Mr. Ambassador - Such an impertinence by a foreign envoy is hardly thinkable.

The former PA security man makes it clear that the intention is to inflict unbearable pain while leaving a minimum of identifiable traces... The whole of the ambassador's piece, like its opening, rings with the unqualified confidence of old-time apologies for the Soviet regime.

Malcolm Lowe..
Gatestone Institute..
01 May '13..

What if the Israeli ambassador in Britain were to write an article in a major British daily, showering praise upon the Irish police? And demanding changes in British policy toward Ireland? Such an impertinence by a foreign envoy is hardly thinkable.

Yet the converse recently occurred in Israel. The British ambassador published an op-ed on Ynet, the internet site of Israel's biggest daily, in which he praised the Palestinian police force and its British trainers. Israel, he urged, must give that force more scope for its activities, while the world must pour in more money. Even more incredible, his piece appeared eleven days after the British Daily Mail published a major article alleging that the Palestinian police, trained by UK policemen and MI6, were engaged in the systematic torture of suspects.

The Mail's Internet site has over a hundred million visitors a month, more than any other newspaper in the world. Some of its articles get hundreds of comments and these comments may attract thousands of likes and dislikes. Were the ambassador and his Foreign Office bosses aware of that major news source? If not, they had failed to do their homework. If they were, then the ambassador's article was a grotesque error of judgment and good taste.

The Daily Mail article is comprehensive and specific, accompanied by artists' representations of the methods of torture employed. The headline spells it out in detail: "Hooded, hanged and left in agony for hours on end: Palestinian security chief tells how he has tormented 'suspects' with MI6's knowledge... and reveals how Britain helps pay for it with £33m foreign aid." There are drawings of victims suspended from the ceiling and walls or bound on their backs across chairs.

The newspaper's informant, a former PA security man, makes it clear that the intention is to inflict unbearable pain while leaving a minimum of identifiable traces."I'm not going to lie to you," he said. "Torture is used. We have to protect our people." Only, it has become more refined. "In the Nineties, we used to torture them badly. We beat them hard and we made them like a car that doesn't function. But we were defending our home, the region and the rest of the world. I am happy it was justified."

He told the reporter that now "the preferred method is termed 'shabeh' – the hooding and tying of the prisoner in a variety of agonising positions for up to eight hours," a method that "takes considerable skill." As the PA security man put it: "You have to deal with it as if you were playing a guitar. Each case has its own speciality."

The Hamas terrorist regime has a criminal system and (gasp) it's abusive

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
03 October '12..

Let the record show that a Human Rights Watch report on Hamas "justice" was issued today (Wednesday). It's downloadable from the HRW site [here].

In its brief summary, entitled "Human Rights Watch reports on ‘severe’ Hamas abuse of Palestinians" [Associated Press, September 3, 2012], AP says that "Hamas’ security forces in Gaza are committing severe abuses, including torture of detainees, arrests without warrants, forced confessions, unfair trials and mock executions". Egypt's Al-Ahram expands the list of Hamas abuses, adding

arbitrary arrests, and failure to inform relatives of the whereabouts of detainees

arrest, abuse and torture of lawyers

military courts are used to try civilians

several prisoners were put to death after military trial verdicts though there was "credible evidence they had been tortured".

In the past six hours, there have been similar reports in most of the major news channels, as you would expect: "Torture part of Gaza justice system" [Brisbane Times‎]; "Gazans face 'serious abuses' in criminal justice system" [BBC World]; "Hamas slammed over 'torture, unfair trials' [France 24] and so on. The embarrassing charges against the thuggish Hamas regime don't seem to have been reported at all by any of the major online Iranian news services. Not ABNA, not FARS News Agency, not Islamic Republic News Agency, not Tehran Times. We're open to readers' suggestions as to why... but we're not offering prizes.

Link: http://thisongoingwar.blogspot.co.il/2012/10/3-oct-12-hamas-terrorist-regime-has.html

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Palestine's Missing Critics

Where's the outrage for Ramallah's atrocities?

Wall Street Journal
02 November 09

Israel's harshest critics claim to champion the rights of Palestinians. So we're curious about the fallout, or lack thereof, from revelations that the Palestinian Authority regularly brutalizes its own in the West Bank while enjoying a steady flow of dollars and euros.

Senior PA official Haitham Arar was quoted in the Daily Mail more than a week ago openly discussing the abuses. That follows a Mail On Sunday report in January that detailed the Authority's regular use of beatings, whippings, attacks with electrical drills, and other methods of torture doled out to anyone seen threatening the authority of Fatah, the party of President Mahmoud Abbas. Murder and rape are also commonplace.

As Middle East analyst Tom Gross points out, the only news here is that a Western newspaper has bothered to write about it. At least some ink is spilled documenting Hamas's blunt methods, but much less has been made of Fatah's abuses since Yasser Arafat took over most of the territory in 1993. What's more, Western governments support the internecine violence with ever-increasing aid. As of Sept. 15, the European Union had delivered €268 million to the Authority this year, and in July the U.S. extended an additional $200 million.

The money will not stop now that Ramallah is no longer trying to hide the mistreatment. Westminster's one response has been to quietly send officers to the West Bank to train Authority forces on how not to torture prisoners.

So here's the state-of-play in the department of moral outrage. When Britain is accused of abetting U.S. interrogations, lawsuits, investigations, and threats to try Tony Blair for war crimes quickly follow. When Israel attacks Hamas in order to end rocket launches on its soil, it risks a session before the International Criminal Court. But when the West funnels billions to a Palestinian government whose abuses are brazen and ongoing, there is mainly silence.
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British police to tackle UK-funded torturers on the West Bank

Tom Gross
NRO Blog
28 October 09

The Mail on Sunday (which is the Sunday sister paper of Britain’s Daily Mail) reports that:

The British government is sending police and intelligence officers to the West Bank to try to stop a wave of brutal torture by Palestinian security forces funded by UK taxpayers. Their mission is to set up and train a new “internal affairs” department with sweeping powers to investigate abuse and bring torturers to justice.

On Saturday a senior official from the Palestinian Authority, which runs the West Bank and its security agencies, admitted that torture, beatings and extra-judicial killings have been rife for the past two years, with hundreds of torture allegations and at least four murders in custody, the most recent in August. British detectives will also train the Palestinian police and Preventive Security forces in how to question suspects without torturing them.Britain spends £20 million a year funding the forces responsible for the abuse.

In the West Bank city of Nablus, Nasser al-Shaer, a former academic from Manchester University who was deputy prime minister in the short-lived Hamas Palestinian Authority government elected in 2006, said many of those released from detention in recent months were telling the same story – of torture, including beatings, being suspended from the ceiling, and electric shocks.

Now none of this is new. In spite of what the paper says, it has been continuing not just for the past two years, but since Yasser Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and took over most of the West Bank in 1993. What is new is that a major newspaper (The Mail On Sunday is one of Britain’s highest circulation respected newspapers) is reporting on it.

Of course, the abuse of human rights and use of torture is even worse in other “moderate” Arab countries like Egypt and Jordan, and far worse in non-moderate countries like Syria (which yesterday the European Union eagerly signed an Association Agreement with).

Many Palestinians I know yearn for the days when Israel ruled the West Bank before Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah took over most of the Palestinian-populated territories.

Meanwhile, as Palestinian detainees are being tortured to death in Palestinian Authority jails, Palestinian prisoners (including convicted terrorists) in custody in Israel are studying for Israeli university degrees (at Israeli taxpayers’ expense) and also given cable TV, IPods and dental treatment – but international human rights groups instead criticize the treatment of prisoners in Israel, whose deputy foreign minister and former ambassador to Washington Danny Ayalon narrowly escaped being arrested in Britain for “war crimes” yesterday.

And the world community that routinely and harshly condemns Israel even when Israel hasn’t done anything wrong, has failed to condemn the Katyusha rocket fired from Lebanon which narrowly missed an Israeli town last night.

It is a strange world.