Pro-Palestinian vs. pro-life: The courts and media are playing favorites
If you obstruct a business operation, damage property, and threaten people, the worst consequence you might face is getting expelled from college. You certainly won’t face charges. Police are arresting some of the pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses across the country, but they are being released with nothing more than a strong talking to (and probably not even that).
So, how is it that two protesters were recently sentenced to years in prison? What could they have done to warrant such treatment? Was it worse than obstructing business, damaging property, or threatening people?
No, they were peacefully protesting. And that’s truly peacefully protesting in the way that is supposed to be a constitutionally protected act and not the way that media defines it, which most people call rioting.
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Fox News recently reported that Lauren Handy was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison for organizing a pro-life protest at a Washington, D.C.-based abortion clinic , while co-defendant John Hinshaw was sentenced to a year and nine months. Prosecutors actually sought a six-year sentence for Handy. Handy and Hinslaw, along with seven others convicted on the same charges, blocked access to the abortion clinic in 2020 while chaining themselves to furniture inside the clinic, according to the indictment.
Although they disrupted the business, they didn’t damage property or threaten or commit violence. Yet, it was determined in a court that their actions deserve imprisonment while pro-Palestinian protesters are encouraged by the lack of action against them to escalate.
"The contrast here with the Pro-Palestine folks shutting down the colleges and even preventing graduation ceremonies and blocking entire highways and interstates in addition to the ongoing attacks … yet there are virtually no ongoing investigations. I think there's kind of a palpable sense of selective prosecution elements that can't be ignored here," Steve Crampton, senior counsel at the Thomas Moore Society told Fox News.
Not only is the law, which is supposed to be fair, being applied with blatant bias, but the comparison goes beyond the comparison between pro-life and pro-Palestinian protests.
Look at how pro-life and pro-abortion protesters are treated.
When the pro-life CompassCare office in Buffalo was firebombed in 2022, it took nearly two months before the police released their first statement on the case. The FBI didn’t even start their investigation until five weeks after the incident.
“And keep in mind this is with several key pieces of evidence, including video surveillance that clearly shows multiple arsonists planning and executing these attacks on the centers,” CompassCare CEO Rev. Jim Harden wrote.
Meanwhile, if someone stands on a public street in front of an abortion clinic and says anything that is perceived as pro-life, they are arrested. The same year CompassCare was firebombed, a similar accident happened to a Planned Parenthood office. This kicked off a multi-agency investigation that resulted in an arrest and charges days later.
As they say, if it wasn’t for double standards, the Democrats might have no standards at all.
If we are expected to trust the system, then it needs to be shown to be trustworthy. It hasn’t been. In fact, now more than ever, the legal system has been applied against the opposition to silence them. There is even a term for it — lawfare. But it does not involve either law or fairness. It is an abuse of power that needs to be stopped.
Jim Rada is an award-winning freelance writer in Pennsylvania who writes on a variety of topics.
