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Whenever Israeli troops rough up civilian protesters, it is shrugged off as an isolated incident. One of the WikiLeaks cables, however, shows that it was explicit military policy to abuse civilians engaged in non-violent protests. During a 2010 meeting, the cable notes, Israeli officials informed the US of their intention to be "more assertive" against peaceful demonstrations, with the US ambassador noting that the Israeli government believed any demonstration warranted military response. An Israeli commander, Avi Mizrachi, insisted there was no reason for the Palestinians to protest and that they were organized by "suspicious people." He added that since the protests "serve no purposes" anyone caught demonstrating would be arrested. The position takes on a whole new perspective, however, in the face of massive protests later this month aimed at independence. The Israeli military's abuse of human rights has also been a topic of discussion in the US Senate, though most in the Senate seem unwilling to oppose it.

Police 'sat' on sex abuse cases in Rotherham England over racism concerns

Muslim Abuse of 1400 British Girls: "No One Wanted to Rock the Multicultural Community Boat"

Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been imprisoned for nine months on charges of handing government files to WikiLeaks, has not even been tried let alone convicted. Yet the military has been treating him abusively, in a way that conjures creepy memories of how the Bush administration used to treat terror suspects. Inexplicably, it appears to have President Obama's support to do so.

Over the past 10 years, more than 20,000 American children are believed to have been killed in their own homes by family members. That is nearly four times the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The child maltreatment death rate in the US is triple Canada's and 11 times that of Italy. Millions of children are reported as abused and neglected every year. Why is that? ... In looking at key indicators of well-being, children from Texas are twice as likely to drop out of high school as children from Vermont. They are four times more likely to be uninsured, four times more likely to be incarcerated, and nearly twice as likely to die from abuse and neglect.

The intent and effect of such abuse is that it renders those guaranteed freedoms meaningless. If a population becomes bullied or intimidated out of exercising rights offered on paper, those rights effectively cease to exist.

David Cay Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author. A 13-year veteran of The New York Times, David won the Pulitzer in 2001 for enterprise reporting that uncovered loopholes and inequities in the U.S. tax code. He has written several best-selling books, including Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill). His latest, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Abuse "Plain English" and Other Tricks to Rob You Blind, will be published in September.

Should you shut up about human rights abuses because they are happening far away, to people you don't know, who have a different culture or colour or creed? There is now a growing movement across the world saying that, yes, empathy should be cauterised at national borders. The world is carved into cultures, and they should not try to comment critically on each other. Instead, they should be "respectful." You can criticise Your Own Kind, but not Foreigners, because they are unbridgeably different to you. This claim is now made by a strange coalition stretching from the Israeli government to African dictators to Western multiculturalists - and they are trying to give it the force of law.

WASHINGTON - The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account.

Several days ago I noted that Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell had agreed to a four-year extension of the most controversial provisions of the Patriot Act -- a bill Democrats everywhere once claimed to revile -- without a single reform (despite the long and documented history of its abuse and despite Obama's previously claimed desire to reform it).  Tonight, a cloture vote was taken in the Senate on the four-year extension and it passed by a vote of 74-8.  The law that was once the symbolic shorthand for evil Bush/Cheney post-9/11 radicalism just received a vote in favor of its four-year, reform-free extension by a vote of 74-8: only resolutions to support Israel command more lopsided majorities

Back in March, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) astoundingly claimed that the iPad and iPhone are "built in the United States of America." This news must have been a great surprise to the Chinese workers who work for Taiwanese-based manufacturing giant Foxconn, which is notorious for the poor conditions at its factories and the wave of suicides at its plants. After much of the international media covered the abuses at Foxconn's factories, the company, along with the major American corporations it supplies - like Apple and HP - announced that it would be reforming its practices. Yet a new report from Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM), a Hong Kong-based advocacy and research group, finds that many of the practices that led more than a dozen workers committ suicide continue to live on. SACOM conducted a comprehensive study of practices at several Foxconn factories over the months of March and April and found that a number of shocking policies are in place. Here are some of the highlights of their study:

The production of this ingredient causes jaw-dropping amounts of deforestation (and with it, carbon emissions) and human rights abuses.

ROTHERHAM MUSLIM GROOMING: DID PAKISTANI COUNCILLORS BLOCK ATTEMPTS TO TACKLE IT?