Since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, it has now been proven as customary for western governments to exercise the same terror tactics against their people that they have used since the time of rising and falling monarchies during the medieval period. Regardless of the West’s attempts to distance themselves from that dark history that led to the epicenter of murder and mayhem that is the World Wars, their traditional love for control through violence has never left the halls of their administrative practices.
Day in, day out we see new names being drafted onto western police ledgers and the faces tied to those names thrown into prison cells across Europe and the US of Empire for the crime of calling out injustice where it truly is. With Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Day being only a few days ago on 17 April, it would be the bare minimum for those of us who yet maintain sanity and a real sense of humanity to stand with the disenfranchised. Those who, even in exile from their own land and at great risk of further endangerment, still have the bravery to speak truth to power.
Mohammad Khatib, Europe’s coordinator for the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Movement also known as Samidoun, was arrested by Belgian federal police on the eve of 21 April then held overnight before being released later on April 22. All this while he faces publicized attacks from the government for the “crime” of what the Belgian Secretary for Asylum and Migration Nicole De Moor calls “hate preaching”. It’s tough nowadays to see anything a Western official says as truth, and that’s simply due to the enumerate amount of political talking heads dressed in colorful suits and fancy makeup the West provides as “beacons of credibility”, but they seem to forget that the genocidal kings, queens, and emperors of their bloody past were also clothed in fineries and painted in the maquillage of their time.
@SamidounPP: Samidoun Europe coordinator Mohammed Khatib released following arrest in Belgium: Stand together against repression and genocide! https://t.co/PNyzDnybzm
— Samidoun Network (@samidounnetwork) April 22, 2025
So instead of regaling the crowd with the horrid deeds of our “hate preacher” and fetching the young town criers of the internet to spread his hatemongering antics that Miss De Moor so loves to spotlight, let’s talk about the real story of Mohammad Khatib. Because when we post something online about someone such as him, we’re talking about a real human being, not a tool of the “Hate gospel”.
About Mohammad Khatib
Mohammad Khatib’s life is a testament to the unbroken spirit of the displaced—a man forged in the crucible of exile, whose voice refuses to be stifled by the iron grip of empire. Born in 1990 in Ain el-Helweh, a refugee camp in Saida, Lebanon, it’s bullet-ridden streets speaking stories of a stolen homeland. Like millions of Palestinians scattered across the globe, his family’s roots were torn from the soil of Palestine during the Nakba, the Zionist conquest of 1947-1948 that birthed a diaspora drenched in blood and longing. For Mohammad, Palestine existed only as a distant silhouette, glimpsed from Lebanon’s southern border—a cruel irony, given that this same border would later become a symbol of resistance following Lebanon’s liberation in the 2000s at the hands of the many great revolutionary leaders of the resistance who, much like Mohammad, glimpsed the scene of the occupied land for the first time on that border.
In 2012, Khatib traded one exile for another, securing asylum in Europe. But Europe, with its polished veneer of democracy, proved to be another battleground. Mohammad did not arrive to beg for scraps from the tables of the powerful; he came to organize, to resist, to expose the hypocrisy of states that preach human rights while arming genocide.
Activist for Palestine
By 2015, he had become the European coordinator for Samidoun, role that placed him squarely in the crosshairs of the Zionist lobby. The Israeli embassy in Brussels waged several campaigns against him for the crime of demanding freedom for his people. But Khatib, steeped in the legacy of Palestinian resistance, refused to bend.
His politics are no secret: he stands unapologetically with the Palestinian right to resist occupation by means of protest or armed resistance echoes the defiance of Lebanon’s resistance movements, whose victories against Zionist aggression he views as a blueprint for liberation. In 2021, he helped found the Alternative Palestinian Revolutionary Path Movement, a coalition of anti-imperialist forces battling normalization with Israel and the slow erasure of the Palestinian cause.
In Belgium, Khatib became a thorn in the side of the establishment. He helped build trade unions and grassroots organizations, fusing the struggle of the Palestinian people with the fight against rising fascism in Europe. His speeches and writings pull no punches: Zionism and European fascism are twin forces, each enabling the other. To him, the Belgian state’s crackdown on pro-Palestine voices—under the flimsy guise of combating “hate speech”—is no different from the medieval edicts of kings who jailed those of their time who spoke of the same struggles.
The arrest of Mohammad Khatib is not just an attack on one man—it is a page torn from the same old playbook of silencing dissent with a polished smile and an iron fist, whether it happens in Ye Olden or New Europe or in the great US of Empire with the case of another Palestinian of similar initials: Mahmoud Khalil, who is currently under threat of deportation after a judge ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s campaign against him.
Mahmoud Khalil missed the birth of his first child because Donald Trump is holding him in jail for constitutionally protected speech.
This is cruel beyond belief. I continue to stand with Mahmoud and his family and will keep fighting to bring him home. https://t.co/cUdVFf1lXb
— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) April 22, 2025
Mohammad’s life stands as a refusal to forget, a call to resist, and a mirror held up to the face of empire. In a world where truth is criminalized and justice wears shackles, standing with Khatib means standing with all who dare to speak when silence is the safer road. And if that is the price of humanity, then let us pay it loudly.
Source: Al-Manar English Website
