Inter Press is reporting that its correspondent in Gaza, Mohammed Omer, who is also working for the Washington Report, was stripsearched and assaulted at the border crossing from Jordan on Thursday. Omer, pictured here in London, where he lately won a Martha Gellhorn prize for his journalism, says he was forced to undress, then battered and kicked, dragged around, head banged. Every cavity of his body was probed, and he vomited and lost consciousness, woke up in a Palestinian hospital. The soldiers seemed angered by his having won a prize. You can see him accepting his prize in London here, describing how hard it was to get out of Gaza, and dedicating his prize “to the voiceless people of the Gaza Strip.”
The incident is sickeningly reminiscent of a strip-search story told by Hedy Epstein, an 80-plus-year-old Holocaust survivor from St. Louis, who has made it a mission in her 80s to visit Palestine. Here is Hedy telling about her 2004 humiliation, on youtube. They called her a terrorist.
(I learned about Hedy in in this open letter to Cong. Barney Frank saying that he has “lost his mind” because of Israel, as his sister has).
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad informed me about the Mohammed Omer story. I told him that Israel is beginning to sound more like the old Soviet Union than South Africa in some of these stories. I was thinking of Juliano Mer Khamis’s comment a week or so back at the New York Theatre Workshop, that Israel’s indifference to its international image strikes him as fascist. Ahmad said, “You are right, but what is worse is that one incident like [Omer’s assault] in the
Soviet era used to be the subject of whole films, whereas now its the
daily reality of a whole people yet reports like these disappear as
soon as they appear and would make it into public consciousness if they
weren’t being crowded out by more sensational stories such as Lindsey
Lohan’s latest nipple slip etc…”
Again it is worth remembering Jerome Slater’s point about “muting the alarms”: that the American leadership and public, even those who love Israel, are being deprived of a true picture of the state. And when they wake up it may be too late.
Here is Hedy Epstein’s website. She is a “Holocaust survivor and speaker.” Hedy explains her repeat visits to Palestine, to Counterpunch: “I thought a checkpoint was
something like a stop light on a highway here in the United-States.
It’s not like that at all. And it’s gotten worse every
time I return. The way they are now, they remind me of when animals
are rounded up and taken to slaughter, it’s just so humiliating.” I urge synagogues and churches and mosques to call her up now and book her. Hedy: I love you.
Thanks too to Anne Silver for tipping me off.
