Toronto Star..
30 April '13..
Palestinian Facebook pranksters are doing prison time for lampooning Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas online.
At the end of March, a West Bank appeal court upheld a one-year sentence for a man alleged to have defamed Abbas by posting his photo online next to that of a TV villain who had collaborated with French colonial rule.
The Times of Israel reported that the convicted man denied posting the photos. Furthermore, he claimed to have been detained without legal counsel for 20 days and interrogated for 53. Following his lost appeal, Abbas pardoned the man, a small gesture after he’d been churned in the justice system for two years.
The previous month, a 26-year-old PA resident was sentenced to a year in prison for posting a photograph of Abbas kicking a soccer ball with a silly caption: “Real Madrid’s New Striker.”
The charge against him? “Extending [his] tongue” against the king; defamation, more colloquially. “King Abbas,” it seems, invoked a Jordanian law from the early 1960s that was intended, according to David Keyes, executive director of the New York-based NGO Advancing Human Rights, to punish critics of Jordan’s monarchy when it ruled the West Bank.
Apparently, the PA has been making a habit of threatening to sue (and sometimes following through) journalists, Hamas activists and just about anyone who doesn’t agree with them and Abbas. The goal? To intimidate dissenters from expressing their views.
These and other practices were noted in the U.S. State Department annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2012, released on April 21. Israel, however, was recognized for supporting “an independent press, an effective judiciary, and a functioning democratic political system [which] combined to ensure freedom of speech and of the press.”
Then there’s Hamas, the openly Islamist and popularly elected governing authority in Gaza, which is reported to have arrested dozens of journalists since coming to power in 2007, torturing and imprisoning some. Their crime? Often, they belong to the rival Fatah faction; but always, they are critical of the ruling party.
In the lead-up to the much anticipated March 21 meeting between Abbas and U.S. President Barack Obama, it was reported that 18 Palestinian journalists thought to be critical of the chairman were banned from entering his compound to cover the event.
This political meddling in the media seems to be supported by the Palestine Journalists Syndicate — an association purporting to represent Palestinian journalists in the West Bank. Bassem Eid, a former journalist who is founder and executive director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, dismisses the PJS as being “soldiers of the Fatah movement, not soldiers of freedom of the press.”
Eid is blunt in his assessment. “Freedom of the press never existed in Arab culture,” he said in a recent interview, noting that last Saturday the prime minister of Iraq shut down 10 TV channels, including Al Jazeera. In his view, such heavy-handed repression is typical of Arab countries. He says they fear criticism and view control of the press as a priority in securing their power.
Israel hosts what is reputed to be the third-largest press corps in the world, after Washington and London, but we have heard very little, outside the Israeli and niche press, about such incidents.
Yet an allegation of the slightest transgression on the part of the Israeli government or military in dealing with the media is parsed on global front pages with painstaking granularity.
Why? What motivates such uneven treatment? Perhaps because Israel has such a robust press functioning in a democratic environment, it is simply easier to access information about events in that country.
Eid, however, suggests a disturbing metaphor, by way of explanation.
Referring to the United Nations General Assembly vote last fall on the resolution to recognize Palestinian statehood, which carried with a resounding 139 votes in favour, Eid’s contempt is palpable: “The UN doesn’t love Palestinians. It just hates Israel more.”
This Friday is the UN’s World Press Freedom Day. Perhaps the media — as well as the Palestinian Authority and Hamas — should consider the values promoted by this event: a free press in which every person can express views without fear of reprisal, a critical element of any democratic nation.
At the same time, those responsible for international press coverage from Israel, Gaza and the West Bank would do well to reconsider complacent reporting regarding PA and Hamas treatment of journalists and dissenters.
Link: http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2013/04/30/palestinian_authority_keeps_media_under_thumb.html
Vivian Bercovici is a Toronto lawyer and professor with a postgraduate diploma in Mideast politics. Her column appears monthly.
Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.
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