Malsin: No such thing as voluntary deportation

Ma'an
Upon landing in New York on Thursday, Ma'an News Agency's Jared Malsin, a US citizen, said Interior Ministry staff pressured him into dropping a legal challenge against his deportation order just two hours after his lawyer left for the day. ... [Ma'an is the largest independent news agency in the Palestinian Territories. Malsin was the chief editor of their English language division.]

.........Malsin was subsequently placed onto an El Al flight to New York. "None of this was my decision," he emphasized in a phone interview minutes after arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport early Thursday morning local time, rejecting reports that he left Israel voluntarily. "There's no such thing as a voluntary deportation. I was deported, period."

.....  Interior Ministry officials coerced him into creating a legal document to withdraw his case without an attorney present, and offered a misleading explanation over what he was signing.

The document apparently indicated Malsin was leaving the facility "without personal coercion." But Malsin said he was under the impression that the papers he signed would allow him to simply leave the airport while his case continued in Israel.

......In an e-mail from Malsin to Ma'an staff sent upon his arrival to his parents' home in New Hampshire, he said, about the paper, "I thought it was a formality. In retrospect I wish I hadn't signed it. I believe the prison guards were extremely manipulative, misleading, mendacious in the way they dealt with me," he said, but "I'm just so relieved to be out."

....Malsin's deportation was met with mixed reactions from Israeli officials. Interior Ministry spokeswoman ............ told Israel's Hebrew-language Yedioth Ahronoth that he had voluntarily left Israel, adding, "I guess he didn't like it [detention] and chose to leave the country."

Allegations of Malsin being a security risk were made even at the start of the deportation process, with documents alleging Malsin's failure to cooperate with Israeli intelligence officers constituting such a threat.

The same day Hadad told the AP Malsin was a security threat, however, she was quoted by Reuters and the Washington Post as denying Malsin was refused a visa for political or security reasons.

........ international press associations condemned the detention as a violation of press freedom from the beginning.

"We condemn this intolerable violation of press freedom," said Aidan White, the head of the International Federation of Journalists, the largest union of media professionals worldwide.

"The ban of entry in this case appears to be as a reprisal measure for the journalist's independent reporting and that is unacceptable," he said. "This kind of interference has no place in a democracy."   Full story