Last Friday, Sept. 30, a small group of Israeli and Palestinian human rights activists accompanied a Palestinian who traveled to work on his land, which is located within the confines of Anatot, an Israeli West Bank settlement just outside Jerusalem. According to +972 Magazine, the activists “were met by a large group of settlers [from Anatot], who attacked them and reportedly cracked open the head of the landowner and attacked his wife.” (Haaretz reports that the activists provoked the settlers by “hanging Palestinian flags”). Police reportedly arrived to separate the two sides, however, activists say they repeatedly made calls to police after feeling threatened by the settlers but “they did not interfere” in the attacks.

Later that evening, the activists returned to Anatot and again, the Israeli settlers met them with more violence and again, the police did nothing to prevent the attacks, +972 reported:

Later in the day, more activists arrived to protest against the violence that took place earlier. They too were attacked and beaten and had stones thrown at them. In spite of police presence at the scene, the police did nothing.

Nineteen people were injured in the second attack, requiring medical attention, and three have been hospitalized. A total of 23 injuries were reported from this incident, and according to the twitter feed of a female activist who was there, settlers tried to rip her clothes off. There was also damage done to cars belonging to the activists, which were parked outside the settlement – smashed windshields, head and tail lights, and punctured tires.

Activists caught the attacks on video:

+972′s Yossi Gurvitz reported that one of the settlers that attacked the activists was actually a police officer. Eyal Raz, an activist in the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity movement, wrote of the scene in Haaretz:

[The Anatot settlers] came to destroy, to break, perhaps even to kill. They used their hands, their fists and their teeth, along with stones, pipes and knives. They aimed for the photographers, the women, for the young and the old alike. They brought individuals down to the ground and assaulted them as they lay there, surrounded. They pounced on the hindmost of those trying to flee as they pursued their battered victims.

And Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity leader Sara Benninga said that while she has shrugged off previous experiences of harassment from authorities, her “perception changed” because of this incident:

Up until now, when I had experienced expressions of hate and violence from my surroundings, from policemen at demonstrations or from passersby on the street, I didn’t honestly believe that the whole system was against me. … [but] when policemen in uniform stand and quietly watch a violent and brutal crowd of about 200 people beat up a group of 50 people, the illusion of a rescuing justice is shattered.

But what’s also striking about the events in Anadot last Friday is that they are receiving scant media attention, particularly in Israel. Assaf Sharon, also affiliated with the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity movement, suffered a broken nose from the violence. “I took quite a beating,” Sharon told ThinkProgress in an email, “I must confess that the pain of the blows and wounds dulls in comparison with the frustration from the silence and indifference with which this unprecedented event is being received.”

Anti-Islam activist John Jay has vowed to never write again after prominent activists Pam Geller and Robert Spencer disavowed any connection to him and strongly condemned his call to violence. Yesterday, ThinkProgress reported on Jay’s call for the mass murder of members of Congress, journalists, Muslims, and liberals, prompting Geller and Spencer — key players of the Islamophobia network — to disown Jay, who had helped them with the incorporation of their advocacy group.

Now, Jay feels abandoned. In a downhearted blog post titled, “from this day forth, i will write no more forever ….,” he explains that he is retiring his pen because “[I am] toxic to my friends, those who remain“:

i am despised by the left. toxic to my friends, those who remain. and, seemingly either ridiculous or not of interest to all others, just not relevant in any particular, it would seem.

so, from this day forth, i will write no more forever. it’s just not worth the bother, not worth the indulgence.

at best, a lone voice in the wilderness. at the marginal end, a tree falls in the forest,

In an update, he writes that he has no connection to Geller and Spencer’s groups. “[I] support what they do,” he writes, “but, i apparently add nothing to it, & detract from it.” As for the fact “that they disavow any approval over my recent posts here, and they have expressed their vigorous disagreement with the same,” Jay writes, “it’s a free country…so be it.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) blocked a vote on this year’s defense budget authorization act because of provisions in the bill that the Obama administration says will tie its hands when dealing with terrorism suspects. Reid explained his impending move on the Senate floor Monday before issuing a letter Tuesday to the Democratic chairman and ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. On the floor Monday, Reid said:

But I also say, Mr. President, in its present form, I’m going to have some difficulty bringing this bill to the floor. It contains provisions relating to the detention of terrorism suspects that in the words of national security adviser John Brennan would be, and I quote, “disastrous. It would tie the hands of our counterterrorism professionals by eliminating tools and authorities that have been absolutely essential to their success.”

To show you how extremely important it is that we do something about these provisions in this bill that are just wrong, both the Judiciary Committee in the Senate and the Intelligence Committee in the Senate have asked for hearings on this provision in this bill.

Watch the video:

In a September speech, Brennan, a deputy national security adviser, decried any “rigid, inflexible approach” to terrorism that would stop the Obama administration from taking its “practical, flexible, results-driven approach that maximizes our intelligence collection and preserves our ability to prosecute dangerous individuals.”

A day after his floor comments, Reid sent a letter the Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) and Ranking Member John McCain (R-AZ) informing them that he didn’t intend to bring the National Defense Authorization Act to the floor until it was stripped of the detention provisions. In the letter, Reid objected to:

[T]he authorization of indefinite detention in section 1031, the requirement for mandatory military custody of terrorism suspects in Section 1032, and the stringent restrictions on transfer of detainees in Section 1033. [...]

I strongly believe that we must maintain the capability and flexibility to effectively apply the full range of tools at our disposal to combat terrorism. This includes the use of our criminal justice system, which has accumulated an impressive record of success in bringing terrorists to justice.

In his floor speech, Reid cited a compromise over last year’s National Defense Authorization Act, which originally included a repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy on gays in the military. Republicans filibustered the authorization and Democrats relented, taking the DADT repeal out of the bill and agreeing to put it forward later as a separate vote. Reid asked that McCain take the same approach to the terrorism detention provisions in this year’s authorization.

President Obama and his administration have received widespread, bipartisan criticism for the drone strike last week that killed al Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, particularly because Awlaki was an American citizen at the time of his death. While analysts have argued whether Awlaki’s killing was legal because of that fact (CAP’s Ken Gude argues the killing “falls under the scope of the law”), the Justice Department reportedly authorized the killing in a secret memo, the contents of which have yet to be released.

But as ThinkProgress’s Matt Yglesias wrote last week, what’s missing from discussion of the Awlaki case “is the question of why he was still a U.S. citizen up to the day he died.” Had he been fighting for a foreign state’s armed forces or swore allegiance to an enemy state, Awlaki would have been stripped of his American citizenship. “The correct way out of this,” Yglesias argued, “seems to me to amend the relevant section of the Immigration and Nationality Act such that swearing allegiance to al Qaeda can count as an expatriating act in the same way that defecting to North Korea would.”

This is exactly what Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) tried to do last year. Dent introduced a bill that would have stripped Awlaki of his American citizenship, arguing that he “voluntarily renounced his citizenship by recruiting terrorists to engage in violent acts of terrorism against United States and by advocating the violent overthrow of the American government.” While the measure failed to get out of committee, Dent announced last week that in intends to introduce “similar” legislation:

Last year, I introduced a measure encouraging the U.S. Department of State to consider al-Awlaki’s actions against America as a voluntary relinquishing of his citizenship. Shortly, I will be reintroducing similar legislation to allow the Department to investigate the actions of American citizens who take up arms against the U.S. and make an administrative determination if the individual intended to renounce his or her citizenship. Following that determination, the individual can challenge the findings in federal court.

In the event that Dent’s legislation, or something similar, passes, “[t]hen you would need a quasi-judicial process through which an evidentiary determination could be made that someone has, in fact, expatriated himself,” Yglesias writes, “It’s less fun than ad hoc determinations by the DOD and the White House staff, but it would sit a heck of a lot easier with me.” Dent’s office did not respond to a request for comment on his bill.