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In this mailing:
- Bassam Tawil: Palestinians Beat
Female Journalists; World "Sees No Evil"
- A. Z. Mohamed: Blasphemy Laws in
Pakistan
by Bassam Tawil • July 3, 2018 at
5:00 am
- Had an Israeli
soldier merely shouted at these female journalists,
representatives of Western human rights organizations and
major newspapers would have banged on their doors long ago,
demanding that they justify physically abusing peaceful women
who were just doing their job. It is harder, however, to make
sense of the behavior of the foreign media and international
human rights groups, who essentially champion Abbas's fiefdom
by ignoring its brutality.
- The truth is that
the Palestinian Authority is a body that has long been
functioning as a dictatorship that suppresses freedom of
speech and imposes a reign of terror and intimidation on
Palestinian journalists and critics.
- It is only a
question of time before a Western journalist is beaten on the
streets of a Palestinian city. When that happens, the
international media and human rights groups can look to
themselves and their own biased and unprofessional behavior
for answers.
A
Palestinian Authority police officer raises his baton as he
approaches Majdoleen Hassona in Tulkarem. (Image source: Mohamad
Kheiry/Facebook video screenshot)
Two female Palestinian journalists were beaten
during protests in the West Bank in the past week. The two women,
Lara Kan'an and Majdoleen Hassona, were assaulted by Palestinian
Authority security officers while covering Palestinian
demonstrations calling on President Mahmoud Abbas to lift the
economic sanctions he imposed last year on the Gaza Strip.
The physical assaults on Kan'an and Hassona are seen
by Palestinians as part of the Palestinian Authority's continued
effort to silence critics and intimidate journalists who fail to
"toe the line." The beatings, which took place separately
in the West Bank cities of Nablus and Tulkarem, mark a new high in
the Palestinian leadership's crackdown on pubic freedoms:
assaulting an Arab woman on the street is considered a humiliation
of the highest order to her and her clan.
by A. Z. Mohamed • July 3, 2018
at 4:00 am
- Many extremist
Muslims are aiming at even more government submission to
sharia through intimidation and terror.
- Christians and
Ahmadis continue to raise concerns regarding the government's
failure to safeguard minority rights, as well as the government's
persistent discrimination against religious minorities.
- Pakistan is also
where Muslim militants, such as the Pakistani Taliban, carry
out assassinations and terrorist attacks. It seems no one is
there to stop them.
On May 6,
Pakistan's Minister of the Interior, Ahsan Iqbal (pictured at
left), was shot and wounded by an Islamist extremist during a rally
in Punjab. (Image source: USAID Pakistan/Wikimedia Commons)
On May 6, Ahsan Iqbal, Pakistan's Minister of the
Interior, was shot during a rally in his own constituency, in the
province of Punjab. Fortunately, he survived the attack, but the
bullet in his abdomen could not be removed. "The bullet lodged
in my body... will keep reminding me of the impending need to
remove the seeds of hatred sowed in the country," Iqbal said.
An initial report suggested that the main suspect,
Abid Hussain, 21, had carefully planned the attack; recently,
Pakistan's Anti-Terrorism Court issued an 8-day judicial remand of
four possible accomplices.
According to other reports, Hussain is linked to
Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) -- also known as Tehreek-e-Labbaik
Ya Rasool Allah ("Movement of the Prophet's Followers").
TLP is a new Sunni extremist party known for aggressively calling
for enforcing Pakistan's blasphemy laws, which can carry the death
penalty, and for opposing any relaxation of these laws.
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