Ali Abunimah, co-founder and executive director of the anti-Israel Electronic Intifada website, was arrested by Swiss police ahead of a speaking engagement in Zurich on Saturday, the organization said.
The Palestinian-American activist “is currently being detained and has had access to legal counsel,” according to the Saturday statement.
Electronic Intifada said that Abunimah was also interrogated by police at Zurich Airport for an hour before being allowed to enter the country.
According to the report by Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Abunimah had been invited by The Palestine Committee Zurich. The Swiss daily added that local police had been notified of Abunimah’s planned appearance and submitted a request to the Federal Office of Police that he be banned.
Zurich Canton Councilor Mario Fehr told the Swiss newspaper, “We do not want an Islamist Jew-hater who calls for violence in Switzerland.”
Just in: Infamous terror-supporter and certifiable loony toon Ali Abunimah has been arrested in Zurich pic.twitter.com/eBZCkoDzkL
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) January 26, 2025
Abunimah’s detention was immediately condemned by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. In a statement, the committee said it was “outraged” by what it called a “reminder of the increasing attempts to stifle voices calling for justice and accountability.”
The Arab organization called on the U.S. State Department to “fulfill its responsibility to protect the rights of its citizens abroad and do what it can to secure the safe and immediate release of Abunimah.”
Abunimah previously celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, murder of 1,200 people—primarily Jewish civilians—as an “anti-colonial operation.”
On Nov. 10, the Electronic Intifada founder wrote in a post on X, “From ‘mass rapes’ and ‘burned babies’ on 7 October 2023, to ‘anti-Semitic pogroms’ against genocidal ‘Israeli’ hooligans in the Netherlands now, the genocidal Zionist regime and its savage and barbaric Western accomplices lie and lie to justify and cover up their hideous crimes.”
According to the NGO Monitor group, Abunimah frequently makes Holocaust references. He has called Gaza a “concentration camp” and repeated a claim that Israeli army statements are the words “of a Nazi.”
The American activist has called the Gaza Strip a “ghetto for surplus non-Jews,” compared the press in the Jewish state to Nazi Germany’s Der Sturmer, and declared in 2010 that “Supporting Zionism is not atonement for the Holocaust, but its continuation in spirit.”
