WATCH: Jordanian Journalist Praises Israeli Jails As ‘Institutes of Education’

TEL AVIV – A Jordanian journalist who spent time in an Israeli prison told a Saudi TV station that he was “ashamed” of the differences between prisons in the Arab world and those of Israel, in which prisoners are able to receive an education.

Yousef Alawnah, who served a 30 month sentence in an Israeli prison for smuggling explosives, told Saudi 24 it was like being jailed in an “institute of education.”

Prisoners are given “an opportunity to acquire culture, to read and to study many things,” he said in the interview translated this week by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

“I am ashamed by [the comparison] between Israeli and Arab prisons,” he added.

“They have all the important books, history books, books against Israel and against Zionism… Even Hitler’s Mein Kampf is there,” he said.

Alawnah wrote for the Kuwaiti press for many years but was deported in 2016 for criticizing Iraq-based Iranian-born Shiite leader Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani.

“The prisoners held in the dungeons of the Syrian regime… Do you think that they have books?” Alawnah asked.

Alawnah also slammed the Arab and Muslim world for spreading violence in the region.

“Consider what the Arabs have done to one another. If the Jews occupied Syria or Iraq, would they do all those things?” he said. “Have the Jews killed as many Syrians, Palestinians, Egyptians, Jordanians, Lebanese, and others as Iran’s militias killed in Mosul or in Aleppo? No.”