Less than three hours after Banat, 42, was taken into custody, the PA announced that he had "died after his health deteriorated during the arrest."

Banat's family has called for a neutral international committee to investigate....

The Palestinian government, which is responsible for the killing of Banat and assaults on journalists, political activists, and social media users, is now supposedly trying to beautify its image by joining a UN treaty against torture.

If the PA were really serious about human rights, it would stop arresting, torturing, harassing and intimidating its critics and political rivals. The PA talk about joining the anti-torture treaty is solely aimed at deceiving the international community into believing that Abbas and his government actually care about reforms and human rights.

Senior Fatah official Ahmed Bahar said that any Palestinian who protests against the Palestinian leadership, and not Israel, is a "traitor."

This is the same Palestinian leadership that has told the new US administration that it is keen on resuming the peace process with Israel. While Abbas and senior Palestinian officials are talking about the resumption of the peace process with Israel, they are at the same time urging their people to forget about the killing of the anti-corruption activist and continual attacks on their own citizens, and instead engage in violent confrontations with Israelis.

The simple fact is that there are large, powerful donors to the Biden campaign that have big financial stakes in these green energy companies. It is a wealth transfer to Biden's biggest bundlers, and that is a huge and massive problem.

For those companies with inside connections to the Biden campaign, it is American taxpayer money that is truly "shovel-ready."

Former congressmen and senators, and former US ambassadors are being paid large sums of money by governments such as China, or by firms directly linked to those governments, which do not have America's best interest at heart. They are lobbying in Washington to get their paymasters' voices heard.

If you invest a couple of million dollars, let us say, in lobbying, or you invest a couple of million dollars in campaign contributions, often you can get benefits that are worth ten times that.

For Wall Street and Silicon Valley, the prospect of doing deals in China is mesmerizing. To do those deals in China, as they have learned, you must play nice with the regime, speak well of them, feather their nests.... It is no less tempting for American politicians.... Of greatest concern are the deals that actually advance Chinese state interests.

There is no other way to state this. The only way we can correct this situation is by exposing these people and showing U.S. citizens exactly what they are doing in our society.

[J]ust before the 2020 election, the [New York Times ran a piece by its "media reporter" bragging about their role as gatekeepers that would not pursue the Hunter Biden story.

Turkey is still blackmailing the U.S. (and NATO allies) that it may opt for a Russian fighter jet, the Su-57, for instance, in case it feels threatened by the lack of a new generation fighter aircraft. This is bluffing.

Turkish Air Force generals know too well that switching from NATO-standard aircraft to Russian ones after 70 years is not like changing your American car in favor of a Japanese one. Building a new operational structure, modifying air bases, new repair, service and maintenance systems will be too costly, time consuming and technologically difficult.

Erdoğan's top officials are undermining themselves when they try to convince the public that Turkey's local defense industry is making miracles in fighter jet technology.

In the meantime, fearing further U.S. sanctions, Turkey has suspended plans to activate the S-400 surface-to-air missile system.... This means Ankara paid a good $2.5 billion to Moscow for a system that it probably will never activate.

"This is a sale. We received our money. The Turks can ride the missiles to go to the beach or to carry potatoes with them. It's not our concern." — Aleksey Yerhov, Russia's ambassador to Ankara, mocking Turkey's reluctance to activate the S-400 surface-to-air missile system, onedio.com, July 6, 2020.

Ahmetjan Juma's brother, Mamatjan, suggested that Ahmetjan is being punished simply because he, his brother, works at Radio Free Asia (RFA) as Deputy Director of the Uyghur Service.

The Chinese government has blocked international organizations and journalists from going to the region to conduct an independent investigation.

"My parents told me not to contact my brothers; that if I have anything to say to them or other relatives, just to tell my mother and she will pass the message along to them." — Mamatjan Juma, brother of Ahmetjan Juma, high school principal and a literary translator, sentenced to 14 years in prison after being held for two years of "training" in China's internment camps; interview with Gatestone.

"Intellectuals are the people who can lead the social discourse, guide and educate people about their history, culture and everything about Uyghurs. A nation without its intellectuals would be like a person without its brain." — Mamatjan Juma, interview with Gatestone.

The report, The Uyghur Genocide, states that China bears state responsibility for an ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs, and is in breach of the UN Genocide Convention.

Why is the world -- and particularly the global Muslim community -- largely silent as innocent Uyghurs are destroyed by a brutal, totalitarian regime for the "crime" of having been born a Uyghur?

To start with the CCP has been an instrument for ruthless repression ever since it seized full power in 1949. By best estimates... the many atrocities it led have claimed at least 80 million lives.

Decades of misguided policies in Tibet, Xinjiang, Manchuria and Inner Mongolia have surpassed the worst cases of ethnic repression recorded under successive dynasties.

The CCP started with a handful of self-loathing bourgeois intellectuals who sought power by appealing to a peasantry they hardly knew. A century later, it is led by another handful of self-adulating intellectuals who maintain themselves in power with the support of a new class of wealthy entrepreneurs they find harder and harder to control.

The CCP may be proud of its economic success after Deng Xiaoping's reforms, but it celebrates its centenary with "re-education camps" in Xinjiang (East Turkestan), crackdown in Hong Kong and childish but dangerous imperial gesticulations in neighboring seas.

Happy birthday!

With uncountable thanks to our forefathers and all those who strive each day to preserve the values embodied in the US Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. If we do not protect them, America's allies and the Free World, they will be taken away. We have so much to be thankful for. Very Most Joyous Fourth of July! — All of us at Gatestone.

Erdoğan's government claimed the cargo was humanitarian aid to Turkoman locals in Syria but then filed criminal charges against the editors Cumhuriyet, for being members of a "terrorist organization," espionage and revealing state secrets.... The prosecution asked for life sentences for two Cumhuriyet editors. Since then, Can Dündar, then-editor-in-chief, has been living in Germany in exile.

At the beginning of May, Sedat Peker, a convicted Turkish mob boss and a fierce supporter of Erdoğan -- until now -- began posting videos on social media in which he made uncorroborated accusations of corruption, murder and drug-running against top politicians.

After weeks of silence, Erdoğan... ordered prosecutors and judges to investigate and establish that all of Peker's claims were lies and a smear campaign against his government. Who will trust the independence of a legal probe when the president has already ordered its verdict?

The bigots who promote these petitions, and the useful idiots who sign them, cannot possibly be motivated by a concern for universal human rights. If they were, they would focus on nations with really horrendous human rights records, such as Iran, which hangs gays, China, which imprisons Muslim dissidents, Russia, which murders dissenters, Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women, Syria, which gases its own people, as well as Palestinians, and many other nations that face no external threats.

Israel, on the other hand, faces existential threats, and acts in self-defense. It does more to protect innocent civilians than any country faced with comparable threats. Yet it is the only country that is subject to petitions by teachers unions, faculty senates, student bodies, and other groups....

"Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest." — Thomas L. Friedman.

There is an old joke about a Hitler rally in which the Fuhrer shouts out a rhetorical question: "Who is to blame for all of Germany's evils?" And before the crowd can shout "the Jews," a man in the front row screams out: "The bicycle riders." Hitler stops and turns to the man and asks him, "Why the bicycle riders?" To which the man responds, "Why the Jews?" .... There is no good response.

Therefore, let us stop pretending that these hateful, one sided and mendacious petitions are anything but what they are: anti-Semitic bigotry, pure and simple. History will judge the bigots behind them harshly. So should all decent people today.

German lawmakers said that banning the Hamas flag was aimed at sending "a clear signal" of support "to our Jewish citizens." Others, however, dismissed the ban as an empty gesture aimed at silencing critics of the German government's pro-Islamist foreign policy ahead of upcoming federal elections this September.

"A ban on flags remains a superficial measure if the structures of the associations and parties concerned are not or only insufficiently affected." — Alex Feuerherdt, Mena Watch

"What we have been experiencing in Germany for some time testifies to deep-seated Muslim anti-Semitism. One would have therefore wished that politics would have been active as early as 2015." — Ramin Peymani, German-Iranian author

"Wherever anti-Semites appear, politicians and the media try to place them in the right-wing camp, although time and again it is declared leftists who incite against Israel and urge others not to 'buy from the Jews.' The political lie of mostly right-wing extremist anti-Semitism was told so often that at some point no one raised an objection." — Ramin Peymani, German-Iranian author

"Political leaders in Europe are only gradually waking up from their multicultural daydreams. However, this is less based on the mature realization that one's own policy has failed, rather than due to the pressure of voters who fear for their prosperity and security." — Ramin Peymani, German-Iranian author

Germany's ban of Hamas flags follows a well-established pattern of announcing half-hearted measures to tackle radical Islam in Germany. In particular, the German government has a long track record of hypocrisy on Israel and the Jewish people.

"I told judges not to write death sentences for girls. This is what I said. But they perverted my words and quoted me as saying: Don't execute girls. First marry them for one night and then execute them." — Grand Ayatollah Hussain-Ali Montazeri, theologian and human rights activist, in his diaries.

The Biden administration should understand that Ebrahim Raisi is an extremely dangerous man partially because, from his perspective, anyone who criticizes the Islamic Republic or protests against it is rising against God and his representatives on earth. Whatever his regime does is presumed to be fully justified and rewarded by God because the Islamic Republic is a divine political establishment and all its actions are enforcing God's will on earth.

The Biden administration truly needs to halt talks with the Iranian regime, stop appeasing the ruling mullahs, impose sanctions and hold the Iranian regime accountable for handpicking a mass murderer to be the next president, and most likely, the next Supreme Leader of Iran.

Many [naturalized citizens] have endured the terror of dictatorships, the fear of the secret police, and the destruction of personal liberties. They know from first-hand experience just how extraordinary our nation is.

America is about to observe yet another Fourth of July holiday. We will do so against a backdrop of rancor and political division. Our history suggests this is not unique and we have, in fact, weathered worse. But what has consistently bound our wounds and allowed us to realize our full potential as a democracy is the recognition that patriotism and noble deeds in a land that cherishes freedom remain among the rare pleasures of life meant to be embraced and enjoyed. Celebrate Independence Day this year in the knowledge that we remain "the last best hope of earth."

These [Palestinian] leaders have turned the Palestinian Authority-controlled areas of the West Bank into a police state where political opponents are beaten to death, arrested, tortured and intimidated.

The crackdown was almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media in the West -- until the death of Banat. It was ignored because the perpetrators were not Israeli policemen or soldiers. It was ignored because the media could not find a way to blame Israel for the fact that the Palestinian government was harassing, intimidating and torturing Palestinians.

The silence of the international community and media towards the human rights violations by the Palestinian Authority has prompted Palestinian journalists to make a direct appeal to the European Union to provide them with protection.

The protests... are mainly directed at the Biden administration, whose representatives have recently been courting and searching for ways to cozy up to Abbas and his Fatah cohorts. The message Palestinians are sending to the Biden administration: Stop empowering our brutal, corrupt leaders.

Will the Biden administration and the Western world actually legitimize -- and reward with millions of dollars and possibly even a state – political leaders who brutalize, torture and murder their own journalists and citizens? To gain what? A legacy of America championing a regime like that?

Raisi's election, "engineered to guarantee his victory," looks suspiciously like a ploy by Iran's Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei to terrify the American negotiators into capitulating to Iran's demands even faster and more recklessly, to avoid negotiating with an opponent more uncompromising than the one with whom they are negotiating at present.

The JCPOA is allegedly designed to prevent, or at least postpone, Iran's drive for a nuclear weapons capability along with the means to deliver them. Among the deal's many major drawbacks is that after it expires, Iran can enrich as much uranium to have as many nuclear weapons -- and the means to deliver them -- as it likes.

Despite signs that the P5+1 negotiating team will subscribe to a re-constituted JCPOA "understanding," there seems to exist no trust that the Islamic Republic will comply with any agreement. The IAEA's catalogue of doubts regarding Iran's compliance with any nuclear safeguards is lengthy.

Based on Iran's pattern of obstructionism, the impending renewal of the JCPOA does not inspire confidence that the Islamic Republic -- even if it verbally agrees, or this time signs a document -- will ever be in compliance.

It is also sadly assumed, based on past patterns, that the US, in its eagerness to secure a deal -- any deal -- will back down when faced with any Iranian demand.

The real problem for Beijing is that consumption, the only sustainable part of the Chinese economy, looks far softer than officially reported, something evident from the widely followed China Beige Book survey. Spending will not fully recover until the coronavirus pandemic passes, and that is unlikely to happen soon due to China's barely effective vaccines.

In any event, Washington must begin enforcing laws, especially those banning the importation of products made with forced or slave labor.

Japan's Uniqlo is not the only brand that has been implicated. Nike and Apple have, through subcontractors, apparently used such labor. Enforcement has been hampered by, among other things, lack of personnel and a failure of political will.

The larger goal has to be an ending of trade relations with China. "Because the threat posed by China to the United States results from its hostile system and includes economic, technological, and military dimensions, only systemic, not piecemeal, responses can possibly protect critical U.S. interests," Washington, D.C.-based trade expert Alan Tonelson tells Gatestone. "Sanctions against individuals or companies will inevitably produce only pinprick effects, and even these are easily nullified with shell game corporate renamings and personnel changes."

The Palestinian Authority (PA) uses European funding to cultivate more and bigger tracts of Israeli state land every year, a well-known... loophole in the Ottoman Land Law (still in force in these territories) that grants rights to anyone who uses land for agricultural purposes for a period of several years, whether they own it or not.

[T]he question should be, how was this water allocation determined, and how are the actual water needs of this population determined? .... [H]ow much water does each Palestinian in this region need, and how many people are we talking about?

The PA invests untold millions of European taxpayer-funded "humanitarian aid" to initiate massive, unsustainable agricultural projects in desert areas under Israeli jurisdiction... to take control, physically, of ever-expanding swaths of territory. It goes to tremendous lengths to pad "population statistics" -- allowing people born abroad who have never set foot in the Middle East to register as residents... failing to remove deceased persons from the rolls, and double-counting people who live in other areas.

The allocation of water to Palestinian residents under Israeli jurisdiction was determined in the framework of the Oslo Accords according to population size. Simply put, there would be no water crisis if Europe and the PA would not have orchestrated a large-scale migration of people.... for political purposes.

Israel provides approximately 70 million cubic meters (MCM) per year of water to the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") alone... even though the Water Agreement signed in the Oslo framework allocates a much smaller quantity of only 23.6 MCM/year.... If the PA so desired, the residents of the "village" of Kardala could easily be living in Bardala and enjoying sufficient water supplies.

Similarly, the housing needs of all Palestinians currently living in illegal structures on Israeli state land throughout Area C [under Israeli jurisdiction] could easily be met if the PA invested its resources in development and construction in [the Arab jurisdiction] areas A and B -- where there is no threat of demolition, confiscation of equipment or materials, and no need for Israeli permits.

[O]ver 60% of land resources under Palestinian Authority jurisdiction remain available. Rather than using its resources to improve the lives of its people, the PA instead chooses to divert all its resources into illegal, politically motivated projects that are designed to wrest control of as much land as possible away from Israeli jurisdiction.

Agenda-driven journalism is not journalism. It is propaganda....