I was going to ask whether the Palestinians will be using their US-supplied guns and bullets for the execution. But apparently the sentence is death by hanging, so that doesn’t work:
A Palestinian Authority military court on Tuesday sentenced a Hevron Arab to death by hanging for the crime of selling land to Jews in Judea and Samaria, the Bethlehem-based Ma’an news agency reported. The three-member judicial panel heard the case last week and handed down its verdict and conviction on Tuesday. Dozens of Arabs have been executed in the past for collaborating with Israel by selling land to Jews, but the court’s ruling is the first time the PA officially has handed down a guilty verdict of treason for the crime… Seven Arabs were executed in the [1996]… More executions took place the following years, and one Arab, Mohammed Abu al-Hawa, was tortured and murdered in 2006 for allegedly selling an apartment building in Jerusalem to Jews.
State Department press releases routinely – and proudly – point out that the US is “the single largest national donor to the Palestinian people.” And while it’s true that a lot of it ends up in Hamas’s coffers via USAID and UNRWA, isn’t it nice to know that some of it is getting to these pathological West Bank bigots:
The United States plans to expand a program to bolster Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s security forces in the occupied West Bank, the general in charge of training and equipping them said Monday. “We have plans to train at least three more battalions before this time next year,” Lieutenant General Keith Dayton told Reuters. Each battalion has about 500 members.
In unrelated news, sophistication-enamored NYT tool Roger Cohen just published another column accusing Israel of being a racist apartheid state. This time it’s ostensibly because Israelis only let Jews use West Bank roads, a statement that would still be straightforwardly false even if it wasn’t particularly ironic given the PA’s court-enforced anti-Jewish policies.
But it does reinforce the anti-Israel narrative that Cohen and his friends in the informal Iran Lobby have been pushing. So there’s that.
References and previously after the jump…
References:
* Abbas Responds To $700M In State Dept Aid By Letting Hamas Determine PA Security Forces [MR]
* PA Court: Hang Arab for Selling Land to Jews [A7]
* U.S. aid for the Palestinians announced [Obama Mideast Monitor]
* Broken aid system to Palestinians [CT Blog]
* U.S. plans to expand program for Abbas’s forces [Reuters]
* More From Cohen’s "Sophisticated" Middle East [CAMERA]
* Roger Cohen: Obama Should Sell Out Israel To Appease Iran [MR]
* Op-Ed Columnist – Clinton’s Mideast Pirouette [NYT]
* Roger Cohen Sinks [CAMERA]
* The “Iran Lobby” Moves Into The White House [MR]
Previously:
* White House Pushing Palestinian Unity Government, Says It Will Let Them Fund Hamas
* Now They’re Using Hospital Rooms As Torture Chambers
* Seriously: What Exactly Would The Palestinians Have to Do to Lose European Aid?
