RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13842/palestinians-arrest-torture-journalists

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, a body dominated by Fatah loyalists, condemned the arrest of Hazem Nasser and called for his immediate release. The syndicate pointed out that Nasser had been summoned for interrogation by the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces several times in the past few weeks despite the fact that he did not commit any crime.

In the world of the PA and Hamas, the only “good” journalists are those who report negatively about Israel. Independent journalists therefore find themselves forced to seek work in non-Palestinian media organizations, including some in Israel. Even then, these journalists, especially those who live under the PA and Hamas, engage in massive self-censorship.

What is hard to understand are the continued closed mouths of the international community and media towards this ongoing assault on the freedom of the media in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Had Nasser and Abu Arafeh been arrested by the Israeli authorities, their “plight” would have been splashed over headlines across the globe.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank is continuing its unremitting security crackdown on Palestinian journalists, particularly on those who are not affiliated with Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction. Scores of journalists have been arrested or summoned by the PA in the West Bank on a regular basis in the past few years. In the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, Palestinian journalists are facing a similar campaign of intimidation and harassment.

In the past few days, another two journalists, Hazem Nasser and Amer Abu Arafeh, were arrested by the PA security forces — and not for the first time. Nasser, who is from the city of Tulkarem, and Abu Arafeh, who is from Hebron, have, in fact, become “frequent visitors” of PA detention centers and interrogation rooms.

The incarceration of Nasser and Abu Arafeh brings to 16 the number of Palestinian journalists who have been arrested or summoned for interrogation by the PA security forces in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip just since the beginning of this year.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/06/must

Britain, in recent days, has had a rare distraction from its seemingly endless Brexit debate. The distraction, however, has not been an altogether welcome one. It involves the case of Shamima Begum, one of a number of girls who left their school in Bethnal Green in London in 2015 to go and join ISIS.

Back then, in 2015, the story of the Bethnal Green schoolgirls was headline news. Many British people were genuinely shocked that anyone—let alone young women at the start of their lives—would find ISIS’s promise of a Caliphate so alluring that they would leave the comforts of their friends, family, and country in the UK to go to join the group. There was much national debate about this. Various people, including some of the girls’ family members, blamed the British police and security services for not stopping the girls from leaving the UK. Ironically, the people who blamed the police—including the lawyer representing the girls’ families—were often precisely the same people as those who had spent previous years urging Muslims in Britain not to cooperate with the British police. How exactly the British police were either to blame, or to find any way to “win” in such a situation, was never explained. It was just one of many paradoxes thrown up in these circumstances.