Israel Jails Palestinian Who Applauded Militant Attacks on Facebook
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Version 0 of 1. TEL AVIV, Israel — An Israeli court on Tuesday sentenced a Palestinian for incitement and for supporting a terrorist organization based on Facebook posts that applauded militant attacks, his lawyer said. It was a rare case in which statements on social media were regarded as a crime. The defendant, Omar Shalabi, 45, a father of six from East Jerusalem, was sentenced to nine months in jail for 10 posts to his 5,000 friends and 755 followers that urged them to undertake “violent acts and acts of terrorism,” said the Hebrew-language indictment. Legal rights groups said it was unusual for an Israeli court to accept speech on social media as a basis for conviction. But they said that in recent months the Israeli police had detained several Palestinians from East Jerusalem and Arab citizens of Israel for incitement over comments made on their social media networks. Mr. Shalabi’s posts included a photograph of a Palestinian man who was killed after he plowed his car into a group of pedestrians in Jerusalem, killing a baby. Four days after the attack, he wrote, “Hundreds of Jerusalem’s men are rising from their graves, and from under the hands of deprivation to cheer the soul of the martyr,” according to the indictment. Another post praised two cousins who had stormed into a Jerusalem synagogue in November, killing five men. Mr. Shalabi posted the photographs of the attackers and wrote: “Ask death to grant you life; glory is bestowed upon the martyrs.” “These posts motivated other Facebook users who shared the inciting contents with their friends and followers, who in turn supported the posts by pressing the “like” button,” the indictment said. “The mere use of this media, as the defendant has done, serves as a severe act, given the extensive circulation of the messages, as well as the ease with which these messages spread.” Mr. Shalabi’s lawyer, Tariq Bargouth, said the basis for the conviction and punishment never established that Mr. Shalabi’s posts had encouraged any specific militant attack. There have been a series of so-called lone-wolf attacks in Jerusalem, in which Palestinian men, without any political backing or leadership, attack Israeli civilians or security officers. Avner Pinchuk, a lawyer with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which follows freedom of speech cases, said it was the first time he had heard that “incitement to terror in social media concluded in jail.” Majd Kayyal, the media coordinator for Adalah, an organization that pursues the legal rights of Palestinians in Israel, accused security services of a double standard, saying they had not cracked down on Israeli Jews for incitement to violence online. He said his organization had tracked officials from the police and ambulance services who had encouraged violence against Palestinians on their Facebook pages, without punishment. Mr. Kayyal said he also feared government officials were using the word “incitement” too loosely, saying they had to “prove a relation between what was written, and an incident that happened in reality.” |