Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Responsible for Torture
by Khaled Abu Toameh • January 8, 2016 at 5:00 am
- For the mainstream media and human rights organizations, human rights violations are news only when they come with a "made in Israel" sticker on them.
- The Palestinian Authority (PA) has used international aid funds to build prisons and detention centers in the West Bank where torture has become the norm.
- Dr. Ammar Dwaik, Director General of the Independent Commission for Human Rights, a Palestinian group, revealed that his group received 782 complaints regarding torture -- 168 in the West Bank and 614 in the Gaza Strip.
- Both Hamas and the PA each fears that in a free election it could lose some of its power. Why hold an election if you are not sure about the results?
- Needed desperately: scrutiny of Palestinian society by international media and human rights groups -- beginning with Palestinian prisons. Anyone stepping up?
Dr. Ammar Dwaik (center), Director General of the Independent Commission for Human Rights, reports a dramatic rise over the past two years in the number of complaints about torture in Palestinian prisons run by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. (Image source: ICHR)
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The Palestinian Authority and Hamas are torturing Palestinians. Still.
The two Palestinian governments, the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, are both major violators of human rights. Assaults on public freedoms and crackdowns on political rivals are just the first chapters of a very long story.
Yet this narrative does not appeal to the international community, especially the mainstream media and human rights organizations in the West. For them, human rights violations are news only when they come with a "made in Israel" sticker on them.
Yet their obsession with Israel might just kill the Palestinians. Particularly at risk are those who daily put their lives on the line to halt Hamas and PA violence against their own people.
Is Europe Giving Up?
by Judith Bergman • January 8, 2016 at 4:00 am
- As a response to a gang of a thousand migrant men sexually assaulting women in Cologne on New Year's Eve, the mayor suggested a "code of conduct" for German girls and women, as a measure to "prevent such things from ever happening again."
- The idea of a "code of conduct" for girls and women to accommodate male predators not only places the blame on the victim but is an inversion of responsibility unseen in Western jurisprudence. The politically correct urge to accommodate the culture of immigrants means that justice is no longer blind.
- Each asylum seeker, upon entering Europe, needs to be informed, in the clearest possible manner, that all women, even infidels, must be treated with respect.
- "I feel betrayed by Britain. I came here to get away from this and the situation is worse here than in the country I escaped from." — A Muslim woman, quoted by Baroness Caroline Cox.
Left: A scene from New Year's Eve in front of Cologne's central railway station. Right: Britain's Baroness Caroline Cox, who is leading a fight to protect women's rights from the encroachment of Islamic Sharia law on the British legal system.
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The cathedral opposite the main train station used to be the traditional gathering spot for New Year's Eve revelers in the German city of Cologne.
This year, Germans who poured out from the train station to celebrate the New Year they were met by a crowd of some 1000 young men. The men, according to German police, seemed to be of Arab or North African origin. They had taken over the entire public square in front of the station, and divided themselves into smaller gangs to surround women who were passing by. They then sexually assaulted them, and stole their wallets, purses and phones.
Police have so far received over 100 criminal complaints; three-quarters of them for sexual assault, and one for rape.
According to the British Telegraph, "Women were robbed, groped, and had their underwear torn from their bodies, while couples had fireworks thrown at them."
