The nuclear smear option

Melanie Phillips:

Anyone who actually read Chris McGreal’s latest smear against Israel, which the Guardian ran as its front page splash yesterday, would have seen instantly that the detail of the story didn’t even stand up its own malevolent spin. Purporting to claim – on the basis of a book by American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky — that Israel offered to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid-rule South Africa, it actually provided no backup for this at all. In a risible farrago of suppositions, non-sequiturs, leaps of logic and even the throwaway but self-immolatory line that there was no evidence that Israel’s government would indeed have agreed to such a deal, all that it revealed was that the South African regime had come fishing for such weapons with Israel’s then foreign minister Shimon Peres. The story reversed this to state that Peres had offered to sell nuclear weapons to South Africa — for which there was no evidence other than an absurd and incoherent extrapolation of a phrase.

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