Reposted from @AliAbunimah on Twitter:

"I’m free! I wrote this on the plane and I’m posting it just after landing at Istanbul. On Monday evening I was brought to Zurich airport in handcuffs, in a small metal cage inside a windowless prison van and led all the way to the plane by police. This is after three days and two nights in a Swiss prison cut off from communication with the outside world, in a cell 24 hours a day with one cell mate, not even permitted to contact my family. On Saturday in a police interview in the presence of my lawyer they accused me of “offending against Swiss law” without ever telling me what crime I had committed in Switzerland or listing any charges. As far as I know I have not been charged with any crime whatsoever and I was held in “administrative detention.” On Sunday morning, they took me from my cell for questioning by Swiss defense ministry intelligence agents without the presence of my lawyer, and they again refused to allow me to contact her or my family. I refused to talk to them without my lawyer and told them take me back to my cell. During my imprisonment I refused every meal and every cup of coffee or tea they offered me except the last meal, after I knew I would be going home. I accepted only water, which is the right of every human being. All of this was after I was abducted off the street around 1:30pm on Saturday while on my way to the Palestine teach-in by undercover agents, handcuffed, forced into an unmarked car and sped straight to the prison. My “crime”? Being a journalist who speaks up for Palestine and against Israel’s genocide and settler-colonial savagery and those who aid and abet it. I came to Switzerland at the invitation of Swiss citizens to talk about justice for Palestine, to talk about accountability for a genocide in which Switzerland too is complicit. But while I was hauled off to prison like a dangerous criminal before I even had a chance to say a word, the Israeli president Isaac Herzog, who declared at the start of the genocide that there are no civilians in Gaza, no innocents, received a red carpet welcome in Davos, a carpet soaked in the blood of the more than 47,000 known victims of the genocide and the thousands more still under the rubble, or who died of deliberately inflicted starvation and denial of medical care. And on this very day Netanyahu freely travels to Poland to make a mockery of the Auschwitz commemoration despite an outstanding ICC arrest warrant. That is the perverse, unjust world we live in. This ordeal lasted three days but that taste of prison was more than enough to leave me in even greater awe of the Palestinian heroes who endure months and years in the prisons of the genocidal oppressor. More than ever I know that the debt we owe them is one we can never repay and all of them must be free and they must remain our focus. The police gave me my phone back only at the gate of the plane so I’m only seeing now the extent of the overwhelming support and solidarity from all over the world. I’m deeply grateful to each and every person who stood up for me. I’m especially grateful to my lawyer Dina Raewel and her team, to our friends in Zurich who I learned afterwards demonstrated outside the prison, to my family and my colleagues at EI and so many others. I honestly had no idea what was happening outside that concrete room! Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I want to tell the whole story of what happened, perhaps in an @intifada livestream in the next day or two, because I think it’s important for people to know the depths to which their Western so-called “democracies” have sunk in the abject service of genocidal Zionism. Right now I’m glad to be on my way home. I’m looking forward to hugging my mom and dad, taking a shower and sleeping in my own bed. Journalism is not a crime! Speaking out for Palestine is not a crime! Standing against racist genocidal Zionism is not a crime! Say it with me:

From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Free! ❤️🇵🇸✌️"

  • eldavi
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    2 days ago

    I also came to that same realization after the yougov poll showing that the Democrats lost the election because of their complicity in the gazan genocide; they disregarded it in the same manner that the Western Europeans disregarded the political violence that the United States inflicted upon them.

    However, unlike the yougov poll w Democrats or American fostered political violence w Western Europeans, Americans fostered violence in Latin America is a permanent sore spot in relations between Latin America and the United States; In many respects it feels worse that the Western Europeans dgaf about the political violence that the United States put them through simply because it stopped happening after the 1980’s.

    • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      2 days ago

      It seems Europe just loves servitude. It’s no coincidence so many European countries still have monarchies. A lot of people seem to enjoy being subjects, whether of their own inbred aristocracy or of a decrepit empire on the other side of the ocean. At this point i just want to get out of here and go live somewhere where people at least have some dignity, even if they are poorer.