Repeating from two days ago :"For all the hand-wringing about open anti-muslim bigotry none of those now expressing such concern have ever thought of a muslim life as equal to an Israeli one. As with torture the distinctions begin with proximity."

New York Review on Dayton [history here and here]

Islamists have hardly been the only critics of Dayton and the security forces. Last year, in an Op-Ed entitled “Jericho’s Stasi,” Bassem Eid, head of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, wrote, “I would like to suggest that General Dayton not just train agents in the use of weapons, beating and torture…but also train them how to behave among their own people.” The National Security Forces trained by Dayton are not authorized to make arrests, but they regularly lead joint operations with Palestinian security services whose senior leaders have been trained by the USSC, and that have, according to Human Rights Watch and Palestinian human rights groups, practiced torture. A year into Fayyad’s first term, Mamdouh al-Aker, then head of the PA’s human rights organization, spoke of the government’s “militarization” and asserted that “a state of lawlessness had shifted to a sort of a security state, a police state.”

Foreign Policy

Mustafa Barghouti, the head of the Palestinian National Initiative (a leading and increasingly strong political movement inside Palestine) and one of the most prominent leaders scheduled to speak at the meeting was in the crowd as it was pushed out of the meeting house. He attempted to maintain order and separate the meeting's attendees from the group disrupting the gathering. "People were pushed into the street," he remembers, "and that's when the beatings began. It was very violent. The General Intelligence people were pushing people to the ground." On the street in front of the Protestant Club, meanwhile, members of the Al Haq staff began to document the incident. "We had a camera, one of my staff members had a camera," Jabarin says, "and we were trying to take pictures. But my staff member who had the camera was pushed down and the security official attempted to take the camera, to break it. This man was beating him and when one of my other staff members tried to help him, she was pushed to the ground and beaten. They got the camera."

From the same article

Meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas in Washington, Barack Obama characterized the Hebron as "a heinous crime," while State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley speculated that the attack was timed to coincide with the opening of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. In fact, while the attack's timing was not coincidental, it followed a series of highly publicized clashes in al-Buwayra, near Hebron, in which Israelis from the nearby settlements of Kyriat Arab and Harzina attacked Palestinian villages with clubs and set fire to their orchards. By the end of August, the attacks were widened to include Canadian and Danish "internationalists," who had come to protect al-Buwayra's villagers.