Prisoner X: Israel Compared to the Gulag
February 14, 2013 15:25 by Simon Plosker
The headline “Israel’s Prisoner X driven to suicide by interrogation, lawyer suggests” conjures images of torture, water boarding and all round human rights abuses – something that The Guardian’s readers, fed on a diet of anti-Israel stories, would be keen to embrace.
Lacking a smoking gun of abuse, Peter Beaumont instead indulges in pure fiction to smear Israel:
The latest revelations come amid a growing outcry over the case in Israel, with some comparing the treatment of Zygier to that meted out in the Soviet Union or Argentina and Chile under their military dictatorships.
Just who are the “some” who have compared Israel to brutal military dictatorships? Peter Beaumont doesn’t say.
And if you are looking for criticism of Israel from a someone you can claim to be credible by virtue of his being an Israeli, who better to quote than Gideon Levy, HonestReporting’s Dishonest Reporter 2012 winner?
In one of the fiercest denunciations yet of the behaviour of the authorities and media in the Prisoner X affair, the veteran liberal Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, condemned the state’s ability to “disappear” people with the collusion of the press and courts.
A more accurate description of Levy would be an extreme or radical leftist unrepresentative of Israel at large. But then, that’s what constitutes liberalism in the warped world of The Guardian.
Marc Schulman
4:35 pm
Feb 14, 2013
Sorry as an Israeli I am not sure what you find inaccurate about Levy’s statement. Most of the time criticism of Israeli is not justified, once in a while it is. YOu lose your credibility when you criticize even legitimate criticism
Hot debate. What do you think?
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Tuvia Fogel
12:25 pm
Feb 15, 2013
You ask what is inaccurate about Levy’s statement? Every time Gideon Levy breathes, what comes out is not air but propaganda against Israel and – yes, check it out for yourself – Judaism. Talking of ‘disappearing’ people or comparing Israel’s prisons to the Soviet Gulag are things you’ll only find in the most outrageously anti-Westerm media, like al-Jazeera, the Guardian or Haaretz.
Well-loved. Agree or Disagree:
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bernard stern
4:57 pm
Feb 14, 2013
Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself
Well-loved. Agree or Disagree:
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Carl
7:20 pm
Feb 14, 2013
To Marc. I read the article in Hebrew, and his attorney did not suggest that he killed himself because of the harshness of his interrogation. What he implied was that he may have done it because he realized that he would have to serve substantial time in jail and would be disgraced.
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Brent Pudsey
2:25 pm
Feb 17, 2013
I think it is right to think of as an unstable man who needed medical treatment. Thus his death is not the fault of Israel but of circumstances in the mental condition of prisoner.
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Ed Frias
6:26 am
Feb 19, 2013
Frimet Roth who lost her daughter in the Sbarros massacre in 2001.
Read what she wrote about Gideon and Amira Hass
She hits it right on the head.
http://web.israelinsider.com/Views/9961.htm
Gideon Levy, who writes for Israel`s pre-eminent daily, Haaretz, fancies himself a champion of the weak and vulnerable. The day after my child`s cold-blooded murder by a Hamas bomber, Levy wrote the following in his weekly piece detailing Palestinian suffering:
“These children, every child in the world should have protection as though he were a VIP. Every child in the world is a VIP”
Levy did not mention the seven Jewish children whose graves were dug that day because he did not mean those children. He never does.
Levy`s colleague, Amira Hass, the only Israeli journalist who lives in a Palestinian town, Ramallah, was equally indifferent to my child`s murder. The first piece she published in Haaretz after the Sbarro massacre made no mention of the fifteen victims. Instead, it was an emotive tirade about the Palestinian right of return, reminding her readers of two major Jewish settlements close to Jerusalem that she fears “won`t be evacuated”: the city of Maaleh Adumim and the Jerusalem satellite community of Givat Ze`ev.
Murdered Jewish children do not move Hass either.
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Ed Frias
6:38 am
Feb 19, 2013
This is the same Gideon Levy who said nothing when the images of Hamas thugs lynching a supposed informer and dragging his body through the streets of Gaza behind a motorcycle. As it turned out the people Hamas murdered were just rivals of Hamas. Hamas apologist Gideon Levy the Hypocrite cant even condemn Hamas when they murder fellow Arabs for just being rivals of Hamas.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/hamas-victim-dragged-streets-collaborator-widow-article-1.1208004
Hamas victim dragged through the streets of Gaza City Tuesday by motorcycle was no collaborator, widow says
It was a sight that shocked the world
Nov 26, 2012
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