Jumping To Conclusions

The Guardian reports, in its usual evenhanded fashion, that Palestinians are executing accused "collaborators" en masse. The Guardian at least admits that the treatment of the "collaborators" is brutal, but still manages to blame it on Israel.

Their bodies were dumped in a side street as a gruesome warning to anyone else contemplating spying for Israel against their own people.

Really. Perhaps it's a gruesome warning to anyone else who thinks that the Palestinian Authority is a group that can be dealt with as though it were civilized. And note that to the Guardian, they're not informing on terrorists or criminals, but "spying on their own people."

The police and guards did not try to stop the gunmen, who also belonged to the al-Aqsa martyrs, because they did not want to raise tensions in the city which is surrounded by Israeli tanks, the security sources said.

See? It's not because the so-called "police" are really terrorists. It's all Israel's fault.

The Palestinian attacks on collaborators have been based on well-founded suspicions about the level of penetration by the Israeli intelligence agencies of Palestinian society.

Confessions by arrested collaborators in the last 18 months have revealed the extent of the use of paid informers - often working for no more than a few hundred dollars - who have been recruited either through blackmail after being arrested by the Israelis, or because they were known to have a grudge against key militant figures.

And of course, these "confessions" must be legitimate, because Palestinian "police" wouldn't coerce them. And of course, these people couldn't be working for Israel because they think terrorism is wrong -- it has to be because Israel is blackmailing or bribing them.

At the very end, the Guardian slips in this little factoid:

In the last intifada, from 1987-93, more than 800 suspected collaborators were killed by fellow Palestinians.

I repeat: where are all the protests from human rights groups?