assangewatch.blogspot.com
Julian Assange sat down with Agoravox, a public service news site, to discuss his background, Egypt, the international press and other topics like his fear of Israel.
Here are some english translations of the interview:
Is it true that you fear Israel?
"Of course."Yet you made some choices when you decided to publish the first leaks...
"We chose not to publish anything on Israel during the first week because it would have caused many problems. So we started publishing the files on other countries. Once our "boat" had sailed, it was inconceivable to change course. At first we did not have many files on Israel and we were afraid of attacks from the east coast of the United States (the major Jewish organizations are all on the east coast). If we had published information on 'sensitive' countries from the beginning, we would have suffered attacks to make us deviate from our path."Are you more afraid of Israel or the U.S.?
"It is the union of the two countries that scares me the most. More so because they share a number of interests in the Iraqi conflict. Bush has supported Israel since it was surrounded by friends at the head of the oil companies. Israel, meanwhile, has strong ties with the east coast of the United States. Not only because of the presence of many Jews on American soil, but also because many Israeli passports were provided to the Jews of the east coast to strengthen their ties with their homeland. Russia has done the same with South Ossetia, distributing passports to the local population to promote the fight against Georgian nationalism."What is your relationship with the British media? Why do they accuse you of being anti-Semitic?
"Our relationship does not look good. Particularly with the BBC. Today I was verbally attacked by a journalist at the exit of the station. It was John Sweeney's Panorama program. The BBC is one of our biggest rivals. This media has accused us of collaborating with the alleged anti-Semitic Israel Shamir who supports us. He is a journalist and writer born in Siberia and settled in Israel. Denying the Jewish and becoming pro-Palestinian, he later converted to Russian Orthodoxy. That is why he is hated in the same proportions as Salman Rushdie. He now lives in Sweden, and as we helped for a while, the media accuses us of being anti-Semitic, having provided documents to the Russians and of having relations with Lukashenka. Our opponents also contact our enemies for interviews. They will make a show that will air on Monday (coincidentally during the first day of trial) and try and influence judges. We finally discovered that the wife of producer for this show was part of the Zionist movement in London ..."What do you think of the riots in Egypt?
"It is only recently that Mubarak has received the qualification of a dictator. Tony Blair still calls him "the great man". In our cables we have it all. We even published 480 cables about Gaddafi. What we're trying to do is take a regional approach. So even if they replace Mubarak with a puppet, it will improve the lives of the population. That pushed, for example, Tunisia, into providing a better condition to its population, and this will impact the entire region. Regimes are mutually supportive, but populations are also supportive of each other."How it will end in Egypt?
"I do not know how all this will end, but history will be the same in Libya when the issue of replacing Gaddafi is asked. His successor will have to rebuild the country, but if we can help to improve living conditions in the region, it will not be able to go back. The heart of the problem is the Israeli question, and more particularly the case of Gaza. Because a new head of state could be a border with Gaza. And if Gaza has a border state, it could have an army, tanks and helicopters to defend themselves. That is exactly what Israel wants to avoid."Are there other interesting things in the cables?
"Yes there are some interesting points regarding the relationships between oil companies and governments. For example, BP does a lot of business with Iran ... Here is the great hypocrisy, The U.S. complains about Iran and then they do business with no worries."Why did you start the project Wikileaks?
"My story comes from afar. I did not wake up one day and start Wikileaks. I started in Australia with other people, then I had a bit of notoriety with the documents issued against Scientology and 94 in Australia, I have conducted operations hacking under another name ... I wrote several programs to develop pictures and I became interested in mathematics, physics and mechanics as to understand the technologies must be able to look in several directions."
The full interview is available at agoravox.fr, but this is a french website.
For an english translation of the page try here.
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