A Palestinian court sentenced a local journalist to a year in jail on Thursday over a picture posted on Facebook that was deemed insulting to President Mahmoud Abbas.
The ruling against Mamdouh Hamamreh, who works for the al-Quds TV channel in Bethlehem, is the second this year in which Palestinians have been given jail terms over caricatures of the president.
Journalists and media watchdogs, saying Hamamreh was only "tagged" in the photo and did not create it, criticized the ruling and curbs on media freedom by the Western-backed Palestinian Authority.
The offending image juxtaposed Abbas beside a similar-looking man who plays the part of a collaborator with French colonial forces in an old Syrian television drama.
One of the supposed “benefits” for the Palestinians of achieving U.N. recognition of statehood in the West Bank and Gaza would be the possibility for the new "state" to submit itself to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC), thereby paving the way for prosecutions of Israeli military personnel and government officials for alleged "war crimes" committed in the territory.
The Palestine Liberation Organization's ambassador to the United States said Tuesday that any future Palestinian state it seeks with help from the United Nations and the United States should be free of Jews.
Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy recently argued at National Review Online that the federal government has reason to investigate Rashid Khalidi, an activist Middle Eastern studies professor at Columbia University. What prompted this?
If Israel and its neighbors are ever to arrive at a stable and genuine peace, Palestinian incitement of hatred –and its predilection for murderous acts – must cease. It is an elementary proposition, and one to which the Palestinian Authority has unambiguously agreed.
“Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton rebuked Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Friday about the state of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, demanding that Israel take immediate steps to show it is interested in renewing efforts to achieve a Middle East peace agreement.
Alan Dershowitz has ventured where very few—if any—on either side of the furor over the Goldstone Report have gone: With his virtuoso lawyer’s searching eye he has combed every word of the 500-some-odd pages, the long appendices, and the 1223 footnotes in pursuit of the evidentiary basis for the report’s conclusions. His verdict—there is none:
The Goldstone Report, when read in full and in context, is much worse than most of its detractors (and supporters) believe. It is far more accusatory of Israel, far less balanced in its criticism of Hamas, far less honest in its evaluation of the evidence, far less responsible in drawing its conclusion, far more biased against Israeli than Palestinian witnesses, and far more willing to draw adverse inferences of intentionality from Israeli conduct and statements than from comparable Palestinian conduct and statements. It is worse than any report previously prepared by any other United Nations agency or human rights group.
It seems the Israeli settlement-freeze scheme, which in its most recent, Obamic, incarnation began to flounder almost as soon as it was born last October, is lingering like an aqueous floater in the mind's eye of Mr. Obama’s Middle East peace envoy, George Mitchell. The other day, exchanging pleasantries with his Arab interlocutors in the Palestinian purlieu of the “proximity talks” he is lately and farcically conducting between the two sides, Mr. Mitchell apparently suggested that “the U.S. views Israel’s measures in the settlements and Jerusalem as ‘illegal’.” Well golly, so much for that moratorium on settlement construction he and the Secretary of State shoved down the Israeli throat, and which was “more than any Israeli government has done before and can help movement toward agreement between the parties!”
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