ISRAELIS BEAT AND TORTURE RETURNING JOURNALIST, MOHAMMED OMER

-

Originally posted by my good friend in Israel, Desert Peace. Make a point of reading his site daily!

mohammed OmerUPDATE from IPS NEWS… just published.

My dear friend and brother Mohammed Omer returned to his native Gaza Strip on Thursday… literally unconscious and unable to speak after being beaten and tortured by Israeli troops. He is still unable to speak so I was not able to communicate with him, I will be posting updates on his condition in future posts.

Mohammed was in Britain, where he was the recipient of a prize for journalism. You can read about it HERE in a post I wrote earlier in the week.

Mohammed’s ordeal is written about in an Action Alert issued by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, a journal in which he appears regularly.

Gaza Correspondent Mohammed Omer Home Again in Rafah

At a June 16 ceremony in London, Mohammed Omer, author of the regular Washington Report feature “Gaza on the Ground,” received the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism (a link to the presentation and Omer’s remarks can be found on our home page, <www.wrmea.com>). He shared the prestigious prize with independent American journalist Dahr Jamail, who was honored for his “unembedded” reports from Iraq.

Before traveling to England to receive his award, Omer spoke in Sweden, the Netherlands and Greece about the situation in Gaza. Dutch MP Hans Van Baalen, head of the parliament’s foreign relations committee, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Pilger spent weeks lobbying Israel to issue an exit permit to allow this young reporter to travel to Europe and London.

Not for the first time, however, getting home was even harder than leaving.

As soon as Omer arrived in Amman, the Dutch diplomats who were helping facilitate his travel arrangements informed him that the Israelis did not want to allow him to return. After further intervention by his Dutch sponsors, Omer finally got the green light, and on the morning of June 26 crossed from Jordan into the occupied territories via the Allenby Bridge. There he was interrogated, strip-searched and manhandled for several hours. After losing consciousness, he finally was taken to a hospital in Jericho, and from there escorted back to Gaza.

MP Van Baalen has demanded that Israel launch an investigation into Omer’s barbaric treatment.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Fourth of July Memory

-
This Fourth of July holiday stirred memories of this same day ‌forty-eight years ago. That day was the big US celebration of the Bicentennial--200 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I was fifteen years old. My memory of the 1976 Fourth of July was that of a quiet, boring day in the country. Once again, Dad was hiding out in Pittsburgh leaving Mom and me to ourselves. We lived in a new mobile home that was parked on an isolated eight acres of former orchards between Delmont and New Alexandria, Pa. The orchards had long ago run wild. Only a few peach trees remained but red apples and yellow apples were everywhere. There is nothing like the absolute joy of climbing a tree, sitting in the branches and plucking a ripe apple to eat. I remember the day as hot and sunny. While records show the temperature during the day was around 75 degrees Fahrenheit and the skies cloudy, my memory could be faulty but I remember the sun beating down on me from blue skies while I gril...
Read more

A Mention In The Independent

-
Too bad I stumbled upon an email from The Independent's Tehran correspondent, Angus McDowall too late. The email ended up in my Yahoo email which I only use as a spam trap. An article was published today about the Iranian public's ho-hum reaction to the "Holocaust" cartoon exhibition. I was pleased to see that I was treated fairly. "The cartoons included US, European, Brazilian, Korean and Chinese entries. However, the US cartoonist David Baldinger said that his drawing "in no way ridiculed the Holocaust". It is best to let people determine what is propaganda and what is not. Most of the time intelligent people know the difference. Sane people, I would think, don't place value on government statements refuting the Jewish Holocaust's historical fact. I doubt Iranian president Ahmadinejad even believes his statements. He is engaging in what I would call "political mooning". A bare ass sticking in the world's face gets a lot of atten...
Read more