Typical of evil Western Zion Nazi media demonising poor honest Palestinians going about their lawful business lauching rockets, despatching suicide bombers, honor killings and beating up women for wearing nail varnish and laughing in public. Mainstream media didn’t report that, did they?

Freed from scrutiny by the EU and US focus on whether Israelis add extensions to their homes in Jerusalem, Hamas continues the quiet work of turning the Gaza strip into a Taliban-style Islamic state. A few days ago came the news that the Gaza Strip’s most senior judge “has ordered all female lawyers to wear headscarves and a long, dark colored cloak under their black robes when they appear in court beginning September.”

This is part of a general crackdown on female professionals — or maybe it’s just females. It follows the news several weeks ago, reported by Khaled Abu Toameh of the Jerusalem Post, that Hamas policemen attempted to arrest a female Palestinian journalist “under the pretext that she came to a Gaza beach dressed immodestly and was seen laughing in public.”

The journalist, Asma al-Ghul, said that the policemen instead confiscated her passport. Since the incident, she added, she has been afraid to leave her home, especially after receiving death threats from anonymous callers….They accused me of laughing loudly while swimming with my friend and failing to wear a hijab,” Ghul told a human rights organization in the Gaza Strip. “They also wanted to know the identity of the people who were with me at the beach and whether they were relatives of mine.”….Ghul said that many Palestinian women have noticed the presence of the police officers at the beaches and other sites. She said that the talk in the Gaza Strip these days was about Hamas’s intention to impose the hijab on all female school children from first to 12th grade.

After reporting this incident in a standard news story for the Jerusalem Post, Khaled incorporated this anecdote into a larger piece titled “Hamas tightens its grip” which he posted on his Hudson Institute blog. Here he talked about the larger issue of a new entity in the strip, the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice security force, which “reports directly to the Ministry of Waqf Affairs and is said to be a copy of units that have long been operating in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. (It reminds me of the unit in Iran which amuses itself by intercepting women who are baring their ankles and administering summary floggings in the street.) The new Gaza force consists “of dozens of plainclothes police officers who patrol beaches, public gardens, restaurants, hair salons and coffee shops to make sure that males and females are not mixing together and that the women are dressed modestly.”

This would seem to be a fairly “sexy” - as they say in the news business - story to me. But the mainstream press is not giving this the attention it deserves. Most reporting is done by one lone Palestinian reporter, Khaled Abu Toameh, who often gets death threats for his pains. Why does the press pack ignore it? Could it be that they are frightened of Hamas? Or just very concerned about “preserving their access” - as one says in the biz? Surely not those swashbuckling international reporters who so bravely stand up to brutal IDF soldiers. Well, I suppose they have far more pressing things to do. Mrs Feinstein down the road in East Jerusalem has just applied for a permit to add a two-room extension to her house to accommodate her daughter’s new baby. The Telegraph