On Wednesday morning, Palestinian Preventive Security Services arrested 16-year old Amir Taha Muhammad Abu Sharar of Hebron for a Facebook post.
The police forced the child to close his Facebook account.
The Facebook post that offended the Palestinians was published during the conflict in May.
Abu Sharar, who suffers from diabetes, was held in custody for hours before he and his mother made a pledge to close his account and that he would stay away from posting on social media.
According to the Euro Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, this is only the latest in a wave of similar arrests for things people have posted on social media. Anything that offends the Palestinian government can be prosecuted under their overly broad "Cybercrime Law."
At least 60 people have been arrested or detained in the past month, and there are reports that some of those arrested were subject to torture and abuse in Jericho Prison.
I could not find a single story in the media about any of these arrests. As of this writing, the Euro-Med Monitor only published this in Arabic.
This isn't only a story about an egregious arrest of a child. It is not only a story about how the Palestinian Authority spits on freedom of speech.
This is a story about how the world media simply ignores Palestinian crimes.
60 arrests for social media posts in a month? How can this have not been reported anywhere??
Part of the reason is because Palestinian media itself doesn't report it - there is an unwritten rule that the media is not going to say anything bad about their own leaders. But there is no doubt that this information was known - Euro-Med found out about these.
The sad fact is that the world media does not want to find out anything negative about Palestinians. There are probably more reporters in the region per square kilometer than anywhere else in the world but all the reporters are only interested in demonizing Israel.
Human rights violations by the Palestinian Authority is simply not on the reporters' radar. There is no digging, no investigative journalism. Reporters are jostling to make Israel look as bad as possible but there are no similar stories about the Palestinian leadership - even though every single reporter knows that the corruption on the Palestinian side dwarf anything that Israel has done.
The real story is that this isn't a story in any media. And that is because the entire world media is effectively colluding to make public opinion hate the Jewish state and be sympathetic to the criminally corrupt Palestinian Authority.
It is a scandal. But it is not a scandal that the media will ever report.
