NAZARETH, Israel (Michigan News Source) – A member of the Dearborn Public Schools board of education said he was retained by Israeli police after a comedy show he performed in Nazareth.

Amer Zahr is a Palestinian American comedian who lives in Dearborn. He was performing Dec. 26 when police detained him after the first of three shows.

The show goes on.

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In a video he posted on Facebook, Zahr said the police asked if he was inciting against Israel and they told him they could hold him under administrative detention. He said he was held for 90 minutes. Zahr said he thinks the police were trying to cancel his final two shows.

But the show went on.

“The real story is they held me for an hour and a half hoping to kill the next two shows … But here’s what happened. The hundreds of people who came to see me last night,” Zahr said in the video. “They sat in that theater and they waited for me to come back because they knew what was going on. When I came back, they welcomed me with open arms. They didn’t care that they sat around and we had a show.”

“This is about the people of Palestine who are not going to let the attempts by Israel to silence us go forward,” Zahr said.

Zahr wrote the book “Being Palestinian Makes Me Smile” in 2014.

Free speech in the West Bank.

The Palestinian Authority, the governing body of the Palestinian territories: the West Bank and Gaza Strip, doesn’t have a good track record of respecting free speech.

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In June 2021, Palestinian activist Nizar Banat, an outspoken critic of the Palestinian Authority, was arrested by the Palestinian Preventive Security, according to Amnesty International. The Palestinian Preventive Security’s primary mission it to protect the Palestinian Authority. While in custody, Banat was beaten and died while enroute to the hospital.

“Recent arrests of student activists and dissidents, along with the accounts of torture they shared with Amnesty International, prove that Nizar Banat’s case cannot be seen in isolation but is part of a broader pattern of human rights violations aimed to silence dissent and criticism of the Palestinian authorities,” Amnesty International stated in a press release.

In 2017, the Palestinian Authority enacted a cybercrime law that Amnesty International said allowed for “prison sentences and heavy fines for anyone critical of the Palestinian authorities online …”