Back in April, National Review finally parted ways with longtime contributor John Derbyshire after Derbyshire penned an especially racist piece advising non-black American parents on how to talk to their kids about black people. Explaining his decision to sever ties, editor Rich Lowry called Derbyshire’s piece “nasty and indefensible,” and wrote that Derbyshire:

“is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation.”

While National Review’s decision to can Derbyshire was commendable (if long overdue), ThinkProgress noted at the time that it continued to feature the writings of prominent Islamophobes such as Robert Spencer, David Horowitz, and Daniel Pipes, and called on the magazine to sever ties with these figures as well.

Unfortunately, not only has National Review continued to publish these Islamophobic authors, it has now taken on as a contributor one of the Islamophobia network’s worst offenders, David Yerushalmi.

Back in September 2010, ThinkProgress examined Yerushalmi’s long history of extremists statements, which include a proposal making it “a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.” In a 2006 article, Yerushalmi lamented in the inability to engage in “a discussion of Islam as an evil religion, or of blacks as the most murderous of peoples (at least in New York City), or of illegal immigrants as deserving of no rights” without being labeled a racist. He also wrote that the American founders were on to something when they limited the vote to white men. “There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote.”

As Mother Jones noted, the Anti-Defimation League said Yerushalmi has “record of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry.”

In short, he has espoused white nationalist views very similar to John Derbyshire’s, with the added bonus of anti-Muslim “creeping sharia” nonsense. Were the editors of National Review simply unaware if these statements? Or don’t they consider this stuff “nasty and indefensible”?

Activists today reinvigorated a campaign to allow women to drive in Saudi Arabia, the last country in the world that doesn’t allow a woman behind the wheel. Last summer, Saudi women stepped on the gas anyway, some sentenced to lashings for their defiance (the penalties were later reversed).

Manal Alsharif, who rose to fame by spearheading the initial campaign with an internet video of herself driving, called on women to take to the roads again next week. She told Reuters:

If women don’t take action, the authorities will not lift the ban. It is up to women to decide.

Alsharif’s fellow organizers, who cited the one year anniversary of the first protests last June, made an appeal to Saudi King Abdullah to support them and not enforce penalties for defying the ban. The activists wrote to the king:

In our campaign we do not seek to disturb the authorities or violate rules and regulations … All we want is for the women who need to go about their daily business and do not have a man to help her to be able to help herself.

The women’s aims faced religious opposition in the deeply conservative and repressive Saudi culture. (The kingdom won’t send women athletes to the Olympics.) A group of religious scholars who advise the government wrote last year in a report that if women are allowed to drive, there will be “no more virgins” left in Saudi Arabia.

The campaign, though, has found supporters in the U.S. Last summer, a group of Senators wrote the king asking him to lift the ban. And, after a campaign waged by the women activists and diplomatic evasion, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised the “brave” protesters, said they were right, and offered her support.

Our guess blogger is Philip Ballentine, national security team intern at the Center for American Progress

At a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing last week, Senator Sen. James Risch (R-ID) and Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) treated six four-star Generals and Admirals testifying in favor of ratifying the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) with hostility before questioning their motives and honesty.

At the hearing, the Generals and Admirals spoke unanimously asking for Senate ratification of UNCLOS. Adm. James Winnefeld, the Vice Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified that joining “will fortify our credibility as the world’s leading naval power and allow us to bring to bear the full force of our influence on maritime disputes.” The other panelists, including the Chief of Naval Operations, the Commandant of the Coast Guard, and the heads of US Northern, Pacific, and Transport Commands, all agreed. The military, business leaders, environmentalists, and labor groups all support ratification.

But some Republicans on the committee opening attacked these top military officials for supporting the treaty. Risch reacted angrily, accusing Commandant Robert J. Papp, Jr. of disrespecting the Committee when he said that America’s non-ratification has prevented the resolution of American maritime disputes with Canada, saying, “Admiral Papp, you know, we sit here every day and it isn’t very often our intelligence is insulted.”

When Adm Samuel Locklear III, the head of U.S. Pacific Command, testified that joining UNCLOS would help America press China on its claims in the South China Sea, Risch fumed that treaty is nothing but, “Flowery speeches, just like the ones we’ve had here today.” He continued to lecture Locklear and the rest of the panel on the situation in the South China Sea, saying, “The gate is open and the rodeo is started!”

Despite the fact that all six panelists specifically said they were offering their independent judgments on UNCLOS, Inhofe dismissed their testimony, saying, “You’re naturally going to reflect anything that comes [from the Commander in Chief]—you have to.” Watch clips from the hearing:

“In continuing their efforts to delay ratification, staunch conservatives in the Senate show their extreme ideological and out-of-touch position by opposing a measure that even their strongest champions—Big Oil, the Chamber of Commerce, and the U.S. military—assure them would secure U.S. economic and national security interests,” said Michael Conathan, Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress.

In recent years, conservative Republicans have repeatedly questioned military leaders’ motives and honesty when they disagree, notably over the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and Pentagon budget cuts. If America’s top brass cannot get through to Senate Republicans on these security issues, who can?

The top U.N. official for executions submitted a report late Monday night to the U.N, Human Rights Council urging the U.S. to lift the veil of secrecy around its drone strike program, where unmanned planes fire precision-guided missiles at targets whose behavioral patterns fit profiles of suspected terrorists. The secretive strike program draws widespread criticism from rights groups and local populations, who decry imprecise targeting criteria and civilian casualties.

U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions Christof Heyns criticized the drone strikes’ exclusive focus on the latter part of the “capture or kill” paradigm that’s long-guided military and law enforcement tactics. He also criticized the lack of transparency — the U.S. doesn’t even officially acknowledge most strikes — and the difficulties it poses for civilian victims of attacks. Heyns recommendations included:

The [U.S.] government should clarify the procedures in place to ensure that any targeted killing complies with international humanitarian law and human rights and indicate the measures or strategies applied to prevent casualties, as well as the measures in place to provide prompt, thorough, effective and independent public investigation of alleged violations.

Despite more than 200 drone strikes — as graphically demonstrated by a chart of strikes and civilian casualty claims released by ProPublica — since President Obama took office in early 2009, the administration only officially acknowledged the program in an April 29 speech by top counter-terror adviser John Brennan.

The issue came to the fore last month when the New York Times published a long exposé on the administration’s targeting procedure. The article reported on controversial methods for counting civilian casualties and recounted a criticism that the administration relied too much on killing suspected terrorists because of disputes about how to deal with detaining them in the case of capture.

The secrecy and counting methods heighten these quandaries. ProPublica noted on Monday that the administration’s claims on civilian casualties, even when measured against its own different numbers at different times, “do not add up.” For instance, an administration official told the Times last month that total civilian deaths in Pakistan were “in the single digits” throughout all of Obama’s tenure. However, an official told McClatchy in April 2011 that “about 30″ civilians had died in strikes in a 12-month period from August 2009 through August 2010. (See ProPublica’s interactive chart.)

The top U.N. rights official Navi Pillay, in the context of disputes with the Pakistani government over the drone strikes, hinted at the results of the new report in comments earlier this month: “Drone attacks do raise serious questions about compliance with international law, in particular the principle of distinction and proportionality,” she said.

The Puerto Rico Police Department (PRPD) “commits serious and rampant abuses in violation of the United States Constitution, the Puerto Rico Constitution, and the United States’ human rights commitments,” say the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in a new report, released today, on police practices in Puerto Rico. The ACLU conducted a six-month investigation of police practices, finding that the PRPD is “plagued by a culture of violence and corruption” that has been allowed to “run amok for years.”

The report details the PRPD’s abuses including: the unjustified use of lethal force; beatings of black, poor and Dominican men; excessive use of force against peaceful protesters and failure to police and investigate reports of domestic violence and rape. “The PRPD is steeped in a culture of unrestrained abuse and near-total impunity,” wrote Jennifer Turner, ACLU Human Rights Researcher and report author. “The issues plaguing the PRPD predate the administration of the current Governor, Luis Fortuño, and without farreaching reforms, the abuses will continue.”

The ACLU compiled a video of the PRPD’s violence against unarmed protesters. Watch it:

From 2005 to 2010, ten percent of the police force, over 1,700 PRPD officers, were arrested for criminal activity including assault, theft, domestic violence, drug trafficking and murder [PDF]. That figure is nearly three times higher than the number of New York Police Department (NYPD) officers arrested in a comparable five-year period even though the NYPD is twice the size of the PRPD.

By most objective measures, the PRPD faces a host of internal problems, including:

In 2010 and 2011, PRPD officers killed at least 21 civilians. The PRPD’s per capita rate of deadly police shootings in 2010 was almost triple that of New York City.

Rape appears to be chronically under reported with only about 1 percent of rapes properly reported to the PRPD.

While the statistics about crime and PRPD activities are shocking, individual cases highlighted in the report offer a disturbing view into the PRPD’s world. For example, an officer who had been arrested eight times and even took a local police chief hostage at gunpoint was reinstated, after which he fatally shot an unarmed teenager and wounded his sister. Despite the series of dangerous, and at time deadly, actions, the officer remained on active duty for several more months before assaulting a court security guard.

The report concludes that “in order to stop the ongoing police abuse and translate planned reforms into real change, a court-enforceable and monitored agreement between the DoJ and the government of Puerto rico that includes a comprehensive reform plan is necessary.”

When Washington’s right-wing wants to take military action to foster Middle Eastern “democracy and freedom,” as Sen. John McCain said attacking Syria would do Monday night on CNN, they often cite the willingness of the U.S.’s Gulf Arab allies to go along with their plans. But if increasing crackdowns against merely dissenting Twitter users is any indication, many of the Gulf Sheikhdoms need to get their own houses in order first.

In recent weeks, rights groups criticized arrests of activists in Kuwait and Bahrain for doing little more than tweeting criticisms of their governments or religion. The crackdown follows the rise of Twitter in these Gulf countries as a central means of political discourse, utilized by a spectrum of dissenters and government supporters, according to the Financial Times. Only dissenters, obviously, face the wrath of their governments. The FT reported:

The arrests –- together with other detentions in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates –- show how social websites are expanding Gulf public life in contrasting and sometimes conflicting directions, as nationals traditionally served only by heavily censored media grapple with rapid social change at home and the political turmoil gripping the Middle East.

On June 7, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said a Kuwaiti court’s ten-year prison sentence for Hamad al-Naqi for the charge of “insulting” the prophet Muhammad “violates human rights standards.” Moreover, al-Naqi’s lawyer told HRW that the conviction also came on national security grounds because of insults against neighboring rulers.

In Bahrain, human rights activist Nabeel Rajab was arrested on June 6 for the second time in as many months, this time for calling on the country’s prime minister to step down. “Nabeel Rajab’s comments concern political discussion and therefore are clearly protected under his right to free speech,” said HRW deputy Middle East director Joe Stork of the case. Last month, Amnesty International criticized Bahrain’s Sunni Muslim rulers for their crackdown on the Shia majority’s political rights, including Rajab’s arrest for “insulting” the government (he already faced charges of participating in “illegal” demonstrations). Authorities “continue to compound their violations of his basic right to free speech by adding to the charges against him as he continues to criticize the government,” Stork said of the latest arrest.

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Shaul Mofaz, leader of the centrist Kadima party in Israel that recently formed a coalition with the right-wing Likud party led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhu, said in an interview with the Washington Post that on his frist trip to the United States as Israel’s vice prime minister he will appeal for American support for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which according to the Post, he called “the greatest threat to his country”:

What keeps him awake at night is Israel’s drawn-out conflict with the Palestinians and the prospect that it could cause the demise of the Jewish state if Arabs eventually outnumber Jews in Israel.

“Time is not in favor of the state of Israel,” Mofaz, 63, said in an interview in this central Israeli city, where Kadima, the centrist political party he leads, is based. “The generation of the leaders today should decide. This year, next year — we have to decide.” [...]

“It’s about time,” Mofaz said repeatedly, as if practicing a talking point ahead of his visit to Washington, where he is scheduled to begin meetings on Wednesday with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and U.S. security officials.

Mofaz favors a two-state solution, and has offered a plan to create an interim Palestinian state that would eventually give Israel major Jewish settlement blocks in the West Bank in exchange for land swaps with the Palestinians. However, experts note that Mofaz’s demands probably won’t go very far given Kadima’s weak position.

But Mofaz, who has spent his career in the Israeli military, has previously spoken out against a rush to attack Iran over it’s nuclear program and told the Post that there is still time for a diplomatic solution. “Speaking about an Israeli use of force, it is only when the sword will be on our neck and we see that no one is going to act and there is no other option. And today this is not the situation,” Mofaz said. “There is, today, time and room for diplomacy and for sanctions.”