POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
The real question for the world is: when is Israel going to allow inspection of its Dimona nuclear facility?
The answer is, of course, never.
Dimona is a working factory for the production of nuclear weapons components.
Israel doesn't just have a vague possibility of making nuclear weapons - the charge against Iran - Israel makes and deploys them.
And - unlike Iran which has attacked no one in its entire modern history - Israel has proved to the world, over and over, it is ready to use brutal force whenever it chooses.
It did so twice in Lebanon. It has done so many times in Gaza. It has done so in the West Bank. And it engineered the Six Day War so that it could seize the land of the people it still holds in subjugation more than forty years later.
It deliberately attacked the USS Liberty, an American intelligence ship, in an effort to pull the U.S. into its war. It was a bloody business lasting two hours against a well-marked ship.
Or was that attack - never explained properly - to cover up the war crimes Israel was carrying out in the Sinai, where it is known to have executed hundreds of Egyptian prisoners who had surrendered?
Please, just who is the greater threat to world peace?
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"I have heard no credible argument that a Japanese surrender would have resulted from anything other than a full-scale, D-Day style invasion against the Islands."
Sorry, this is just ignorant.
The evidence is there for anyone who reads.
The Japanese made a number of backchannel offers of surrender. They had only one proviso of importance, that they be allowed to keep their emperor.
The U.S. just ignored them. It insisted on absolute, unconditional surrender.
So, the U.S. obliterated two non-military target cities, than took the Japanese surrender and allowed the Japanese to keep their emperor.
And, in doing that, it set a terrible example for all time.
All that horror and destruction was for nothing.
It represented the same poor judgment and ugly Puritan attitudes we saw in Vietnam, Iraq, and still see in Afghanistan. We want it our way, or we will obliterate you.
The use of the atomic bombs on Japan also deliberately considered, in the highest councils of the American government, the strategic value of setting a terrible marker against Stalin.
The story of the losses owing to land invasion was just that, a story, planted in a deliberate propaganda effort to white-wash one of the 20th century’s most criminal acts.
Of course, soldiers would have died, but the story leaves out the fact that an invasion was completely unnecessary to get a surrender.
It was all an inexcusable horror, and the United States has no business telling anyone what it may or may not do. It is simply playing God.
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"Our gratitude goes out to John Chuckman for the unrequested, off-topic history lesson on the Japanese surrender and yet another expected anti-Israel rant - neither of which has anything to do with the subject."
Sorry, Mr Foonman, that too is just ignorant. You have only to scroll through the posts to see reference to America's use of atomic weapons.
It used them twice, both times on civilians.
So how in God's name do they have the moral authority to demand Iran behave in this or that way?
Plus, of course, they've just killed a million people in Iraq - a next-door neighbor to Iran - in a completely illegal invasion.
Where is their moral authority on such issues?
They have none.
And as far as "rants" about Israel and "anti-Israel" statements, perhaps those are the words you like to use to demonize those with whom you disagree.
It is, after all, a favorite tactic of Israel's apologists to call everyone who doesn't agree with them names.
All I've done is set out some raw facts.
How can anyone who is rational and not a pathetic propagandist claim that Israel's illegal nuclear weapons have nothing to do with this issue?
Iran is virtually surrounded by nuclear powers, two of which have very belligerent records of behavior.
Doe it not have the right to look after its defense?
