Earlier this month, Hussam Khader, a member of the Palestinian Authority (PA) parliament, was thrown in jail for criticizing the PA president, Mahmoud Abbas, on Facebook. Stephen Flatow explains why Khader’s imprisonment should matter to those in the West concerned over the Palestinians’ fate:
I have no sympathy for Hussam Khader. He is a veteran terrorist who has served time in Israeli prisons. But his arrest tells us a lot about the nature of the Palestinian Authority.
Crushing strikers and arresting dissidents, including members of the Legislative Council, has become routine under Abbas. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Critics of the regime are routinely tortured. Unions are intimidated. Women are treated as second-class citizens. Abbas’s “Cybercrime Law” mandates prison sentences and fines for anyone who establishes a website that might “undermine the safety of the state or its internal or external security.”
As for Abbas himself, he refuses to hold elections for his position. Incredibly, he is now in the fourteenth year of his four-year term as head of the PA.
The Jewish “peace” groups that shout in protest if they think Israel has mistreated an Arab rock-thrower are conspicuously silent when it comes to the PA’s daily trampling of the rights of the Palestinian public. Jewish advocates of Palestinian statehood don’t want to talk about this. Acknowledging that the PA is a fascist dictatorship would mean acknowledging that a sovereign Palestinian state would certainly be a fascist dictatorship, too. Too bad for Hussam Khader.
Read more on JNS: https://www.jns.org/opinion/why-the-arrest-of-this-palestinian-matters/