Where’s the Coverage? Palestinian Authority Hands Down Death Penalty for Land Sale to Jews

In an article “celebrating” Israel’s 64th Independence Day, “Israel’s Big Day, Under Sun and Cloud” (April 26, 2012), the New York Times could not refrain from taking a number of jabs at Israel, including the obligatory swipe at “the settlements”:

Israel’s settlement building in the West Bank drew more international condemnation this week after the government retroactively legalized three Jewish outposts there. The Palestinians described the move as another example of why there is no peace.

This description is, at the least, simplistic. The communities had been authorized and approved by prior governments in the 1980s and 1990s but were missing some additional paperwork to formalize their status. The spokesman for the Prime Minister’s office, Mark Regev stated, “You can’t tell me that the Israeli government has built new settlements, and you can’t tell me that this is legalizing unauthorized outposts. These decisions are procedural or technical. They don’t change anything whatever on the ground.”

While this story was all over the media, another story about homes in the West Bank was completely ignored.

A Palestinian man, Muhammad Abu Shahala, reportedly confessed under torture to selling his home in Hebron to a Jewish man. He has been sentenced to death after a hurried trial. Caroline Glick writes on her blog:

The PA was established in May 1994. The first law it adopted defined selling land to Jews as a capital offense. Shortly thereafter scores of Arab land sellers began turning up dead in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria in both judicial and extrajudicial killings.

Leaders of the Jewish community of Hebron wrote a letter to international leaders this week asking them to intervene with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and demand that he cancel Shahala’s sentence. They addressed the letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy, the director-general of the International Red Cross, Yves Daccord, as well as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. In it they wrote, “It is appalling to think that property sales should be defined as a ‘capital crime’ punishable by death.

“The very fact that such a ‘law’ exists within the framework of the PA legal system points to a barbaric and perverse type of justice, reminiscent of practices implemented during the dark ages.”

They went on to make the reasonable comparison between the PA’s law prohibiting land sales to Jews to Nazi Germany’s Nuremburg laws that constrained and finally outlawed trade between Jews and Germans. The letter concluded with the question, “Is the Palestinian Authority a reincarnation of the Third Reich?”

Certainly this is newsworthy. Yet a search of the New York Times Web site turn up zero matches for the search term “Muhammad Abu Shahala,” only asking if you meant someone else.

Similarly, a search of the Washington Post Web site also turned up zero matches for “Muhammad Abu Shahala.”

And a search on the Wall Street Journal Web site returned, “Sorry, there are no results for your search query, please try another search.”

Maybe the fact that even the sale of property by a Palestinian to a Jew is a crime punishable by death under the Palestinian Authority is “another example of why there is no peace.” And remember, this is the “moderate” regime to which Israel is supposed to make concessions.

Where’s the good sense? Where’s the tolerance? Where’s the coverage?