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Tortured in Libya

Today on Tablet

by
Marc Tracy
February 15, 2011

Former Maariv columnist Yoav Fromer has an exclusive interview today in Tablet Magazine with Rafram Hadad, a Tunisian-born Israeli who spent five months in Muammar Qaddafi’s prisons after being arrested in Tripoli while on assignment for an anodyne non-governmental organization devoted to memorializing Libya’s 2,500-year-old Jewish community. He was tortured and vaguely accused of all manner of intrigue and at one point had cause to expect he would never leave; his harrowing experience is essential reading. Yet today, he seems to project nothing so much as hipster irony about the whole thing: “Baby-faced and bespectacled,” Fromer reports, “Hadad, who looks much younger than his age, is dressed in a homemade T-shirt with Qaddafi’s portrait printed on it in the style of the well-known Che Guevara stencil.”

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.