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January 2017

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Democrat Patient Ignoring the symptoms, misdiagnosing the malady, skipping the treatment By Victor Davis Hanson

By on January 31st, 2017

If progressives were to become empiricists, they would look at the symptoms of the last election and come up with disinterested diagnoses, therapies, and prognoses.

Although their hard-left candidate won the popular vote, even that benchmark was somewhat deceiving — given the outlier role of California and the overwhelming odds in their favor. The Republicans ran a candidate who caused a veritable civil war in their ranks and who was condemned by many of the flagship conservative media outlets. Trump essentially ran against a united Democratic party, the Republican establishment, the mainstream media (both liberal and conservative) — and won.

He was outspent. He was out-organized. He was outpolled and demonized daily as much by Republicans as Democrats. Yet he not only destroyed three political dynasties (the Clintons, Bushes, and Obamas) but also has seemingly rendered the Obama election matrix nontransferable to anyone other than Obama himself.

Not that Hillary did not try to copy Obama’s formula. She brought on Obama politicos to staff her campaign. She supported all the Obama initiatives, from Obamacare and record debt to a collapsed foreign policy. She spoke in a faux-inner city accent the same way Obama had to get out the African-American vote. She outdid Obama’s clinger speech by her own twist of “deplorables” and “irredeemables.” She returned to her own hard-left phase of the 1990s. Yet she was trounced in the electoral college and saw the fabled “blue wall” crumble.

DIAGNOSIS

Any reasonable post-election autopsy for a party would identify certain inconvenient truths.

1) The African-American vote is vital to the Democratic party, but it is dubious to suppose that blacks will register, turn out, and vote in a bloc (as they did in 2008 and 2012) for a Democratic candidate other than Barack Obama. The very efforts to ensure that 95 percent of blacks will vote for other Democratic nominees might only polarize other groups in an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic America. Trump, of course, knows all this and will make the necessary adjustments.

2) Asians and Hispanics are less a monolithic voting bloc. Supposedly discredited melting-pot assimilation, integration, and intermarriage are still the norm and can temper tribal solidarities and peel away from Democrats a third of their assumed constituents — in an electoral landscape where there is already only a thin margin of error, given that Democrats have written off the white working classes. In the case of Latinos, red states such as Texas and Arizona are unlikely to be flipped soon by Latino bloc voting, especially if Trump closes down the border and ends illegal immigration as a demographic electoral tool of the Democratic party. And Latino electoral-college strength is dissipated in states that are likely to be blue anyway (California, Nevada, New Mexico).

3) The race/class/gender agenda so favored by coastal elites and promulgated by media, Hollywood, and popular culture is an anathema to Middle America, especially its strange disconnect between affluence and the mandate for purportedly progressive equality. Moralistic lectures from wealthy people are not a way to win over the working classes. Rants by Hollywood celebrities and racialist sermons by would-be DNC chairs will not win over 51 percent of the voters in swing states. The twin agents of progressive dogma, the media and the university, are themselves under financial duress, must recalibrate, and have lost support from half the country.

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BOOKS, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Meltdown at the EPA And not the nuclear kind: The agency’s junk-science promoters are flipping out. By Julie Kelly

By on January 31st, 2017

In his recently released and timely book, Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA, author Steve Milloy says this about the Environmental Protection Agency:

The EPA has over the course of the last 20 years marshaled its vast and virtually unchallenged power into an echo chamber of deceptive science, runaway regulations and fatally flawed research derived from unethical human experiments. The EPA’s conduct runs the gamut from subtle statistical shenanigans to withholding key scientific data, from seeking to rubberstamp baseless research data to illegally spraying diesel exhaust up the noses of unsuspecting children and other vulnerable populations.

Milloy, who runs the website JunkScience.com, has chronicled the scientific and bureaucratic abuse at the EPA for two decades, and he is thrilled by President Trump’s plans to finally reform the EPA. “I can think of no agency that has done more pointless harm to the U.S. economy than the EPA — all based on junk science, if not out-and-out science fraud,” Milloy told me. “I am looking forward to President Trump’s dramatically shrinking the EPA by entirely overhauling how the remaining federal EPA uses science.”

It looks like the EPA will be the agency hardest hit by the Trump sledgehammer. For eight years, President Obama used the agency as his de facto enforcer of environmental policies he couldn’t pass in Congress even when it was controlled by his own party. If Obama was the climate-change bully, then the EPA was his toady, issuing one regulation after another aimed at imaginary polluters who were allegedly causing global warming. Jobs were lost, companies were bankrupted, and an untold amount of economic growth was stymied out of fear of reprisals from this rogue agency. The courts halted many of the EPAs most overreaching and unlawful policies initiated by Obama — such as the Clean Water Rule and Clean Power Rule, two regulations aimed at farmers and coal producers. Unsurprisingly, people in these sectors voted heavily for Trump.

Trump officials and Congress are ready to make major changes in the EPA. A leaked memo written by Trump’s EPA transition team details how the new administration wants to tackle shoddy science at the agency. The memo asserts that the EPA should not be funding scientific research, and it must make any data publicly available for independent scientists to review. It also said that the agency must eliminate conflicts of interest and bias from the science advisory process.

The administration also put a freeze on most contracts and grants, pending further review by incoming staff. A good chunk of the EPA’s $8.3 billion budget is spent on grants to universities and units of government; its 2017 budget for state- and tribal-assistant grants was nearly $3.3 billion. The agency also has nearly $6.4 billion in outstanding contractual obligations to dozens of companies across the country, dating back to 2001. These will get much-needed scrutiny over the next several months, and Milloy insists it’s a necessary step:

The EPA uses tax dollars to fund its friends and allies, who tend to be political activists and “political” scientists. There has been no effective oversight of the EPA because Republicans have lacked the numbers and often the will to challenge the all-powerful EPA.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is It a ‘Muslim Ban’? Trump’s goal is not to exclude Muslims from our country; it is to exclude sharia supremacists, a significant subset of Muslims. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on January 31st, 2017

President Trump’s temporary ban on entry into the U.S. by various categories of aliens has caused a firestorm. That owes in part to the rash implementation of perfectly legal restrictions, but the hysteria is out of proportion to the minimal harm actually done.

One of the most dismaying parts of the debate has been the banter over whether Trump has imposed a “Muslim Ban.”

It is no surprise, of course, that Islamists — along with their friends and stooges on both sides of the political aisle — have used the opportunity to agitate and hand-wring over the specter of America “at war with Islam.” That, after all, has been page-one of their playbook for a generation.

There has also, however, been indignation on the other side, from Trump defenders denying that the executive order (EO) is in any way a “Muslim ban.” Time after time this weekend, right-of-center news outlets and commentators could be found defying their guests and counterparts to find the word “Muslim” or “Islam” in the EO. I sympathize with the frustration. The EO is clearly not a ban on all Muslims, or even of any specific Muslim. Since the other side is slanderously suggesting otherwise, there is an irresistible urge to seize on anything that proves them wrong.

Yet the only reason there is an EO is the threat posed by sharia-supremacism, which we inexactly refer to as “radical Islam.” You can’t have radical Islam without Islam. Therefore, the people the EO seeks to exclude are, of necessity, Muslims — not all Muslims, of course, but a significant subset of them nonetheless.

Trump got to the EO (which is a temporary stop on the way to a more refined policy) by starting — during his campaign — with the proposal of a temporary categorical ban on all Muslims. I highlight temporary because it is important. Trump never took the position that all Muslims outside the U.S. should be banned from our country for all time. He recognized the need to separate our Muslim friends from our radical Islamic enemies. He was groping for a way to do that while protecting the country.

For decades, Washington has been suicidally unwilling to target our radical Islamic enemies for fear of offending Muslims in general. Trump’s more security-minded approach — which many Americans outside Washington regard as common sense — was to call a temporary halt to the admission of Muslim aliens until the government could figure out an effective way to screen out Islamists from pro-constitutional Muslims who would be an asset to our country.

During the campaign, then, Trump asked Rudy Giuliani — the former New York City mayor and renowned federal prosecutor — to help him develop a policy that would solve this dilemma. Rudy then put together a team of advisers, of which I was a member, to work the problem. Trump’s proposals consequently evolved away from a coarse categorical ban, adopting instead a threat-based approach that would rely on vetting rather than banning, and that would target the places where the threat is most prevalent.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Hillary May Give President Trump a Second Term The Clintons aren’t done damaging the Democrats. Daniel Greenfield

By on January 31st, 2017

When all the campaign booze was downed and the last “I’m With Her” balloons were popped, bleary Democrat hacks rose from stained couches to try and explain the election to the rest of their party.

Two explanations made the rounds like the last champagne bottle for a victory that never came.

Hillary was a bad candidate. Her shady financial dealings made her untrustworthy. The more she tried to appeal to everyone, the less she appealed to anyone. She was better at hitting up big donors at glitzy parties than at interacting with working class voters. And the huge campaign machine they financed was no substitute for voter excitement.

Hillary was a historic candidate who would be sitting in the Oval Office right now if it hadn’t been for the FBI and the Russians. President Trump is illegitimate and must be impeached. Hillary was not defeated by her flaws. Instead she was a wonderful leader who was stymied by a rigged election.

The first explanation was championed by the Sandernistas of the far left. Their case was straightforward. Hillary lost because she was a bad candidate. Bernie would have won. The Democrats needed to move forward by burying Hillary’s machine and replacing it with the even more radical Bernie left.

But the Clinton machine had no interest in being buried.

The Clintons are not just two greedy politicians. They’re a brand and an industry. The huge sums of money they raised went to subsidize a whole network of loyalists. And then there were the many friends who had gotten jobs based on the strength of their connections to Clintonworld.

It wasn’t just about the S.S. Hillary sinking into the cold waters of Chesapeake Bay. Hillary’s defeat endangered the positions of all her friends who had schemed, plotted and broken the rules to get her this far; the leaders of Democrat outfits in states across the country, bundlers who threw a lot of other people’s money into a giant hole and lobbyists who got by on the strength of their Clinton connections.

That $1.2 billion campaign cost was the tip of the iceberg. Billions had been plowed into Clintonworld.

They couldn’t and wouldn’t accept the blame for backing a bad candidate. So they lied. They insisted that she hadn’t lost. Hillary had been illegitimately denied the White House by a vast conspiracy.

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BOOKS, MOVIES AND TELEVISION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Kermit Gosnell, America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer A riveting new book tells his disturbing story. Mark Tapson

By on January 31st, 2017

Masked by innocuous language like “pro-choice” and “reproductive care,” and protected by a media conspiracy of silence, the grim reality of abortion rarely surfaces in our cultural awareness, as it did with the recent undercover videos exposing Planned Parenthood’s moral vacuum. But a new book about the chilling crimes of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, America’s most prolific serial killer, highlights that ugly reality in an even more horrifying but compelling fashion.

Part true-crime investigation, part social commentary, part courtroom drama, and part journey into the banality of evil, Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer was written by investigative journalists and filmmakers Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, well-known for their controversial documentaries FrackNation and Not Evil Just Wrong, as well as a play called Ferguson drawn entirely from testimony about the shooting of Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson. The husband-and-wife team have also miraculously crowdfunded a feature film based on the Gosnell story (it raised more money than any film project in Indiegogo history), directed by conservative actor and Twitter gadfly Nick Searcy (Justified), with the screenplay written by novelist and political commentator Andrew Klavan.

McElhinney begins the book with a confession that she had “never trusted or liked pro-life activists”; she resented the “emotional manipulation” of their demonstrations – until she began researching the Gosnell story, a process so “brutal” that at times she wept and prayed at her computer, not only over Gosnell’s evil but over “the reality of abortion” even when it’s performed properly and legally. Writing the book changed her dramatically, and it’s not an overstatement to say that reading this book will have the same effect on many readers as well.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell might still be butchering babies today if it weren’t for the dedication of a Philadelphia narcotics investigator named Jim Wood who followed up a lead about Gosnell’s lucrative illegal prescription scheme. The lead led to a raid on Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society abortion clinic in February, 2010, where investigators discovered shockingly unsanitary conditions and incompetent, untrained assistants, as well as improperly medicated post-abortion patients sleeping or sitting together under bloodstained blankets, a few in need of hospitalization. The procedure room was even filthier. Fetal remains were found throughout, in empty water and milk jugs, cat food containers, and orange juice bottles with the necks cut off. One cupboard held five jars containing baby feet, which Gosnell apparently severed and kept for his own amusement.

Unfazed by the presence of the FBI, Dr. Gosnell proceeded to perform an abortion in the middle of the raid. When he was done, Gosnell sat down with the investigators and ate dinner while still wearing torn, bloody surgical gloves (his staff later reported that Gosnell normally ate during his abortions). He pointed out one of the cats that roamed the clinic, which reeked of cat urine, and casually said it had killed 200 mice there. The only time his cool, casual demeanor slipped was when he realized that the staff were telling detectives about his habit of manipulating ultrasound readings to falsify fetal ages, in order to perform late-term abortions well after the state’s legal limit. Detectives also would later learn that Gosnell’s practices included killing babies that were born alive by plunging scissors into the backs of their necks and snipping the spinal cords.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Challenges the Internationalist Order What the hysterical response of the opposition tells us. Bruce Thornton

By on January 31st, 2017

A job begun is half done, as the Romans used to say. Restoring our nation’s pride in its exceptionalism, and keeping our government’s obligation to put our country’s interests and security first, is job number one for the new president. After just one week in office, President Trump has made a good start at dismantling the internationalist order that for nearly a century has tried to weaken and subordinate national sovereignty and identity to globalist institutions. The hysterical response of the global elites and this country’s fellow-travelers tells us Trump is drawing blood.

Trump’s executive orders and comments on securing our southern border, renegotiating NAFTA, and banning refugees from jihadist-infested countries––from a list drawn up during the Obama administration by the way–– drew the usual blustering dudgeon. Mexico’s complaints about Trump’s comments were laughably hypocritical. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto said, “Mexico does not believe in walls.” Of course they don’t believe in their northern border because Mexico uses illegal immigration into the U.S. to get rid of people for whom they have no jobs or opportunities, and from whom they secure $25 billion a year in remittances, more than the revenues from the sale of oil.

But the last border you want to try to cross illegally is Mexico’s southern border, notorious not for any wall, but for the brutality, including torture and rape, inflicted on those caught. Even Mexican-Indian citizens are apprehended and abused as suspected illegal aliens from Central America. This animus against immigrants is no surprise, given the harsh protections of citizenship enshrined in Mexico’s constitution, which makes illegal entry a felony. And there are numerous draconian restrictions on legal immigrants, such as prohibitions on owning property and serving in government or the military. Or consider Article 33, which states, “The Federal Executive shall have the exclusive power to compel any foreigner whose remaining he may deem inexpedient to abandon the national territory immediately and without the necessity of previous legal action.” Compare that with the extensive legal protections for even criminal illegal aliens in the U.S. The Mexican president is merely mouthing globalist pieties in order to serve his own country’s national interests.

The same hypocrisy is evident in the mainly European complaints about Trump’s moratorium on immigration from certain countries. Last week foreign immigrants from such places who had been detained at airports were blessed with restraining orders by two federal judges in Virginia and New York. The ACLU applauded this slap-down of Trump’s “unconstitutional Muslim ban,” a willful distortion of the plain text of the executive order. And as a globalist outfit congenitally hostile to its own country, the ACLU seems to think there is a Constitutional “civil liberty” for anybody from anywhere to enter the U.S.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

You’re Fired! Trump fires insubordinate acting AG Sally Yates and restores law and order at the Justice Department. Matthew Vadum

By on January 31st, 2017

President Trump last night fired the insubordinate acting Attorney General Sally Yates after she ordered federal prosecutors to ignore Trump’s lawful emergency executive order restricting travel and immigration from Islamic terrorist-infested nations.

The Yates termination may foreshadow a major house-cleaning at the U.S. Department of Justice. That agency is overrun by left-wing careerists who have no respect for the rule of law and who operate under the legally and morally grotesque assumption that aliens, including suspected terrorists, ought to enjoy all the same rights as U.S. citizens.

Yates “has betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States,” Trump said in a press release. “This order was approved as to form and legality by the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel.”

He called Yates “an Obama Administration appointee who is weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration.”

“It is time to get serious about protecting our country,” Trump continued. “Calling for tougher vetting for individuals travelling from seven dangerous places is not extreme. It is reasonable and necessary to protect our country.”

Last night President Trump also relieved acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Daniel Ragsdale of his duties. No reason for the decision had been reported at press time. The new acting ICE director is Thomas D. Homan who has been executive associate director of ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) since 2013.

When the U.S. Senate was considering Yates’s nomination for deputy attorney general in 2015, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama), whose nomination as attorney general is pending in the Senate, made his opposition known. According to Politico, Sessions “urged his colleagues to defeat Yates” objecting “to what he said was her involvement in defending the federal government against a lawsuit 26 states have filed challenging unilateral actions Obama took in November to grant millions of illegal immigrants quasi-legal status and work permits.” Sessions described the Obama actions as “presidential overreach.”

Hours before Trump ended Yates’s employment, Yates took the extraordinary step of directing Justice Department attorneys to refuse to defend Trump’s executive order in court.

“I am responsible for ensuring that the positions we take in court remain consistent with this institution’s solemn obligation to always seek justice and stand for what is right,” she wrote in a letter to lawyers at the Department of Justice. “At present, I am not convinced that the defense of the executive order is consistent with these responsibilities nor am I convinced that the executive order is lawful.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Palestine-born Scholar of Islam’s Advice for President Trump (video)

By on January 31st, 2017

Dear Mr President,

Please let me address to you this message as a Christian with a Palestinian origin living in Switzerland. I am an expert on Arab and Islamic law, a field that I taught at various universities in Italy, France and Switzerland, and on which I published more than forty books, including an Arabic edition, an English translation and a French translation of the Koran in chronological order.

It is the duty of each of us to support the efforts of our leaders towards a better society and to wish them success in fulfilling their obligations.

The society, as a statue, has two legs: the public authority, and the scholars who have the knowledge. The public authority executes, and the scholars enlighten the public authority.

When an epidemic occurs, it is necessary that scholars are able to identify it … But still they must have been trained and are free to express themselves. Then the scholars must inform the public authority in order to take the necessary measures to counter this epidemic.

Your country, like Europe, the region where I come from, and the world are facing the rise of violence in particular by various Islamic terrorist groups. This violence is one of the causes of immigrant waves breaking on the shores of Europe, the US and other countries. In your statements, you highlighted these two issues.

You described “radical Islamic terrorism” as an “evil” unseen before, adding that it should be just “eradicated off the face of the earth”: “we gonna end it. It’s time. It’s time right now to end it”. But you have not said how you will achieve this goal. You also called Angela Merkel’s open door policy to refugees a “catastrophic mistake”, saying that Berlin, instead of hosting refugees, would have done better to advocate more for the creation of no-fly zones in Syria in order to protect the local population from the bombing. “The gulf states should have had to pay for them. After all, they have money like hardly anyone else has”.

Let me give you my humble opinion on these two issues.

Regarding radical Islamic terrorism, it is certainly necessary to fight it with weapons, but weapons alone will not suffice. It is also particularly important to eliminate the ideology on which radical Islamic terrorism is based, namely the Islamic ideology. To take adequate action we must call things by their name.

The radical Islamic terrorism is based on the Koran, the Sunnah of Muhammad and the teachings of Islam. Radical Islamic terrorist groups are only putting into practice what universities, Islamic centers, schools and mosques have been teaching for fourteen centuries in all Muslim countries, and even in Western countries, including yours. Egyptian journalists and intellectuals continue to denounce this teaching, which is the source of terrorism that destabilizes Egypt. This teaching is conveyed by mosques, schools and universities of Al-Azhar, the most important religious institution in the Sunni world. Without a radical change of this teaching, it is impossible to end the radical Islamic terrorism. But how to proceed?

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Latest Applicant to be “The Muslim Voice” by Denis MacEoin

By on January 31st, 2017

Secularism may be accepted in a Christian society but it can never enjoy a general acceptance in an Islamic society.” — Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

The acceptance of a legislation formulated by humans means a preference of the humans’ limited knowledge and experiences to the divine guidance: “Say! Do you know better than Allah?” (2:140)…. For this reason, the call for secularism among Muslims is atheism and a rejection of Islam. Its acceptance as a basis for rule in place of Shari’ah is downright riddah [apostasy]….” — Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

We Muslims believe that Allah is the sole Creator and Sustainer of the Worlds…. If they do not [observe His injunctions and to judge according to them], then they commit kufr [unbelief], aggression, and transgression.” — Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

There have never been any effective democracies in the Islamic world.

The idea that human beings can replace God as legislators is obnoxious to classical Islamic thought and to modern Islamist convictions. Men and women do not choose how to live: God has been there first.

Several of the ECFR’s own pronouncements indicate an unwillingness to compromise with European norms.

“The Shari’ah is for all times to come, equally valid under all circumstances. The Muslim insistence on the immutability of the Shari’ah is highly puzzling to many people, but any other view would be inconsistent with its basic concept.” — Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

The European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) plays an important role in the Fiqh al-‘Aqalliyyat (“Jurisprudence for Minorities”) world. It is now based in Dublin, having been founded in London in 1999 by the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe. Apart from issuing fatwas (principally those of leading Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi), it aims to supervise the education in Europe of local imams, to bring together Muslim scholars living in Europe, to resolve issues that arise on the continent (and UK) while operating with strict respect for shari’a law (which implies there should be no compromise), and to establish itself as an approved authority wherever Muslims live as minorities. This latter aim would suggest that the ECFR might one day possess an authority that would override that of local and national shari’a councils, and its members would expect to be the first and perhaps only voice to which parliaments and parliamentary bodies would lend an ear in their deliberations on how to treat their Muslim minority communities.

Despite the claim of the ECFR and other bodies involved in guidance for Muslims living outside Islamic jurisdiction to work towards a modus vivendi with Western governments, laws and cultural norms, the members of the ECFR nevertheless tend to approach this challenge in a way that can make the rapprochement problematic. Two matters engage much of their attention, namely secularism and democracy. Al-Qaradawi has spoken and written clearly on these. In one of his books, he separates Christian and Muslim beliefs:

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Palestinians’ Fort of Torture by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on January 31st, 2017

Because it is not Israelis who are perpetrating the abuse, the reports are ho-hum to these journalists.

Hamas is an extremist Islamist movement that does not consider itself obliged to abide by international laws and treaties concerning basic human rights. Indeed, the concept of human rights simply does not exist under Hamas in the Gaza Strip, where public freedoms, including freedom of speech and of the press, are non-existent.

In 2013, two Palestinian detainees reportedly died of torture in the Jericho Central Prison.

A London-based human rights organization reported 3,175 cases of human rights violations, including arbitrary detentions, by the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces in the West Bank during 2016. Hundreds of those detained include university students and lecturers, as well as schoolteachers. During the same year, the PA security forces also detained 27 Palestinian journalists.

Unfortunately for them, they are not going on hunger strikes in an Israeli prison, where such actions garner the immediate interest of the mainstream media.

Many are willing to tell their stories. But who is willing to listen? Not Western governments, human rights organizations and journalists. Most of them seek evil in Israel, and Israel alone.

As Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas and his cronies occupied themselves in the past two weeks issuing warnings to President Trump against moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, reports resurfaced concerning the brutal conditions and human rights violations in a Palestinian prison in the West Bank.

These reports, however, were buried, along with the abuse, in favor of attention to rhetoric directed against the Trump Administration. Anything uttered by Abbas and senior PA officials regarding the possible transfer of the US embassy to Jerusalem made it to the headlines of major newspapers and TV networks around the world.

At one point, it actually appeared as if the mainstream media in the West was interested in highlighting and inflating these statements in a bid to pressure Trump into abandoning the idea of moving the embassy to Jerusalem. Western journalists ran to provide platforms for any Palestinian official interested in threatening the Trump Administration.

The threats included warnings that the transfer of the embassy to Jerusalem would “destroy the peace process,” “jeopardize regional and international security” and “plunge the entire region into anarchy and violence.” Some Palestinian officials went so far as to state that such a move would be considered an “assault on all Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims.” They also threatened to “revoke” Palestinian recognition of Israel’s right to exist.

Regrettably, as Palestinian officials from across the political spectrum joined forces to broadcast sensational headlines in the mainstream media around the world, the reports about torture of Palestinian detainees in a PA prison failed to attract the interest of the many journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The torture that takes place in PA-controlled prisons and detention centers is not new.

Over the past few years, Palestinians have become accustomed to hearing horror stories about what is happening within the walls of these structures. Yet, because it is not Israelis who are perpetrating the abuse, the reports are ho-hum to these journalists.

A Palestinian who points a finger at Israel is guaranteed a sympathetic ear among journalists. When a Palestinian complains of torture at the hands of Palestinian interrogators or security officers, it is seen as just more of the same. Worse: It is seen as “Oh those Arabs, what can anyone expect from them?”

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