Yet in a recent interview on PA TV, Ahmad Jabara, the terrorist who served 27 years in Israeli prisons for murdering 14 in a Jerusalem bombing in 1975, and was released last month as a good will gesture, unwittingly presented a picture of the unique beneficence of Israeli prisons.

The host asks Ahmad Jabara to describe the hardship and torture in the Israeli jail, so that "the viewers can feel, even just a little, the suffering and wretchedness of the prisoners." Jabara responds with two contradictory statements. First he charges that the Israeli prisons are as bad as Nazi camps. However, in his depiction of the nature of this "Nazi like" evil the worst example he could site was: "at any given moment the Israelis could burst into our rooms and check us." Later on in the interview, he went even further in depicting the excellent conditions of Israeli prisons, when mentioning that Palestinian prisoners can even get a university education from Israeli universities!

The following is from the discussion on PA TV:

The host: "Describe the conditions of the prisoners so that the viewers can feel, even just a little, their suffering and wretchedness."

Ahmad Jabara: "I would like to tell the leadership of our Arab and Islamic nations that we are living in camps where there is no less suffering than in the Nazi camps in Germany. In fact, at any given moment the Israelis could burst into our rooms and check us.

And, thank God, as Palestinian prisoners, more than 200 of us have been accepted into the Hebrew University and the Ben Gurion University, and our brother Hisham Abed Al-Razak [PA Minister for Prisoners] is paying the tuition fees .Even in the prisons we are studying, and we are looking forward to the future and live in hope."

[PA TV June 23, 2003]

Link & Sources:

Palestinian Media Watch