A 20-year old man goes on MySpace.com and talks a 16-year old girl into running away from home to meet him. The usual media treatment of stories like this is to portray the man as a sexual predator, and rightly so.

But because in this case the predator is a Palestinian, the Associated Press allows their Palestinian propagandist Mohammed Daraghmeh to file one of the most outrageous puff pieces you’ll ever read: Palestinian anguishes over MySpace romance.

“Romance?”

JERICHO, West Bank - The Palestinian man who befriended a 16-year-old Michigan girl through the MySpace.com Web site and invited her to join him in Jericho said he is heartbroken by U.S. authorities’ decision to send her back home.

Abdullah Jimzawi, 20, told The Associated Press that his love for Katherine Lester, of Gilford, Mich., was pure and they planned to marry. The music buff, who spends at least 10 hours a day on the Internet, decried attempts to portray him as an Internet predator.

“We love the same things, the same songs and we have similar dreams. I fell in love with her because she is innocent and goodhearted. We found ourselves as soul mates,” he told the AP on Sunday at his family’s comfortable house.

Jericho, a town of 17,000, is largely immune from the violence and mayhem plaguing the rest of the West Bank.

Jimzawi, a high school dropout with close-cropped hair, a two-day beard and large, dark eyes, said Katherine was willing to convert to Islam and that the pair remain in close contact, speaking to each other at least five hours a day via Internet phone calls.