Christian Palestinian unjustly held behind bars by Palestinian Authority appeals for help

BY SAMIR A. ZEDAN

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/02/christian-palestinian-unjustly-held-behind-bars-by-palestinian-authority-appeals-for-help;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

In response to Jihad Watch’s recent articles about the suffering of Christians living under the Palestinian Authority’s thumb in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus Christ, more information is flooding in that further exposes the Christians’ plight.

Moreen Botto contacted this writer regarding her husband Charlie Botto, who is behind bars in a Palestinian jail for signing her power of attorney for the management of his property in Jerusalem, as she is an Israeli resident.

The Palestinian Authority may justify the arrest on the pretext that the property may eventually go to Israeli businessmen, but an arrest such as this one becomes a powerful extortion tool while Charlie is held without any sort of arraignment. This Christian family today is being subjected to all sorts of extortion attempts.

People who live under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority rely on their family members who are either permanent residents or citizens of Israel to take care of their properties inside Israel’s borders, also known as the “green line.”

As of October 2020, Charlie Botto has been in dire straits in a below-ground cell in what is known as Amer’s Prison, which is located near the Church of Nativity. This has been a cause of devastation for this Christian family.

Charlie Botto before and after his arrest

While Moreen Botto’s elder daughters Mona and Cynthia attend colleges in Hebron and in Jordan, her three younger children Joe, Tatiana, and Julian still attend schools in Bethlehem at a time when Moreen is desperately trying to provide for her family by running a modest business. Meanwhile, she is keeping herself fully abreast of any new development regarding her husband’s imprisonment.

Moreen’s ordeal continues as she reaches out to senior Palestinian officials to make them aware of Charlie’s arrest, despite the fact that he is not expected to be tried.

In her effort to be heard, she has been subjected to financial blackmail by members of Fatah, who keep assuring her they will inform Ramallah’s attorney general of her plight, but to no avail.

The tragedy of this Christian family has been ongoing for almost two decades. Farah Botto, Charlie’s father was killed in front of his house in Old Bethlehem by Fatah militants in May 2001, when he refused to keep paying protection money.

Farah Botto with son Charlie

As the Intifadah began in October 2000, many Christian Palestinians suffered abuses and extortion attempts as Yasir Arafat turned to terror and violence in order to put pressure on the political process initiated after the Oslo Agreement, which was signed in Washington, DC in 1993.

A few months after her father-in-law’s assassination in old Bethlehem, Moreen Botto was driving near Bethlehem University when she witnessed Fatah militia members begin shooting at Farid Azizeh, a prominent Assyrian, and former Bethlehem council member. Azizeh lost his vision and had a damaged memory for the rest of his life due to wounds in his head caused by the bullets.

Farid Azizeh was determined that the son of a senior Fatah member, who drove recklessly and ran over his nephew Ghassan, would not be entitled to walk free without prosecution. He refused to accept money in exchange for his nephew’s blood and insisted that the senior Fatah member’s son should be tried for reckless behavior while driving a stolen Israeli car.

The Fatah militants decided to silence Azizeh, while the perpetrator of the hit-and-run incident was sent to live in another country so as not to cause friction with another Christian family that also had lost a son in the same accident.

One may question why Moreen Botto felt the need to contact this Jihad Watch writer, who in discussion with her was candid about the risks she was taking while Charlie was being held captive in a Palestinian prison.

While Mrs. Botto fears for her husband’s safety since he is held in an unheated cell during the winter while the Covid pandemic has severely affected the Bethlehem region, she has turned to Jihad Watch as a last resort to expose her tragic current situation.

Moreen Bottos’s attempt to send her husband Charlie adequate thermal clothing was recently turned away by the Palestinian jailers.

By bringing this matter to the attention of the public, Moreen Botto hopes her Israeli residency would mitigate the possibility of Palestinian retribution while hoping that Christian organizations in the United States will hear her family’s ongoing anguish.

On the other hand, in describing the deteriorating health conditions of Charlie Botto, his eldest daughter Mona Botto broke into tears while she explained that her father had been hospitalized three times thus far due to a stomach infection contracted while being initially detained at the Palestinian Preventive Security detention facility in Bethlehem. Moreover, she said that a periodontal disease that spread to her father’s mouth also resulted in his teeth being removed.

Moreen Botto and her children hope to make their plea through Jihad Watch also be heard at both the US Department of State and the US Congress, and by bringing this matter to their attention end this Christian family’s continuous agony.

Many years ago, another family member was forced to seek refuge in the UK after mentioning the assassination of Farah Botto by Fatah militants in 2001. This came in the context of her attempt to call attention to the plight of Palestinian Christians living under the Palestinian Authority’s jurisdiction.

As a result, her family had to endure serious reprisals by the Palestinian Authority, which drove her to openly challenge late Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat during one of his lectures at a London university.

Exacerbating the suffering of Christians in the Palestinian Territories is the fact that the Church does not speak out on their behalf, whereas the propagation of dhimmitude among the clergy has increased the burden on Christians in the land of Jesus.

Samir A. Zedan is a former Senior Counter-Terrorism Analyst at the US Department of State, and a former Development Outreach and Communication specialist at USAID/Iraq. He also was a journalist with major media outlets with assignments in the Palestinian Areas, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, and Europe.

Palestinian Authority paid at least $156,000,000 to jihad terrorists in 2020

BY ROBERT SPENCER

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/02/palestinian-authority-paid-at-least-156000000-to-jihad-terrorists-in-2020;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Good thing Biden’s handlers are going to start showering these good folks with American taxpayer money again, eh?

“How much did PA spend on terror salaries in 2020?,” by Maurice Hirsch, Itamar Marcus, and Nan Jacques Zilberdik, Palestinian Media Watch, February 22, 2021:

Since the beginning of 2020, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has been trying to hide the financial record of its payments to the Palestinian terrorist prisoners and released terrorists (together hereinafter “the terrorist prisoners”). In 2018 and 2019, the PA monthly budget performance reports clearly listed the transfer expenditures of the “Ministry of Prisoners’ Affairs,” which was primarily the payments to terrorist prisoners, as 502 and 517 million shekels respectively. In 2020, the budget category of the “Ministry of Prisoners’ Affairs” (later by the PA called the Commission for Detainees’ Affairs) was removed altogether. However, throughout 2020, numerous statements by PA and PLO officials confirmed that the PA continued to pay hundreds of millions of shekels a year in terror rewards. Consequently, it was clear that the PA had decided to pay terrorists in a roundabout way so that there would be no reference to the salaries at all in their budget.

Palestinian Media Watch has examined the PA’s financial reports throughout 2020 and can now report both where the payments are being hidden, and that the amount the PA spent on terrorists salaries in 2020 was no less than 512 million shekels.

The salaries the PA paid to terrorists in 2019 via the Ministry/Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs, were paid in 2020 through the PLO. Under the budget listing of PLO “transfer expenditures” the PA’s payments through the PLO rose more than 300% in 2020, from 161 million shekels to 673 million shekels. The additional expenditure – 512 million shekels – is the minimum amount the PA paid to the terrorist prisoners and released terrorists in 2020.

Why did the PA make this accounting change in 2020?

As a recipient of international funding, the PA must show full transparency and publicly list all its expenses, whereas the PLO is not accountable to anyone for how it spends its money. The PA wants to prevent the international community from seeing listings like the one below in its “budget performance report” of 2019, which shows 517 million shekels for salaries to terrorist prisoners listed under the “Commission of Detainees’ Affairs”. (Note: the 517 million shekels in the right column are the salaries to terrorists, while the 619 million shekels in the left column is the full budget of the Commission in 2019.)

This is not the first time the PA has tried to hide its expenditure on the salaries to the terrorist prisoners. In 2014, after a series of PMW events in European parliaments and meetings with members of the US Congress exposing the PA’s terror rewards resulted in threats from the donors to cut all funding to the PA, the PA stopped paying salaries to terrorists directly. It closed its Ministry of Prisoners’ Affairs and transferred the terrorist payments to a new PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs. At the time, PMW’s report “The PA’s billion dollar fraud” exposed the PA’s effort to deceive the world with a cosmetic change concealing its terror payments, which brought condemnation and outrage from the donor countries.

The following chart shows the PA Ministry of Prisoners’ Affairs and the PLO’s “transfer expenditure”, i.e., its payments to terrorist prisoners, from 2014 through 2020. Whenever the PA closed the Ministry of Prisoners’ Affairs (orange columns), the PLO’s transfer expenses (blue columns) rose by the amount of the salaries to terrorists. See the blue columns in the years 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2020, which include salaries to terrorists.

In 2020, with the PA again paying the terrorists through the PLO rather than directly, the annual “transfer expenditure” of the “PLO institutions” rose from 161 million shekels in 2019 to almost 674 million shekels in 2020 – a rise of 300%!…

PMW concludes that the PA continued to pay salaries to terrorist prisoners in 2020; that the PA hid the salaries under the budget line of the “PLO institutions”; and that the total payments in 2020 to terrorist prisoners and released prisoners were at least 512 million shekels….

SENATOR CRUZ: Biden AG pick Garland ‘dodged every question’ in Senate hearing~The Fascist Democrats & the Fake Insurrection

The Fascist Democrats & the Fake Insurrection

Why Americans should be afraid. Very afraid.

BY DAVID HOROWITZ

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/fascist-democrats-fake-insurrection-david-horowitz/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

In less than a month in office, the Biden administration has clearly defined itself and its party as a fascist vanguard, driven by a racist agenda, and unconstrained by constitutional principle. It chooses to rule by presidential diktat, even though it controls both Houses of Congress.  It is an aggressive pursuer of political division behind a deceptive smokescreen of “healing” and “unity,” It is busily exploiting a fake “armed insurrection” to justify witch-hunts of the military, the capital police, members of Congress and the opposition media, at the moment Fox and Newsmax, whom they want to suppress. Its legislative radicals have called for the expulsion of half the Republican conference, without rebuke from their leaders. Because these actions are indefensible in a democracy, the Democrat Party is brazenly advancing these destructive, anti-democratic measures using Orwellian doublespeak.

Thus, Merrick Garland, Biden’s nominee to be the chief law enforcement officer of the land, has claimed under oath that terrorist acts can only be committed in the daytime – a transparent move to protect the domestic terrorists of the left who laid siege to 220 American cities at night last summer, showing utter contempt for authority and law, while attacking federal buildings and local police offices along the way. In other words the fake insurrection in the Capitol – an event conducted mainly by Trump supporters in which only Trump supporters died – is an act of domestic terrorism because it took place in the daytime. But violent armed insurrections and attacks on federal buildings conducted by leftists at night, cannot be regarded as terrorist events. How can Americans expect blind justice from a sophist like this? The nauseating sophistry has an obvious bottom line. Only violent protests by Trump supporters can justify the political witch-hunts and purges the Democrats are currently conducting against all conservatives and Republicans.

The so-called “armed insurrection” in the Capitol on January 6 was used to impeach Trump? It was allegedly so dangerous as to justify impeaching him after he left office? But it deserves to be called a “fake armed insurrection” because there were no firearms present and no plausible plan to overthrow the government. The malicious fantasy that this effort was an armed attempt to overthrow the government is just that: a malicious fantasy.

Four people died at the event – all unarmed. The one who didn’t die of a heart attack, stroke or medical emergency, Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, was murdered by a Capitol police officer – with no consequences to the officer. The Capitol police officer who died – Brian Suknick, and was laid in state and honored by Democrats as a defender of their faith, died of indeterminate causes the day after the melee and was a Trump supporter.

The January 6 mob scene, according to investigators, was planned by “Oath Keepers” – a fringe pro-Trump group - two months before Trump gave the speech for which he was impeached under the bogus charge that he had “incited an insurrection.” In fact, he had offered to deploy 10,000 National Guardsmen to defend the Capitol for the January 6 certification. Some insurrectionist!

Trump’s infamous speech was perfectly normal, law-abiding and democratic. It was given a mile from the Capitol and was an appeal to his supporters to stiffen the spines of Republican members of Congress so they would challenge the election result. This was something Democrats and their impeachment leader – the devious Jamie Raskin - had done at the certification hearings in 2017 after Trump’s election (and also in 2001 and 2005 after both Bush elections). Democrats’ hypocrisy apparently knows no limits and no restraints and evidently has no decency filter. If Trump’s supporters failed to stiffen the spines of “weak Republicans” as Trump urged them to do in so many words at the Ellipse, they needed to go back home and primary them in the 2022 elections. Totally respectful of the democratic process.

The reality is that given the three months of violent assaults by Black Lives Matter and Antifa criminals on 220 American cities last summer, January 6 was an unexceptional event. Where was the respect for government courthouses, national monuments, police stations and public order all summer? For three months and more, those violent insurrectionary riots were supported by Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrat Party leadership, and even funded by them.

Thanks to the Democrats, violent attacks on people and property and government buildings had become a “cultural norm” – to use Biden’s unconscionable phrase for looking away when confronted by Chinese genocide and enslavement of 2 million Uighur Muslims. Yet with the help of cowardly Republicans, afraid to call these aggressions by their proper names, the Democrats were able to turn the Capitol melee into a preposterous Reichstag Fire – the same that provided Hitler, the elected chancellor of the Weimar Republic with an excuse for destroying the Republic and silencing his opponents.

The difference was that for Hitler the phantom enemy that justified his depredations was the Jews, while for the fascist Democrats it is “white supremacists,” whose actual numbers are fewer even than the Jews. The Marxists of Black Lives Matter are the actual authors of the lie that the January 6 melee in the capital was a “white supremacist coup.” But even the pathetic Merrick Garland was forced to repeat the canard - without offering a shred of evidence - at his confirmation hearing. That’s how pervasive this racist ideology has become in shaping the Democrat Party’s drive to destroy our constitutional Republic. The hour is actually late, and Americans better wake up and start fighting for their country or there will soon be nothing left to defend.

 

DONALD TRUMP JR Addresses The Nation! SCOTUS Will Allow Persecution for Donald Trump!

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SCOTUS allows Trump's tax returns be investigated

SCOTUS couldn't get their pound of flesh out of Trump & The Patriots on Monday, so they granted Cy Vance the right to peruse Trump's taxes. This is a travesty and disgrace. The levels of government throughout the USA are compromised and cannot be relied upon for We The People...

Do We Have the Courage of this Jailed Canadian Pastor Who Refuses to Be Silent?

BY MARK TAPSCOTT

SEE: https://pjmedia.com/culture/marktapscott/2021/02/23/do-we-have-the-courage-of-this-jailed-canadian-pastor-who-refuses-to-be-silent-n1427600;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Not long after Jesus was crucified and buried, two of his disciples, Peter and John, were jailed by the Jerusalem authorities for telling people that He had been resurrected from the dead after three days in the tomb, that He had talked multiple times with the disciples, and that He had ascended to Heaven.

Peter and John were preaching these things from Solomon’s Colonnade in the Temple, according to Acts 3:11, and in course of the incident, they healed a man who was lame, and claimed the healing was done “by the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene — whom you crucified and whom God raised from the dead — by Him this man is standing before you healthy.”

And then they made the claim that began to change the world in the most radical ways possible: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven give to people by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

The authorities who had Peter and John arrested realized that they had put themselves between a rock (pun intended) and a hard place, saying, “What should we do with these men? For an obvious sign, evident to all who live in Jerusalem, has been done through them and we cannot deny it.”

So they did what governments have been doing to dissidents ever since: They ordered them to shut up, to stop preaching Jesus resurrected, on pain of further, likely much more severe, punishments. Since Jerusalem had no First Amendment, Peter and John were faced with a profoundly serious choice.

Acts 4:19-20 tells us the choice they made: “But Peter and John answered them, ‘whether it’s right in the sight of God for us to listen to you rather than God, you decide; for we are unable to stop speaking about what we have seen and heard.”

So Peter and John kept right on proclaiming Jesus as the resurrected savior of all who would accept Him, defying the very authorities who had murdered Him with a cross and held the same power over His disciples who now refused to shut up.

A remarkably similar scene has just happened in our neighbor to the North. Pastor James Coates of Edmonton, Canada, Grace Life Church, was jailed earlier this month for preaching to an assembly of unmasked congregants whose numbers exceeded the 15 percent of building capacity permitted by the authorities during the Covid pandemic.

Coates was tried in secret and sentenced to prison, according to his wife, but on the condition that he can be a free man if he agrees not to again violate the Covid restrictions by preaching to his congregation assembled illegally for worship. Coates, like Peter and John, refuses to be silent. Unlike Peter and John in Acts, Coates remains in jail.

Coates is the first Canadian pastor to be so jailed. No American pastor has been jailed, yet, but many of them, especially in California, face fines that in some cases approach millions of dollars. And the prospect of going to jail is very much on their minds.

Canadians are guaranteed freedom of worship. Americans have the First Amendment to the Constitution, with its guarantee of freedom of worship and assembly.

The U.S. Supreme Court, unlike those in Canada, is steadily striking down and limiting the actions of presumptuous officials threatening church congregations and their pastors with fines and imprisonment for their obedience to God’s command at Hebrews 10:25 “to not neglect the assembling together [for worship].”

But why are these battles having to be fought in the first place if governments are bound by their chartering documents to respect freedom of assembly and worship?

Lawyer James Kitchen of Canada’s Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms suggests that a major part of the answer to that question is the fact we let officials trample on our rights:

“More people need to stop self-censoring. They’re scared to speak up. They’re scared of getting in trouble at work, they’re scared of losing their friends, they’re scared of what people are going to say, they’re scared of dirty looks, this is what I hear, they’re scared of other people.

“And unfortunately, the more influence people have, the more they’re scared to use it, to say ‘You know, this is wrong. Count me in, I disagree with this. This has to stop.’ People with their words and with peaceful actions need to say, stop, enough is enough.”

“Democracy is governing by consent. This is the whole underlying philosophical purpose of elections, You choose who governs you. … It is time for people to say, ‘I am removing my consent to be policed and governed this way,’” said Kitchen.

That advice holds true on both sides of the U.S./Canadian border, and it is a challenge to each and every one of us.

Mark Tapscott is an award-winning investigative journalist who covers Congress for The Epoch Times, and he is founder and editor of HillFaith, an apologetics ministry sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with congressional aides on Capitol Hill.