If a dearth of coverage of Khader Adnan’s hunger strike in the Israeli media is deplorable, albeit predictable, Palestinian activists believe the lagging coverage of the international media is unconscionable.
“It is simply despicable and downright outrageous that Khader Adnan only managed to get media attention after 50 days of hunger strikie,” Al-Saafin says. “The media goes crazy over its portrait of Palestinian resistance fighters or dissenters as bearded terrorists with a bomb strapped to their torsos. Khader Adnan has surpassed Gandhi’s hunger strike legacy. The world’s silent complicity is telling.”
Steven Friedman, director of The Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Johannesburg, says Adnan’s hunger strike is set to reframe the conflict in the Middle East as a fundamental human rights issue. “It is an important departure, an attempt in a dramatic and tragic movement to reframe Palestinian rights. The Palestinian issue is not widely understood as a human rights issue. It is the illegitimate exercise of power by one party over another,” Friedman says. More here.