Palestinian Authority Silences Students

by Bassam Tawil • July 25, 2018 at 5:00 am

By targeting Palestinian journalists and university students, the Palestinian Authority shows that it has turned the territories under its control into a dictatorship that systematically grinds public freedoms into the ground.
Palestinians are permitted to badmouth Israel and the US -- but that is where their "freedom of speech" ends. Let a Palestinian utter a bad word about his leaders -- he will find himself (or herself) behind bars. This bodes rather poorly for the future of democracy and free speech in a Palestinian state. In fact, it discloses exactly what a Palestinian state would look like, if and when it is ever established.
Failing to hold the PA leadership accountable for its actions against journalists and university students drives Palestinians into the open arms of Hamas. Yet the international media remains mute in the face of the PA's flouting of the right to freedom of expression. Why? Because, for the foreign media, a story that does not serve to bash Israel is not "news that's fit to print."

As part of the Palestinian Authority's ongoing effort to silence and intimidate its critics and political rivals, a number of students from Bir Zeit University (pictured) have been arrested or summoned for interrogation by PA security forces. (Image source: Oromiya321/Wikimedia Commons)

A Palestinian electric engineer from the West Bank is facing up to one year in prison and a heavy fine. Ibrahim Al-Masri, who was arrested by the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces on June 19, is the latest victim of the PA's continued crackdown on its political opponents and dissenters.

Al-Masri's lawyer said that his client was taken into custody under the PA's new controversial Cyber Crime Law, which targets Palestinian social media users. His family said they learned about his detention more than 24 hours after he was taken into custody. They pointed out that Al-Masri was arrested for posting comments on Facebook criticizing the PA security forces for beating him during a demonstration in Ramallah last month. The demonstration was organized by Palestinian activists to protest the economic sanctions imposed by the PA government on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

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Iran: Khamenei's New Poem - Pure Wine and Deadly Poison

by Amir Taheri • July 25, 2018 at 4:00 am

However, one cannot ignore the fact that the man currently ruling Iran appears unsure of his impact on life, feels he is the victim of some unspecified injustice and sees a schizophrenic "id" (in the Freudian sense) that is "sometimes pure wine, sometimes deadly poison."
"I wish I could get out of self-absorption that
Pulls me this way and that like a straw"
— Iran's Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
"From whom can I seek redress for the injustice done to me?" — Iran's Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran's Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. (Image source: khameni.ir/Wikimedia Commons)

The annual poetry congress in Tehran, held at the beginning of July, included what state-owned or controlled media have described as an "historic literary event," which, according to one establishment literary commentator, Muhammad-Ali Mujahedi, electrified those present.

The "event" was the public reading of a new ghazal (sonnet) by "Supreme Guide" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose poetical ambitions date back to his early youth more than 60 years ago. He has often said that he wished he had spent more time and energy on his poetry rather than on politics, and in anecdotal accounts of his life has cast himself as a disciple of such great contemporary classicist Persian poets as Amiri Firuzkuhi and Muhammad Qahreman, not to mention the great Mohammad-Hussein Shahriar and Rahi Mo'ayyeri.

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