ISRAEL MATZAV: I hope he dies. I hope he dies soon. I'm waiting for him to die

The 'Palestinian' newspaper Maan reports that 'a Palestinian with Jordanian citizenship' is on a hunger strike and has been hospitalized. They give the man's name as Abdallah Barghouti, and mention that he is serving 67 life terms in an Israeli prison - the longest sentence of any prisoner. He is demanding that he be transferred to a Jordanian prison to serve out his sentence (like Ahlam Tamimi?). 

What the article fails to mention is why Abdullah Barghouti was sentenced to such a long prison sentence. It says "A Hamas leader, Barghouthi was convicted of involvement in multiple attacks in Israel." 'Involvement' is an understatement. Barghouti was Hamas' master bomb maker. Among others, he made the bomb that blew up the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem 12 years ago next month.

The article also fails to mention that your tax dollars are paying him a salary of NIS 4,000 per month, which is due to go to NIS 6,000 sometime in the next two months. 

The article also fails to mention that Barghouti does not consider himself a murderer.

Let's go to the videotape. 



It's very harsh to wish for the death of another human being. But I wish for Barghouti's death. He should have been executed in the first place. If he starves himself to death, that's a fine outcome. He's a mass murderer who has vowed to continue to fight against Israel if he is ever - God forbid - released from prison.

What the Media Won’t Tell You about ‘Palestinian Prisoners’ The language in Sherwood’s report was revised to note that it is only the Palestinians who view them as “political prisoners.”

A prisoner making a phone call at the Israeli Gilboa Prison.
Photo Credit: Moshe Shai/FLASH90

Harriet Sherwood’s April 9, 2013 Guardian report, about efforts by John Kerry to restart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, discussed concessions demanded of Israel by Mahmoud Abbas before he’ll agree to resume negotiations, and included this passage:

The Palestinians also want the release of 123 political prisoners who have been in jail since before the Oslo accords were signed almost 20 years ago, and for Israel to present a map showing proposed borders. [Emphasis added]

After CiF Watch complained to the Guardian readers’ editor – demonstrating conclusively that the pre-Oslo prisoners were all convicted of violent/terrorist-related crimes and can not honestly be characterized as “political prisoners” – the language in Sherwood’s report was revised to note that it is only the Palestinians who view them as “political prisoners.”

However, use of such euphemisms and biased terminology is only part of a larger problem involving the mainstream media outlets’ whitewashing of the terrorist acts and violent crimes committed by ‘Palestinian prisoners’, who often fail to mention the crimes at all or significantly downplay the degree of violence.

The following report on the media’s highly misleading (often ideologically motivated) coverage of the ‘Palestinian prisoner’ issue includes data released by Israel’s Ministry of Justice on the pre-Oslo prisoners – detailed information which has been translated from the original Hebrew and is being published for the first time exclusively at CAMERA.

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About the Author: Adam Levick serves as Managing Editor of CiF Watch, an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), and is a member of the Online Antisemitism Working Group for the Global Forum to Combat Antisemitism. Adam made Aliyah from Philadelphia in 2009 and lives with his wife in Modi'in.

Terrorists hold a party in oppressive Israeli prison

From Times of Israel:

A video clip showing convicted Palestinian terrorists celebrating the engagement of one of their own in an Israel prison was posted to the Internet and has been raising ire over the conditions granted the convicts by the Israeli authorities.

The story was broken by the Hakol Hayehudi website on Tuesday before it was reported on by the mainstream Hebrew media. The video was apparently filmed with a cellphone smuggled into the prison against regulations.

The focus of the video is Samar Abu Kwick, who is serving three life sentences in Eshel Prison for terror attacks against Israelis during the Second Intifada.

In the undated clip, several inmates are seen gathered in a cell around tables laid out with drinks and snacks, reportedly to celebrate Kwick’s engagement. As music blares in the background, the inmates greet Kwick with hugs and kisses before settling down to enjoy the feast.

Kwick was convicted of murdering Sarah Lisha and the two IDF soldiers Elad Valenstein and Amit Zana in a 2000 terror attack at the Halamish junction in the West Bank.

Maariv cited Palestinian Authority sources who expressed disapproval of the video, saying it depicted life on the inside as being pleasant and could result in a tightening of conditions.

“People who watch the video can fall under the impression that life in Israeli prisons is easy and all they do all the time is have parties and feasts,” the Palestinian sources were quoted as saying.

By the way, that last statement is yet more proof of the honor/shame culture that Arabs live in. The PA is not denying that Palestinian Arab terrorists in prison have an easy life - they are just upset that people can now watch a video of it. That is how honor/shame works; appearances are more important than reality.

The prisoner comparison Ynetnews presents comparison between treatment of Palestinian prisoners, Shalit's captivity

In the days before Gilad Shalit was returned to Israel, various Hamas spokesmen boasted that he was treated well by his captors, "in line with the tenants of Islam." Meanwhile, other Palestinians slammed the imprisonment terms in Israeli jails as exceptionally harsh and cruel.


Following the completion of the Shalit swap, Ynetnews presents a comparison between the jail terms of Palestinian security detainees held in Israel and the treatment accorded to Gilad Shalit by Hamas.


Leisure and entertainment: Based on initial statements, Shalit was able to watch Arabic-language television and listen to Arabic-language radio. Meanwhile, Palestinian prisoners are given books and have access to 10 television channels.

Physical activity: Gilad Shalit's pale skin and his apparent difficulty in handling sunlight in the early moments of his release indicate that he was deprived of sunlight, a fact reinforced by statements from his father, Noam. Moreover, Gilad was held in solitary confinement. Meanwhile, Palestinian prisoners are allowed to exercise and walk outside in the sun every day. In addition, inmates can attend prayer sessions and religious classes.

Visits: Nobody visited Gilad Shalit in captivity, including Red Cross representatives. In Israel, close relatives of Palestinian inmates are allowed to visit every two weeks. In addition, Palestinian detainees are allowed to hug children aged up to 8.

Communication with the world: Gilad only sent one videotape, one audiotape, and three letters (largely dictated by his captors.) Meanwhile, Palestinian prisoners are entitled to meet lawyers and Red Cross representatives and can mail up to four letters each month.

Medical treatment: Gilad, who requires eyeglasses, arrived in Israel following his captivity without his glasses. Some experts said his vision may have been hampered had he been without glasses for years. Shalit's father, Noam, added that his son is suffering from shrapnel wounds that were not treated by Hamas. Meanwhile, Palestinian inmates are entitled to regular medical treatments, including dental work and eye exams.

Food: At this time, the quantity and quality of Gilad's food in captivity is unknown. However, he returned to Israel visibly slimmer and weaker. Meanwhile, Palestinian prisoners are given three full meals a day. They also receive some NIS 1,200 (roughly $350) per month from various organizations and use it to shop at the prison's canteen.

PMW: PA: Conditions for Palestinians in Israeli prisons are worse than Jews' conditions in "the Auschwitzes"

A Palestinian Authority deputy minister has accused Israel of having worse prison conditions than "the Auschwitzes of the Nazis." Ziad Abu Ein belittled the Holocaust by using the term "the Auschwitzes" three times in 2 sentences during his PA TV interview.

The PA as policy repeatedly compares Israel to the Nazis, and continuously reiterates the libel that Israel performs medical experiments and tortures Palestinian prisoners. Palestinian Media Watch reported in May that the PA accused Israel of doing Mengele-like experiments on imprisoned Palestinians. (See this and additional examples below.)

The following is PA Deputy Minister of Prisoners' Affairs Ziad Abu Ein's statement that Israeli prisons were worse than "the Auschwitzes of the Nazis":

"Israel forgets that we are now in the 21st century and that the conditions of our Palestinian prisoners are worse than the Auschwitzes of the Nazis, where Jewish detainees were held. If we return to the pictures of the Auschwitzes, how [Jews] were on beds and so on in the Auschwitzes - in our case, the beds were only introduced in the 1990s, and it was [only] a metal bed."

[PA TV (Fatah), Oct. 6, 2011]

Contrary to this accusation, a released Palestinian prisoner stated last year that the prisoners in Israeli prisons "lack nothing," and the official PA daily likewise described in detail how Palestinian prisoners are allowed to study while serving time, reporting that "prisoners in occupation prisons complete university studies and obtain MA and Ph.D. degrees." (See full texts below.)

The following are more examples of this PA policy of comparing Israel to the Nazis:

Headline: "'Slow death' [is] the Israeli system for exterminating prisoners"

"[There is] an entire system called 'slow death,' which the Israeli establishment uses against Palestinian prisoners, from the moment of their arrest until they are released... The 'experiments' station is perhaps one of the most dangerous stations in the slow death of released prisoners, who suffer from diseases which they contracted in prison. The Israeli prison guards attempt thereby to imitate the German Nazis, who were the first to use prisoners as testing grounds, for testing the weapons and the deadly drugs which they developed. The Nazi German doctor, Josef Mengele, was the most famous among them."

[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, April 17, 2011]

Headline: "Palestinian Prisoners' Movement in a predicament"

"The record of the Israeli treatment to our prisoners is not a clean record at all. Some have died as Shahids (Martyrs) inside the prisons as a result of Israeli medical negligence and as a result of logistical negligence: fires have broken out in some Israeli prisons because of electrical faults or something else, andeven more serious are acts which even the Nazis and the fascists did not commit at the height of their arrogance and hatred for humanity, such as the imprisonment of pregnant women so that they would give birth in prison; detention of women together with their children; procedures forbidding family visits; Israel's refusal to appoint lawyers for them; isolation for lengthy periods; violent and racist interrogation methods; and other Israeli violations and actions which are considered crimes against humanity."

[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 5, 2011]

"Director for the Bethlehem region at Al-Quds Open University, Ibrahim Al-Sha'er, met with a delegation of British MP's from the Labor Party... Al-Sha'er told the delegation about the ongoing suffering of the Palestinian people under the occupation and the latter's acts of suppression. He said, 'While the Jews experienced a holocaust over a limited period in history, the Palestinians have experienced a continuous and ongoing holocaust for 63 years, and yet this nation has not found a supporter who will halt this holocaust or this injustice.'"

[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, June 9, 2011]

"Member of the PLO Executive Committee, Tayseer Khaled, stated that what the occupation gangs and Zionist organizations carried out in 1948 against the Palestinians was a 'holocaust' against our people."

[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, May 11, 2011]

Regular PA daily columnist Yahya Rabah:

Headline: "Israel is more dangerous than a ordinary enemy!"

"...the conclusion I reached is that Israel, in its current state, is a thousand times more dangerous than an ordinary enemy, or a sworn enemy, or an existential enemy. It is incapable of existing without being an enemy, and it cannot exist even for a few moments it if is not in an exaggerated state of hostility with the Palestinians in particular, and with the region in general. But what is even more dangerous than all of this is that Israel, in its present state, wants to create on its own the enemy against which it is gathering itself... Israel - strong and fragile, realistic and stuck in mythical ruins, democratic and scornful of human existence, which trades in Jewish moral values in the songs of lamentation of Jeremiah and Isaiah, and which has faithfully reproduced the Holocaust - this Israel wants an enemy which it depicts as it wishes: a despicable, fearsome, terrorist [Palestinian] enemy whose religion commands it to murder; barbarous, uncultured and undemocratic, attesting itself to all of these dreadful traits and crimes, but at the same time not [actually] harming it, and not costing it a single penny, or a single drop of blood."

[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, April 24, 2011]

"Israeli doctors also carry out medical experiments on prisoners... There are prisons which fall under the military administration - in other words, [they are] directly under the army, and soldiers armed with weapons from head to toe are spread out among them. Often these soldiers shoot live ammunition at detainees; this has led to the injury and Martyr-deaths of many. These prisons are detention camps dotted with tents, with each group of tents forming a wing, surrounded on all sides by a fence and guards who are armed with weapons from head to toe. They resemble the detention camps during the Nazi period."

[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, April 15, 2011]

Headline: "El-Sana: The racist Israeli laws will not intimidate Palestinians of the Interior (i.e., Israeli Arabs)"

"Chairman of the Arab Democratic Party inside the Green Line (i.e., in Israel), Talab El-Sana, described Israel yesterday as a Nazi and racist state, whose racist laws will not intimidate the Palestinians of the Interior (i.e., Israeli Arabs). El-Sana spoke about the recent developments during an open session at the Arab-American University in the Jenin district. He said that 'the laws of Nazi Germany are passed these days in Israel by a majority - for example, the law forbidding commemoration of the day of the catastrophe [i.e., Israel's establishment] and its erasure from the study curriculum.'

He described Israel as a racist state which acts to establish cities for Jews only, like the cities for white inhabitants which were established in South Africa during the Apartheid era. He said that these laws will not intimidate the Palestinians of the Interior, and they will end up in the dustbin of history...

He noted that Israel works day and night to fight against Palestinian instruction and culture as part of its efforts to inculcate ignorance, and uses study curricula to achieve Zionist aims. It proves daily that it is a racist state with regard to the native Arab inhabitants, and a democratic state with regard to the Jews...

He called upon the Fatah and Hamas movements to end the situation of rift [between them] immediately, and to achieve national unity."

[Al-Ayyam, April 12, 2011]

Palestinians describing actual prison conditions

Released Palestinian prisoner on prison conditions:

PA TV host: "You were in Megiddo [prison]. How are the guys?

You were released from prison just today."

Prisoner: "By Allah, the guys in the prison are fine. They lack nothing. They are doing fine."

Host: "Do they lack nothing?"

Prisoner: "They are doing really fine."

Host: "They lack nothing, not even freedom?"

Prisoner: "No. Freedom, Allah willing, there will be freedom."

Host: "How long were you in prison?"

Prisoner: "Two years."

Host: "And you say that they lack nothing?"

Prisoner: "I don't know."

[PA TV (Fatah), June 24, 2010

Prisons Service Set to Worsen Terrorists’ Conditions

Lt. Gen. Aharon Franco, Head of the Israel Prisons Service, is quoted Sunday as saying that the IPS intends to deny terrorist – or “”security” – prisoners all of the privileges not mandated by international law. 

Photo taken from an inmate's Facebook account and displayed on Maariv website.

 

“We are currently in a process of assessment vis-à-vis everything to do with the holding of security prisoners,” Franco told the Maariv daily newspaper. “All that is required by the treaties and laws governing prisoners, we will give, but whatever is not – we intend to remove. We are carrying out a legal and intra-organizational examination of the IPS. As the Prime Minister said, we have stopped the process of registering prisoners to academic studies.”

 

The interview was granted following Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's statement that "the party is over" for terror prisoners. 

 

Franco said that the security prisoners, who number almost 6,000, have been receiving more and more privileges over the course of 20 years (Note: the “Oslo peace process” began in 1993 – Ed.).

 

“Every privilege granted until now is currently being reviewed both on the legal plane and on the internal IPS plane. What is not deserved will not be given… We are looking at the subject of the canteen, we are looking into the books, the newspapers, the television, the visits and even room conditions.”

In a 2008 interview in Maariv, an IPS official listed some of the privileges granted to terrorist inmates in Israel. Terrorists are granted three hours a day to wander the premises, he said, where they socialize and play games. The prison provides ping-pong tables, basketball courts, soccer fields and backgammon sets.

Terrorist prisoners receive meat and fish on holidays and are allowed to purchase 1,200 shekels' worth of food each month in the prison canteen, where they can buy more meat, besides soda, candy, cigarettes and similar items. Most prisoners apparently get money to buy luxury items from the terrorist groups they represent, the unnamed official said. They live in "one big summer camp," he summed up glumly.

Franco denied Sunday that prison conditions in Israel are better than in other countries. “Our conditions are not hotel conditions, despite what one might imagine when looking at the photos published in Maariv, as if the prisoners are living in luxurious conditions. If I arranged the plates of ten prisoners who share a single cell on the table, it would look as if they are readying for a feast, but that is not the situation.”

 

Franco noted that there are, on average, two square meters of cell space per prisoner.

 

Franco did not deny that the changes in conditions are connected with an attempt to pressure Hamas regarding Gilad Shalit, but noted that the process of re-examining conditions had begun under his predecessor, Benny Kanyak.

 

Laws have been introduced and committees established in the past, with the purpose of limiting terrorists' conditions. Yet, the party goes on. The main factor working against the worsening of conditions is the belief, within the IPS, that if prisoners riot and the wardens are forced to use violence against them in response, subsequent committees of investigation will not give the wardens any moral or legal support. 

Netanyahu: "The Party is Over" for Terrorist Prisoners

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said benefits and privileges enjoyed by terrorists in Israeli prisons would be revoked following Hamas' refusal Thursday to allow the International Red Cross to visit kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit.

“I have decided to change Israel’s policy toward terrorists siting in Israeli jails," Netanyahu said at the closing event of the Israeli President's conference.

Netanyahu said he was committed to upholding Israeli and international law and conventions, but not exceeding their strict requirements. A bill was previously proposed to worsen prison conditions for terror prisoners, but was rejected by the Netanyahu government.

"We are not committed to anything beyond that. As such the magnanimous conditions in the Israeli jails will end,” Netanyahu explained.

Netanyahu did not provide a comprehensive overview of the changes he intends to implement vis-a-vis terrorist prisoners. However, he did say he planned to stop the “absurd practice" of allowing “murderers in jail” to sign up for advanced academic degrees.

“There will be no more Masters' for murder, or doctors of terror,” Netanyahu said, generating loud applause and cheers from the conference attendees. “That party is over.”

“I believe that if we all place public, political pressure on Hamas, we will advance Gilad’s release,” Netanyahu said.

Netanyahu also praised leaders in the US, France, Britain and Italy who in recent days demanded that Hamas let the Red Cross visit Schalit.

Hamas last week rejected an unprecedented deal from Egypt, Israel, France, and Germany for Schalit's release.

 

Earlier on Thursday Hamas dismissed an appeal by the ICRC to provide proof of life for Gilad Schalit.

"The Red Cross should not get involved in Israeli security games aimed at reaching Schalit. It should take a stand that results in ending the suffering of Palestinian prisoners," Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters.

In an uncharacteristic public appeal, the ICRC said said Schalit's family had the right under international law to be in contact with their 24-year-old son, held incommunicado since his capture on June 25, 2006.

"Because there has been no sign of life from Mr. Schalit for almost two years, the ICRC is now demanding that Hamas prove that he is alive," the Geneva-based ICRC said.

The ICRC also reiterated its long-standing request to visit Schalit in custody.

"The total absence of information concerning Mr. Schalit is completely unacceptable," ICRC Director-General Yves Daccord said in a statement.

"We don't know anything about his conditions of detention. But from information available to us we have serious concerns about his fate," Jean-Pierre Schaerer, head of the ICRC delegation in Israel, told Reuters.

"He is completely isolated."