasefire called by Israel from 3pm. A crowded market in Shujai'iya was hit in the late afternoon, causing at least 17 deaths, including a journalist, and injuring about 200 people, according to Gaza health officials. They said people had ventured out to shop in the belief a ceasefire was in place. Witnesses said several shells struck as people were running away. Israel said rockets and mortar shells continued to be fired from Gaza.
Israel on Thursday was showing no sign of scaling back Operation Protective Edge, with the military reportedly calling up an additional 16,000 reserves as the offensive entered its 24th day.
At the UN school the first shell came just after the early morning call to prayer, when most of those taking shelter were asleep, crammed into classrooms with what few possessions they had managed to snatch as they fled their homes.
About 3,300 people had squashed into Jabaliya Elementary A&B Girls' School since the Israeli military warned people to leave their homes and neighbourhoods or risk death under intense bombardment. Classroom number one, near the school's entrance, had become home to about 40 people, mostly women and children.
As a shell blasted through the wall, showering occupants with shrapnel and spattering blood on walls and floors, Amna Zantit, 31, scrambled to gather up her three terrified infants in a panicked bid for the relative safety of the schoolyard. "Everyone was trying to escape," she said, clutching her eight-month old baby tightly. Minutes later, a second shell slammed through the roof of the two-storey school. At least 15 people were killed and more than 100 injured. Most were women or children.
Pierre Krähenbühl, commissioner-general of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said the shelling of the school was a "serious violation of international law by Israeli forces".
Krähenbühl said: "Last night, children were killed as they slept next to their parents on the floor of a classroom in a UN-designated shelter in Gaza. Children killed in their sleep; this is an affront to all of us, a source of universal shame. Today the world stands disgraced."
Khalil al-Halabi, the UN official in charge of the schools in the area, was quickly on the scene. Bodies were littered over the classroom, and the badly injured lay in pools of blood amid the debris and rubble caused by the blast. "I was shaking," he said. "It was very, very hard for me to see the blood and hear the children crying."
By daylight, the detritus of people's lives was visible among ruins of the classroom: a ball, a bucket, some blankets, tins of food, a pair of flip-flops. The corpses of donkeys, used to haul the meagre possessions of refugees to what they thought was safety, lay at the school's entrance as two lads wearing Palestinian boy scout scarves collected human body parts for burial. Five of the injured were in a critical condition in hospital
Halabi was facing impossible requests for advice from those who escaped the carnage. "These people are very angry. They evacuated their homes and came here for protection, not to be killed inside a UN shelter. Now they are asking me whether to stay or leave. They are very frightened. They don't know what to do."
The attack on the school was the sixth time that UNRWA premises have been hit since the war in Gaza began more than three weeks ago, the UN said.
Palestinians fled their homes after Israel warned that failure to do so would put their lives at risk. Those at the Jabaliya school were among more than 200,000 who have sought shelter at UN premises in the belief that families would be safe.
Analysis of evidence gathered at the site by UNRWA led to an initial assessment that Israeli artillery had hit the school, causing "multiple civilian deaths and injuries including of women and children and the UNRWA guard who was trying to protect the site. These are people who were instructed to leave their homes by the Israeli army."
Krähenbühl added: "Our staff, the very people leading the humanitarian response, are being killed. Our shelters are overflowing. Tens of thousands may soon be stranded in the streets of Gaza, without food, water and shelter if attacks on these areas continue."
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said it was investigating the incident at the UN school. Initial inquiries showed that "Hamas militants fired mortar shells from the vicinity of the school, and [Israeli] soldiers responded by firing towards the origins of the fire", a spokeswoman said.
A UN source said there was no evidence of militant activity inside the school.
The US, which has been at odds with Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, over efforts to secure a ceasefire, condemned the school shelling but did not specifically blame Israel.
The incident comes after an explosion at another UN school in Beit Hanoun last week as the playground was filled with families awaiting evacuation. Israel denied responsibility for the deaths, saying a single "errant" shell fired by its forces hit the school playground, which was empty at the time.
Comments
Has there ever been a war where innocent children have not been killed?
11,000 in Syria recently and if I remember my history correctly 10% of the victims of the WWII London Blitz were children.
War sucks and children die.
And there we have it. Israel should not be where it is.
what about Egypt's border with Gaza?
what I was implying in not so many words is whether or not the full-scale war being waged upon an impoverished and ill-equipped refugee population is at all in proportion to what is required or necessary.
ETA: targeting civilians is a war crime. the end.
Do they really? Or is this just your pathetic pc puppet persona with your fist up its arse talking out loud? I guess you never need the cops, you can talk tough and handle your own biz, correct?
There were several confirmed cases of Hamas storing rockets in and around UN schools:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/24/gaza-hamas-fighters-military-bases-guerrilla-war-civilians-israel-idf
"The UN's discovery of arms caches in two of its schools in the past week has given Israel's assertions credence. "UNRWA [the UN agency for Palestinian refugees] immediately informed all relevant parties and issued a statement strongly condemning the abuse of its premises," said a spokesman, Chris Gunness. The UN agency UNRWA's shelters have been shelled on four occasions in recent days, despite officials giving precise coordinates to the IDF."
From the same article you posted:
This article is also 6 days old and not referencing my original post. I don't know how anyone can even argue that killing sleeping children can be justified under ANY circumstances. The quote from the UN on this attack is "outrageous and unjustifiable" and "the world stands disgraced".
I think we can all agree that this is fucked up no matter what side you are on.
I haven't seen any evidence that the various hospitals and schools being bombed actually have anything besides people in them, except the slippery slope of "there were Hamas rockets being fired in the area"
@Staxwax bro, for a guy all about the true hippity hop u have a remarkably retrograde attitude about the police. In my neighborhood the police are just as often the problem as the solution. But I don't even know why I'm responding to this bullshit
I have been wearing digital belts all my life.
But I recently upgraded to an analog belt.
And I am loving it. Can we get Batmon/Herm or some other fashion minder strutter to weigh in on the pros and cons of analog v digital belts?
Exactly ^^^^
For all the flaws of the UN, they have been doing a great job of housing civilians and securing the shelters in Gaza. There is no evidence (according to every credible report on the recent bombing I've read) that weapons were being held in the UN shelter before or at the time of the Israeli strike this morning.
With respect, much of the above information is lopsided. The encroaching Israeli settlements of the West Bank are by design meant to have the long-term effect of taking control of as much of the West Bank as possible for Israel. We are witnessing ethnic cleansing in progress there right now, where Palestinians will be forced to the margins of their occupied territory if the current trajectory holds.
b/w
Many from the sizable Arabic / Muslim population living in Israel that you reference above are not Palestinian, but are from other countries in the region that live there for work / economic reasons.
Stop pretending as if you care about the Jews.
LaserWolf asked me if Jews and Palestinians live together.
I said only where Israel governs does this happen. Jews were cleansed from Gaza (by the Egyptians) and the W Bank and much of Jerusalem (by the Jordanians). And the Palestinian position has always been that their future state will be similarly cleansed of Jews. In contrast, around 20% of Israel is Arab-speaking, and they and their Jewish neighbors by-and-large don't kill each other.
these aren't controversial or "lopsided" statements; they're facts.
No man. 20% of Israel is made up of full Arab-speaking citizens (mostly Bedouin, Druze, and Christian and Muslim Arabs referred to variously as "Palestinian" or "Israeli Arab" or "Israeli Palestinian" depending on who's doing the referring).
These are the Arab-speakers who remained in Israel after its establishment (a population that has since multiplied by nearly 11X).
I didn't re-quote the whole thing once more as it would have become too hard to read.
Apparently the school was hit by tank shells and the Israeli claim to before have been fired upon by mortars "from close by". Whatever happened, it's clear that any combat in such a densely populated and chaotic environment with so many displaced civilians will be terrible. Especially when you have combatants mixed in with civilians. Nobody is denying the fact that war is a terrible thing where fucked up stuff happens. Do you think Hamas has any concerns about hitting civilians with their rockets? Should Israel just sit still and wait until Hamas has better weapons and be a more equal military opponent to result in a more even number of casualties?
Should I instead pretend to care about the trolling attempts of some anonymous nobody
It's easy to say whatever you want on the internet, any child can do this. If this matters to anybody at all largely depends on who's saying it, so let's see what you have going for yourself:
-Your username already brands you as an idiot.
-I've never seen you post anything even remotely interesting.
-whatever few things you ever said related to music or records revealed an almost impressive degree of ignorance.
I'm sorry to have to tell you this but whatever you could say will never have more relevance than a random piece of spam mail. I'd put you on ignore but I'm worried this could make you feel somewhat special and there's clearly no need for that.
Slaughter is not self-defense: The assault on Gaza and the corruption of language
Just saw this joke and thought it might cheer you up Frank:
I was just behind Merkel at passport control in Athens last year.
Officer: Name?
AM: Merkel, Angela.
Officer: Country of origin?
AM: Germany.
Officer: Occupation?
AM: No, not this time.
Personally I don't think you take out a whole building filled with civilians to possibly get 1 or 2 bad guys. But hey, that's just me.
Or ever worse, whole neighborhoods.
Like this one in about an hour...
I don't care if you give 3 hours notice or even 24 hours. Where are these people to go? UN shelters? It's obvious those aren't safe either.
that's a really good one...
You're an anti-Semite, and one of the worst at that. One that pretends he supports Israel, yet in reality despises all Middle Eastern people (Arabs & Jews).
Should we forget your racist rants against Egyptians last year, in which you described the Middle Eastern religions as 'the Middle Eastern plague'?
Guess what, Judaism is essential to Jewish identity and culture, you hypocritical Nazi coward.
Let's at least try to keep this schitt civil, people.
Don't even start me on how Hitlers strong Protestant believes fueled his anti-semitism. Without Christianity there would have been no Holocaust. Today the declared goal of Hamas is to eradicate Israel. Yet, people call Israel defending itself a new Holocaust. In the meantime you have german neo nazis take to the streets to support Gaza and Palestinian immigrants yell "Sieg Heil!".
You can call me an anti-christian or anti-muslim all day long, hell you can call me whatever, it doesn't matter to me one tiny bit what you think because clearly you are a hopeless idiot.
I'm out of this thread, your stupidity stinks up the place like a bad fart.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4034765.stm
that has stolen plutonium from the united states while the feds just look the other way
fucking villainous nuclear armed religious maniacs/zelots / ZIONISTS
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/15/truth-israels-secret-nuclear-arsenal
Deep beneath desert sands, an embattled Middle Eastern state has built a covert nuclear bomb, using technology and materials provided by friendly powers or stolen by a clandestine network of agents. It is the stuff of pulp thrillers and the sort of narrative often used to characterise the worst fears about the Iranian nuclear programme. In reality, though, neither US nor British intelligence believe Tehran has decided to build a bomb, and Iran's atomic projects are under constant international monitoring.
The exotic tale of the bomb hidden in the desert is a true story, though. It's just one that applies to another country. In an extraordinary feat of subterfuge, Israel managed to assemble an entire underground nuclear arsenal ÔÇô now estimated at 80 warheads, on a par with India and Pakistan ÔÇô and even tested a bomb nearly half a century ago, with a minimum of international outcry or even much public awareness of what it was doing.
Despite the fact that the Israel's nuclear programme has been an open secret since a disgruntled technician, Mordechai Vanunu, blew the whistle on it in 1986, the official Israeli position is still never to confirm or deny its existence.
When the former speaker of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, broke the taboo last month, declaring Israeli possession of both nuclear and chemical weapons and describing the official non-disclosure policy as "outdated and childish" a rightwing group formally called for a police investigation for treason.
Meanwhile, western governments have played along with the policy of "opacity" by avoiding all mention of the issue. In 2009, when a veteran Washington reporter, Helen Thomas, asked Barack Obama in the first month of his presidency if he knew of any country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons, he dodged the trapdoor by saying only that he did not wish to "speculate".
UK governments have generally followed suit. Asked in the House of Lords in November about Israeli nuclear weapons, Baroness Warsi answered tangentially. "Israel has not declared a nuclear weapons programme. We have regular discussions with the government of Israel on a range of nuclear-related issues," the minister said. "The government of Israel is in no doubt as to our views. We encourage Israel to become a state party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT]."
But through the cracks in this stone wall, more and more details continue to emerge of how Israel built its nuclear weapons from smuggled parts and pilfered technology.
The tale serves as a historical counterpoint to today's drawn-out struggle over Iran's nuclear ambitions. The parallels are not exact ÔÇô Israel, unlike Iran, never signed up to the 1968 NPT so could not violate it. But it almost certainly broke a treaty banning nuclear tests, as well as countless national and international laws restricting the traffic in nuclear materials and technology.
The list of nations that secretly sold Israel the material and expertise to make nuclear warheads, or who turned a blind eye to its theft, include today's staunchest campaigners against proliferation: the US, France, Germany, Britain and even Norway.
Whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu. Photograph: AP
Meanwhile, Israeli agents charged with buying fissile material and state-of-the-art technology found their way into some of the most sensitive industrial establishments in the world. This daring and remarkably successful spy ring, known as Lakam, the Hebrew acronym for the innocuous-sounding Science Liaison Bureau, included such colourful figures as Arnon Milchan, a billionaire Hollywood producer behind such hits as Pretty Woman, LA Confidential and 12 Years a Slave, who finally admitted his role last month.
"Do you know what it's like to be a twentysomething-year-old kid [and] his country lets him be James Bond? Wow! The action! That was exciting," he said in an Israeli documentary.
Milchan's life story is colourful, and unlikely enough to be the subject of one of the blockbusters he bankrolls. In the documentary, Robert de Niro recalls discussing Milchan's role in the illicit purchase of nuclear-warhead triggers. "At some point I was asking something about that, being friends, but not in an accusatory way. I just wanted to know," De Niro says. "And he said: yeah I did that. Israel's my country."
Milchan was not shy about using Hollywood connections to help his shadowy second career. At one point, he admits in the documentary, he used the lure of a visit to actor Richard Dreyfuss's home to get a top US nuclear scientist, Arthur Biehl, to join the board of one of his companies.
According to Milchan's biography, by Israeli journalists Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman, he was recruited in 1965 by Israel's current president, Shimon Peres, who he met in a Tel Aviv nightclub (called Mandy's, named after the hostess and owner's wife Mandy Rice-Davies, freshly notorious for her role in the Profumo sex scandal). Milchan, who then ran the family fertiliser company, never looked back, playing a central role in Israel's clandestine acquisition programme.
He was responsible for securing vital uranium-enrichment technology, photographing centrifuge blueprints that a German executive had been bribed into temporarily "mislaying" in his kitchen. The same blueprints, belonging to the European uranium enrichment consortium, Urenco, were stolen a second time by a Pakistani employee, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who used them to found his country's enrichment programme and to set up a global nuclear smuggling business, selling the design to Libya, North Korea and Iran.
For that reason, Israel's centrifuges are near-identical to Iran's, a convergence that allowed Israeli to try out a computer worm, codenamed Stuxnet, on its own centrifuges before unleashing it on Iran in 2010.
Arguably, Lakam's exploits were even more daring than Khan's. In 1968, it organised the disappearance of an entire freighter full of uranium ore in the middle of the Mediterranean. In what became known as the Plumbat affair, the Israelis used a web of front companies to buy a consignment of uranium oxide, known as yellowcake, in Antwerp. The yellowcake was concealed in drums labelled "plumbat", a lead derivative, and loaded onto a freighter leased by a phony Liberian company. The sale was camouflaged as a transaction between German and Italian companies with help from German officials, reportedly in return for an Israeli offer to help the Germans with centrifuge technology.
When the ship, the Scheersberg A, docked in Rotterdam, the entire crew was dismissed on the pretext that the vessel had been sold and an Israeli crew took their place. The ship sailed into the Mediterranean where, under Israeli naval guard, the cargo was transferred to another vessel.
US and British documents declassified last year also revealed a previously unknown Israeli purchase of about 100 tons of yellowcake from Argentina in 1963 or 1964, without the safeguards typically used in nuclear transactions to prevent the material being used in weapons.
Israel had few qualms about proliferating nuclear weapons knowhow and materials, giving South Africa's apartheid regime help in developing its own bomb in the 1970s in return for 600 tons of yellowcake.
Pictures of the secret Dimona nuclear reactor in Israel, showing where the plant has allegedly been camouflaged. Photograph: space imaging
Israel's nuclear reactor also required deuterium oxide, also known as heavy water, to moderate the fissile reaction. For that, Israel turned to Norway and Britain. In 1959, Israel managed to buy 20 tons of heavy water that Norway had sold to the UK but was surplus to requirements for the British nuclear programme. Both governments were suspicious that the material would be used to make weapons, but decided to look the other way. In documents seen by the BBC in 2005 British officials argued it would be "over-zealous" to impose safeguards. For its part, Norway carried out only one inspection visit, in 1961.
Israel's nuclear-weapons project could never have got off the ground, though, without an enormous contribution from France. The country that took the toughest line on counter-proliferation when it came to Iran helped lay the foundations of Israel's nuclear weapons programme, driven by by a sense of guilt over letting Israel down in the 1956 Suez conflict, sympathy from French-Jewish scientists, intelligence-sharing over Algeria and a drive to sell French expertise and abroad.
"There was a tendency to try to export and there was a general feeling of support for Israel," Andre Finkelstein, a former deputy commissioner at France's Atomic Energy Commissariat and deputy director general at the International Atomic Energy Agency, told Avner Cohen, an Israeli-American nuclear historian.
France's first reactor went critical as early as 1948 but the decision to build nuclear weapons seems to have been taken in 1954, after Pierre Mendès France made his first trip to Washington as president of the council of ministers of the chaotic Fourth Republic. On the way back he told an aide: "It's exactly like a meeting of gangsters. Everyone is putting his gun on the table, if you have no gun you are nobody. So we must have a nuclear programme."
Mendès France gave the order to start building bombs in December 1954. And as it built its arsenal, Paris solds material assistance to other aspiring weapons states, not just Israel.
"[T]his went on for many, many years until we did some stupid exports, including Iraq and the reprocessing plant in Pakistan, which was crazy," Finkelstein recalled in an interview that can now be read in a collection of Cohen's papers at the Wilson Centre thinktank in Washington. "We have been the most irresponsible country on nonproliferation."
In Dimona, French engineers poured in to help build Israel a nuclear reactor and a far more secret reprocessing plant capable of separating plutonium from spent reactor fuel. This was the real giveaway that Israel's nuclear programme was aimed at producing weapons.
By the end of the 50s, there were 2,500 French citizens living in Dimona, transforming it from a village to a cosmopolitan town, complete with French lyc├®es and streets full of Renaults, and yet the whole endeavour was conducted under a thick veil of secrecy. The American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in his book The Samson Option: "French workers at Dimona were forbidden to write directly to relatives and friends in France and elsewhere, but sent mail to a phony post-office box in Latin America."
The British were kept out of the loop, being told at different times that the huge construction site was a desert grasslands research institute and a manganese processing plant. The Americans, also kept in the dark by both Israel and France, flew U2 spy planes over Dimona in an attempt to find out what they were up to.
The Israelis admitted to having a reactor but insisted it was for entirely peaceful purposes. The spent fuel was sent to France for reprocessing, they claimed, even providing film footage of it being supposedly being loaded onto French freighters. Throughout the 60s it flatly denied the existence of the underground reprocessing plant in Dimona that was churning out plutonium for bombs.
Producer Arnon Milchan with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at the premiere of Mr and Mrs Smith. Photograph: L Cohen
Israel refused to countenance visits by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), so in the early 1960s President Kennedy demanded they accept American inspectors. US physicists were dispatched to Dimona but were given the run-around from the start. Visits were never twice-yearly as had been agreed with Kennedy and were subject to repeated postponements. The US physicists sent to Dimona were not allowed to bring their own equipment or collect samples. The lead American inspector, Floyd Culler, an expert on plutonium extraction, noted in his reports that there were newly plastered and painted walls in one of the buildings. It turned out that before each American visit, the Israelis had built false walls around the row of lifts that descended six levels to the subterranean reprocessing plant.
As more and more evidence of Israel's weapons programme emerged, the US role progressed from unwitting dupe to reluctant accomplice. In 1968 the CIA director Richard Helms told President Johnson that Israel had indeed managed to build nuclear weapons and that its air force had conducted sorties to practise dropping them.
The timing could not have been worse. The NPT, intended to prevent too many nuclear genies from escaping from their bottles, had just been drawn up and if news broke that one of the supposedly non-nuclear-weapons states had secretly made its own bomb, it would have become a dead letter that many countries, especially Arab states, would refuse to sign.
The Johnson White House decided to say nothing, and the decision was formalised at a 1969 meeting between Richard Nixon and Golda Meir, at which the US president agreed to not to pressure Israel into signing the NPT, while the Israeli prime minister agreed her country would not be the first to "introduce" nuclear weapons into the Middle East and not do anything to make their existence public.
In fact, US involvement went deeper than mere silence. At a meeting in 1976 that has only recently become public knowledge, the CIA deputy director Carl Duckett informed a dozen officials from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the agency suspected some of the fissile fuel in Israel's bombs was weapons-grade uranium stolen under America's nose from a processing plant in Pennsylvania.
Not only was an alarming amount of fissile material going missing at the company, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (Numec), but it had been visited by a veritable who's-who of Israeli intelligence, including Rafael Eitan, described by the firm as an Israeli defence ministry "chemist", but, in fact, a top Mossad operative who went on to head Lakam.
"It was a shock. Everyody was open-mouthed," recalls Victor Gilinsky, who was one of the American nuclear officials briefed by Duckett. "It was one of the most glaring cases of diverted nuclear material but the consequences appeared so awful for the people involved and for the US than nobody really wanted to find out what was going on."
The investigation was shelved and no charges were made.
A few years later, on 22 September 1979, a US satellite, Vela 6911, detected the double-flash typical of a nuclear weapon test off the coast of South Africa. Leonard Weiss, a mathematician and an expert on nuclear proliferation, was working as a Senate advisor at the time and after being briefed on the incident by US intelligence agencies and the country's nuclear weapons laboratories, he became convinced a nuclear test, in contravention to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, had taken place.
It was only after both the Carter and then the Reagan administrations attempted to gag him on the incident and tried to whitewash it with an unconvincing panel of enquiry, that it dawned on Weiss that it was the Israelis, rather than the South Africans, who had carried out the detonation.
"I was told it would create a very serious foreign policy issue for the US, if I said it was a test. Someone had let something off that US didn't want anyone to know about," says Weiss.
Israeli sources told Hersh the flash picked up by the Vela satellite was actually the third of a series of Indian Ocean nuclear tests that Israel conducted in cooperation with South Africa.
"It was a fuck-up," one source told him. "There was a storm and we figured it would block Vela, but there was a gap in the weather ÔÇô a window ÔÇô and Vela got blinded by the flash."
The US policy of silence continues to this day, even though Israel appears to be continuing to trade on the nuclear black market, albeit at much reduced volumes. In a paper on the illegal trade in nuclear material and technology published in October, the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) noted: "Under US pressure in the 1980s and early 1990s, Israel  decided to largely stop its illicit procurement for its nuclear weapons programme. Today, there is evidence that Israel may still make occasional illicit procurements  US sting operations and legal cases show this."
Avner Cohen, the author of two books on Israel's bomb, said that policy of opacity in both Israel and in Washington is kept in place now largely by inertia. "At the political level, no one wants to deal with it for fear of opening a Pandora's box. It has in many ways become a burden for the US, but people in Washington, all the way up to Obama will not touch it, because of the fear it could compromise the very basis of the Israeli-US understanding."
In the Arab world and beyond, there is growing impatience with the skewed nuclear status quo. Egypt in particular has threatened to walk out of the NPT unless there is progress towards creating a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. The western powers promised to stage a conference on the proposal in 2012 but it was called off, largely at America's behest, to reduce the pressure on Israel to attend and declare its nuclear arsenal.
"Somehow the kabuki goes on," Weiss says. "If it is admitted Israel has nuclear weapons at least you can have an honest discussion. It seems to me it's very difficult to get a resolution of the Iran issue without being honest about that."
1st, lets hope the current 72hr cease fire holds and is extended and leads to peace.
2nd, I have argued this before for 14pages, so let me just state it like this and then I am done:
No religion ever killed anyone. People kill in the name of religion, misusing religion as shield for their evil.
You made the 'Middle Eastern plague' comment in relation to circumcision, which is also practised by Jews.
I have no problem with you other than the fact you constantly insult other peoples cultures.
If you would have ever read the Old Testament, you'd know that it's full with stories of the Jewish people waging war with other nations, similar to what the Arabs did in the Quran. But that's life, war is an essential natural part of life and anyone denying that needs a reality check.
No I didn't.
Perhaps in relations to female circumcision and how it is still today propagandized by various Imams in West Africa, maybe, but I don't recall having had this discussion here.
I call them like I see them.
I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
Now stop putting things into my mouth that I didn't say. There are plenty of things I did say that you can get upset about, just see how much I care.
fucking nazi cowards
United Nations officials described the killing of sleeping children as a disgrace to the world and accused Israel of a serious violation of international law after a school in Gaza being used to shelter Palestinian families was shelled on Wednesday.
At least 15 people, mostly children and women, died when the school in Jabaliya refugee camp was hit by five shells during a night of relentless bombardment across Gaza. More than 100 people were injured.
Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, said the attack was "outrageous and unjustifiable" and demanded "accountability and justice". The UN said its officials had repeatedly given details of the school and its refugee population to Israel.
Fighting in Gaza continued through the day despite a four-hour humanitarian ceasefire called by Israel from 3pm. A crowded market in Shujai'iya was hit in the late afternoon, causing at least 17 deaths, including a journalist, and injuring about 200 people, according to Gaza health officials. They said people had ventured out to shop in the belief a ceasefire was in place. Witnesses said several shells struck as people were running away. Israel said rockets and mortar shells continued to be fired from Gaza.
Israel on Thursday was showing no sign of scaling back Operation Protective Edge, with the military reportedly calling up an additional 16,000 reserves as the offensive entered its 24th day.
At the UN school the first shell came just after the early morning call to prayer, when most of those taking shelter were asleep, crammed into classrooms with what few possessions they had managed to snatch as they fled their homes.
About 3,300 people had squashed into Jabaliya Elementary A&B Girls' School since the Israeli military warned people to leave their homes and neighbourhoods or risk death under intense bombardment. Classroom number one, near the school's entrance, had become home to about 40 people, mostly women and children.
As a shell blasted through the wall, showering occupants with shrapnel and spattering blood on walls and floors, Amna Zantit, 31, scrambled to gather up her three terrified infants in a panicked bid for the relative safety of the schoolyard. "Everyone was trying to escape," she said, clutching her eight-month old baby tightly. Minutes later, a second shell slammed through the roof of the two-storey school. At least 15 people were killed and more than 100 injured. Most were women or children.
Pierre Krähenbühl, commissioner-general of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said the shelling of the school was a "serious violation of international law by Israeli forces".
Krähenbühl said: "Last night, children were killed as they slept next to their parents on the floor of a classroom in a UN-designated shelter in Gaza. Children killed in their sleep; this is an affront to all of us, a source of universal shame. Today the world stands disgraced."
Khalil al-Halabi, the UN official in charge of the schools in the area, was quickly on the scene. Bodies were littered over the classroom, and the badly injured lay in pools of blood amid the debris and rubble caused by the blast. "I was shaking," he said. "It was very, very hard for me to see the blood and hear the children crying."
By daylight, the detritus of people's lives was visible among ruins of the classroom: a ball, a bucket, some blankets, tins of food, a pair of flip-flops. The corpses of donkeys, used to haul the meagre possessions of refugees to what they thought was safety, lay at the school's entrance as two lads wearing Palestinian boy scout scarves collected human body parts for burial. Five of the injured were in a critical condition in hospital
Halabi was facing impossible requests for advice from those who escaped the carnage. "These people are very angry. They evacuated their homes and came here for protection, not to be killed inside a UN shelter. Now they are asking me whether to stay or leave. They are very frightened. They don't know what to do."
The attack on the school was the sixth time that UNRWA premises have been hit since the war in Gaza began more than three weeks ago, the UN said.
Palestinians fled their homes after Israel warned that failure to do so would put their lives at risk. Those at the Jabaliya school were among more than 200,000 who have sought shelter at UN premises in the belief that families would be safe.
Analysis of evidence gathered at the site by UNRWA led to an initial assessment that Israeli artillery had hit the school, causing "multiple civilian deaths and injuries including of women and children and the UNRWA guard who was trying to protect the site. These are people who were instructed to leave their homes by the Israeli army."
Krähenbühl added: "Our staff, the very people leading the humanitarian response, are being killed. Our shelters are overflowing. Tens of thousands may soon be stranded in the streets of Gaza, without food, water and shelter if attacks on these areas continue."
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said it was investigating the incident at the UN school. Initial inquiries showed that "Hamas militants fired mortar shells from the vicinity of the school, and [Israeli] soldiers responded by firing towards the origins of the fire", a spokeswoman said.
A UN source said there was no evidence of militant activity inside the school.
The US, which has been at odds with Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, over efforts to secure a ceasefire, condemned the school shelling but did not specifically blame Israel.
The incident comes after an explosion at another UN school in Beit Hanoun last week as the playground was filled with families awaiting evacuation. Israel denied responsibility for the deaths, saying a single "errant" shell fired by its forces hit the school playground, which was empty at the time.