Israeli Defense Forces detained a St. Louis college student on Friday and held her over the weekend after she attempted to cross the border from Ramallah into Jerusalem to visit revered holy sites with her family.Hala Kasim Salameh, a 22-year-old Palestinian-American woman from St. Louis, was visiting the West Bank with her mother, sister, aunt and cousin.According to her family, Salameh is an American citizen who had proper documentation, a travel permit, a U.S. passport and her Palestinian I.D. card when she approached the first checkpoint but was turned away."Sometimes it doesn't really go how you want, and they can refuse your entry for no reason at all, and that's exactly what happened to my sister," her younger sister Yumna Salameh told 5 On Your Side in a video call on Sunday night."She tried to ask them twice to go in, and they still refused her entry," she said. "They kind of got aggressive with her, too."After being separated from her family at the first checkpoint, Salameh tried again to reconnect with them in a taxi cab. She managed to make one final phone call to her family before she was arrested.Neveen Ayesh, a St. Louis advocate with the Missouri chapter of American Muslims for Palestine, is working with Salameh's family to get her legal representation."To begin with, she was not wrong because she did have a permit to enter," Ayesh said. "The soldier just decided he didn't want to let her in."
The story is very strange. Why would the soldiers let her family through and not her? Why would she be put into jail for something so minor - why not just release her?
If you listen carefully, the video of the story answers both questions, with two buried details that are not in the written story.
At 2:23, after the video report, the news anchor mentions as an aside, "The family tells us that she did have the proper documentation, but did not have it on her when she was detained."
Suddenly, things are starting to make sense. The family and lawyer in the news story were lying when they said she had all her documentation, and then - perhaps upon further questioning from a skeptical reporter - the family changed their story. But that detail didn't make it into the print and video story, which still quotes the AMP lawyer as saying she had her permit on her.
Now look at the video at 1:00: "Now, separated from her family, she tried to enter a third time, in a taxicab." Her sister then says, "Oh, the third time they said, 'you disobeyed us, and now we catch you.'"
Meaning, they let her go twice, but she still tried to sneak into Israel a third time by hoping that they wouldn't check her papers from a taxicab.
This isn't a story of an American girl being abused by the IDF. It is the story of a person trying, three times, to cross a border without documentation - and the third time, knowingly trying to sneak past the border guards.
This is what would happen at any border crossing worldwide.
The family turned to pro-terror American Muslims for Palestine for help. AMP saw an opportunity for a propaganda bonanza, so they immediately contacted the media and concocted a story about a forlorn American girl of Palestinian ancestry who was arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned for no other reason except that Israelis hate Palestinians.
And KSDK happily runs with the story as their top story of the evening. Not only that, they illustrate the part where she gets arrested with this photo of Israeli police detaining a violent protester, as if this was how Hala was treated:
This is not news reporting. This is anti-Israel propaganda.
A proper news organization would have reported this the way they would report anyone trying to bypass security at an airport - as a potential terrorist trying to illicitly cross an international border.
(h/t RealJerusalemStreets)
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