The father of Baha Alyan, killer of three Israelis in Jerusalem’s Armon Hanatziv neighborhood in October 2015, has won the prize for best international human rights attorney, presented by the French International Institute for Human Rights and Peace.
Attorney Muhammad Alyan was awarded the prize this past Sunday in a ceremony held at Al Quds University in Abu Dis, on the eastern outskirts of Jerusalem. The university presented the award in collaboration with the International Institute for Human Rights and Peace, located in the northern French town of Caen, according to a report in Yisrael Hayom.
Alyan enjoyed the opportunity of delivering an acceptance speech at the award ceremony before numerous human rights activists, diplomats and lawmakers from France, Belgium and Canada. Alyan won the prize for having defended the wife of another terrorist, Nadia Abu Jamaal, widow of Ghassan Abu Jamaal, who joined in the vicious attack on a synagogue in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood in November 2014. As with his own son, Alyan’s client was killed by Israeli security forces. But Abu Jamal managed to take the lives of five Jewish worshippers — four of them rabbis — and a Druze police officer — before he was neutralized.
In his speech, Alyan said he was “proud” of what his son did, according to video footage translated by Palestinian Media Watch. He also claimed that “Ghassan was shot dead by ‘occupation police’ [Israeli police] on the pretext he was killing Israelis in Jerusalem. The police did not stop at executing Ghassan without a trial and mere hours after the incident very large forces of police, Border Police and special units surrounded the home and searched it to the astonishment of the wife and children. They did not know what was going on, and did not know that from that moment on their lives would turn into hell, as a security officer told the wife as he wreaked havoc on the home.
“The officer informed Abu Jamaal that her husband ‘had been killed and that his body was being withheld and would be placed in a refrigerator until further notice’,” Alyan claimed in his speech. “The torture did not stop at this point but continued and intensified until it was no longer bearable, as Nadia was informed that occupation authorities would demolish her family home, located in a beautiful place in Jabel Mukaber,” an Arab neighborhood in Jerusalem.
The mother of Lt. Shir Hajaj, a young woman who was murdered by another Arab terrorist in a ramming attack in Armon Hanatziv this past January, told the Israel Hayom newspaper in response to Alyan’s speech:
“This is an absurd situation that we are trying to prevent. The son committed murder and the father receives money and prizes. He’s become a public figure who leads fights against Israel, instead of fearing for his status in the state. This is unreasonable. This is intolerable.”
An advocacy group seeking to safeguard Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, Lach Yerushalayim, pointed out the moral inconsistency of foreign lawmakers honoring an attorney in another country who defends a terrorist.
“The consul general of France in Jerusalem and four French MPs awarded a prize to the father of a despicable murderer. He defends the rights of terrorists who murder worshippers while they are praying,” said Ma’or Zemach, CEO of Lach Yerushalayim.
“This is an unimaginable record moral low.”
Names of the murdered victims of Baha Alyan: Richard Lakin, Haviv Haim and Alon Govberg. 15 more wounded.
Names of the murdered victims of Ghassan Abu Jamaal: Rabbi Moshe Twersky, Rabbi Calman Levine, Rabbi Aryeh Kupinsky, Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Goldberg and Police Master Sergeant Zidan Saif in the attack. 7 more wounded including Howard (Chaim) Rotman who died after being in a coma for a year.