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Gunter Grass Addresses Israel's Nuclear Threat

Stephen Lendman | 05.04.2012 10:46 | Anti-Nuclear | Anti-militarism | History

Writer, poet, playwright, sculptor, artist, and Nobel laureate Grass is regarded as Germany's most celebrated author. Awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy said his "frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history." It credited his first novel, "The Tin Drum," with restoring honor to German literature "after decades of linguistic and moral destruction." It "comes to grips with the enormous task of reviewing contemporary history by recalling the disavowed and the forgotten: the victims, losers and lies that people wanted to forget because they had once believed in them." Published in 1959, "The Tin Drum" became one of the most admired and revealing allegories of guilt and complicity. He once said he "believe(d) it....a good thing that a writer does not sit on the side of the victors." He also called Germany a psychologically damaged society.




His writings stirred controversy. He's done it again. On April 4, Haaretz headlined, "German Nobel laureate Guenter Grass' new poem: Nuclear Israel is a threat to world peace," saying:

Now age 84, his new poem "calls for Germany to cease supplying Israel with submarines (able to carry nuclear-armed missiles), and warns against an Israeli strike on Iran."

"Israel's nuclear potential has been stealthily growing for years," he said, with no international supervision. Fearing the worst, he added that "Germany could be responsible for a crime that can be foreseen."

Der Spiegel headlined, "Nobel Laureate Grass Attacks Israel in New Poem," saying:

"Germany's most famous living author....sparked outrage in Germany....with the publication of a poem, "What must be said," in which he sharply criticizes Israel's policies on Iran."

In response, Israel's Berlin Embassy responded as expected, saying:

"What must be said is that it is a European tradition to accuse the Jews before the Passover festival of ritual murder." ............ more ........ by Stephen Lendman ......

M O R E: by Stephen Lendman ......  http://www.indymedia.org/de/2012/04/955961.shtml
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Stephen Lendman: US Belligerency Risks Global War - 05 Apr 2012 ........  http://www.indymedia.org/de/2012/04/955962.shtml

Stephen Lendman

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Other views

05.04.2012 13:53

Did he have anything to say regarding the German arms industry selling to Iran or did he concentrate on the Jews, oops sorry I mean Israeli, or rather Zionist. (phew, think I got away with it)

Yannk

Samson sleeps...with the fishes.

05.04.2012 16:14

Israel does not possess nuclear weapons nor is it able to deploy any such weapons.

Had you have based your little ditty on that, your press attention would not have been what it was!!!

Viktor

bio

05.04.2012 18:35

That is the same Gunter Grass who finally got around to admitting in 2006 that he was part of the Waffen SS, after half a century of denying it?

I mean, yeah, Lendman's a tedious fool, but you'd think he'd at least do enough checking to find out whether he was defending someone who volunteered for the SS.

really?

Fact Check? 'Volunteered" or was conscripted?

05.04.2012 19:13

Grass said he volunteered mainly to "get away. From constrictions, from the family. I wanted to put an end to all that, and so I volunteered. And that's also something odd: I enlisted at the age of 15, and promptly forgot the details of the process. And it was the same for many of my birth year: We were in the work service and suddenly, a year later, the conscription order lay on the table. And that must be when I first realized: it is the Waffen-SS." Asked whether he had feelings of guilt, Grass answered: "At the time? No. Later on, this guilt feeling burdened me as a disgrace." It wasn't until he heard the testimony of Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach in the Nuremberg trials that he "believed that the crimes had actually taken place."

2%Human

Israeli Bombs?

05.04.2012 19:48

I think it entirely possible that Israel has no nukes and it could conceivably be all smoke and mirrors, much like the UK up to 1962, who had fewer than 30 'devices' (mostly Fat Boy style bombs that were hand made with no guarantee of functionality) and certainly no weaponised H-Bomb. Making bombs takes lots of energy the Manhattan project consumed as much electricity as the 5 largest US Corporations.

Here's what's 'known' not a great deal in reality.

 http://www.nti.org/country-profiles/israel/nuclear/

2%Human

evidence

05.04.2012 22:27

In early 1968, the CIA issued a report concluding that Israel had successfully started production of nuclear weapons. This estimate, however, was based on an informal conversation between Carl Duckett, head of the CIA's Office of Science and Technology, and Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb. Teller said that, based on conversations with friends in the Israeli scientific and defense establishment, he had concluded that Israel was capable of building the bomb, and that the CIA should not wait for an Israeli test to make a final assessment because that test would never be carried out.

CIA estimates of the Israeli arsenal's size did not improve with time. In 1974, Duckett estimated that Israel had between ten and twenty nuclear weapons. The upper bound was derived from CIA speculation regarding the number of possible Israeli targets, and not from any specific intelligence. Because this target list was presumed to be relatively static, this remained the official American estimate until the early 1980s.

The actual size and composition of Israel's nuclear stockpile is uncertain and the subject of many - often conflicting - estimates and reports. It is widely reported that Israel had two bombs in 1967, and that Prime Minister Eshkol ordered them armed in Israel's first nuclear alert during the Six-Day War. It is also reported that, fearing defeat in the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Israelis assembled 13 twenty-kiloton atomic bombs.

Israel could potentially have produced a few dozen nuclear warheads in the period 1970-1980, and is thought to have produced sufficient fissile material to build 100 to 200 warheads by the mid-1990s. In 1986 descriptions and photographs of Israeli nuclear warheads were published in the London Sunday Times of a purported underground bomb factory at the Dimona nuclear reactor. The photographs were taken by Mordechai Vanunu, a dismissed Israeli nuclear technician. His information led some experts to conclude that Israel had a stockpile of 100 to 200 nuclear devices at that time.

 http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/

x

Safety first.

06.04.2012 13:42

"In 1986 descriptions and photographs of Israeli nuclear warheads were published in the London Sunday Times of a purported underground bomb factory at the Dimona nuclear reactor. The photographs were taken by Mordechai Vanunu, a dismissed Israeli nuclear technician. His information led some experts to conclude that Israel had a stockpile of 100 to 200 nuclear devices at that time."

Why on earth would you want to build nuclear weapons under a nuclear reactor!!!

If I had a nuclear reactor power station using other people bits, I wouldn't build a bomb under it. I don't know why but it just seems like a bad idea!!!

What if it went all bangy and smokey?

Fiona Bruce of the BBC.

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2 important points arise

07.04.2012 09:56

Fundamentally the issue here is one of parity.

The issue of whether that zionist state actually possesses nuclear arms is secondary to the issue of their ability to project a nuclear threat.

Not being a signatory to any of the international treaties that govern all the other nations, israel demands for itself the right to do as it it pleases and, given the craven ZOG like tendencies of monied politics in the western alliance, does so with impunity.

We are long passed the time when israels nuclear ambiguity rested on the absence of evidence - the evidence is in and we had better take note.

That zionist,illegal state has invested in (and taken freely from its 'friends - in what you and I would call espionage and theft) all the relevant technologies to both build and test its nuclear arsenal. A little digging around on the internet will reveal the degree to which israel has invested in training, research and development in the nuclear arena, such that only a fool would draw any conclusion other than that which is painfully obvious; israel is a nuclear power and has developed a number of weaponised technologies both exotic and crude, offensive and discreet.

Given the obnoxious nature of the zionist thought police Mr Grass walked voluntarily into a nest of vipers, the responses are predictable but no less disgusting for that.

First the hand wringing and wailing from the isreali political elite:

"What must be said is that it is a European tradition to accuse the Jews before the Passover festival of ritual murder ...

... in the past, it was Christian children whose blood the Jews allegedly used to make their unleavened bread, but today it is the Iranian people that the Jewish state allegedly wants to annihilate.” (israels Berlin embassy)

Then the zionist attack dogs circle from within their privileged position at the heart of the media establishment:

Grass always had a problem with Jews, but it has never articulated it as clearly as he has in this poem. Grass has always had a tendency toward megalomania, but this time he is completely nuts.” (Die Welt, Henryk Broder)

Followed of course, by those without privilege and outside the elite circles who attack because they are called to arms by the megaphone system ... see above and everywhere else where comment is still allowed but, crucially, modified.

It seems that the most revolutionary act in these times is to attempt to speak your truth.

Irritant

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