Palestinians mourn Castro. Amnesty calls him "progressive but flawed."

Mahmoud Abbas ordered public displays of mourning today to mark the death of Fidel Castro.

From the English website of the PFLP terror group:

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine extends its condolences to the Cuban people, the Palestinian people and the revolutionary movements of the world upon the loss of the former prime minister and president of Cuba and the historic international revolutionary leader, Comrade Fidel Castro Ruz, on Friday, November 25, 2016.
Castro’s internationalist revolutionary commitment to fighting imperialism and capitalism – manifest in the revolutionary victory against US imperialism and its puppet Batista regime in the 1959 Cuban revolution – conistently stood with the oppressed peoples of the world in their confrontation of imperialism, Zionism, racism and capitalism. Throughout his life, Fidel was a supporter and an example of revolutionary struggle in Latin America, in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador and throughout the continent. From Angola to South Africa, Palestine to Mozambique, Bolivia to El Salvador, Castro’s legacy of international revolutionary solidarity and struggle continues to serve as an example in practice that transcends borders toward revolution, democracy and socialism.

The DFLP terror group made these posters:

Fatah also mourned with this vintage (badly edited) PLO poster of Castro and Arafat, saying that they will have a memorial service today for him in a Ramallah hotel:

So-called human rights group Amnesty International was conflicted over the death of someone who was responsible for the murder of thousands of his people. But the worst they could say about him was that he did not allow freedom of expression:

"There are few more polarising political figures than Fidel Castro, a progressive but deeply flawed leader."

"Access to public services such as health and education for Cubans were substantially improved by the Cuban revolution and for this, his leadership must be applauded. However, despite these achievements in areas of social policy, Fidel Castro’s 49-year reign was characterised by a ruthless suppression of freedom of expression.

“The state of freedom of expression in Cuba, where activists continue to face arrest and harassment for speaking out against the government, is Fidel Castro’s darkest legacy."

It adds:

After his accession to power following the 1959 revolution in Cuba, Castro oversaw dramatic improvements in access to human rights such as health and housing. This was accompanied by an unprecedented drive to improve literacy rates across the country.

At the very end, it grudgingly mentions that Castro executed "hundreds" of people in trials. "Amid accusations that many of the trials were unfair, Castro responded: 'Revolutionary justice is not based on legal precepts, but on moral conviction... we are not executing innocent people or political opponents. We are executing murderers and they deserve it.'"

Amnesty is way more upset over Cuba's restrictions on Internet usage than on Castro's legacy of blood.

Here is what Amnesty doesn't bother to mention, from the WSJ in 2005:

The Cuba Archive project (www.cubaarchive.org) has already begun the heavy lifting by attempting to document the loss of life attributable to revolutionary zealotry. The project, based in Chatham, N.J., covers the period from May 1952 -- when the constitutional government fell to Gen. Fulgencio Batista -- to the present. It has so far verified the names of 9,240 victims of the Castro regime and the circumstances of their deaths. Archive researchers meticulously insist on confirming stories of official murder from two independent sources.

Cuba Archive President Maria Werlau says the total number of victims could be higher by a factor of 10. Project Vice President Armando Lago, a Harvard-trained economist, has spent years studying the cost of the revolution and he estimates that almost 78,000 innocents may have died trying to flee the dictatorship. Another 5,300 are known to have lost their lives fighting communism in the Escambray Mountains (mostly peasant farmers and their children) and at the Bay of Pigs. An estimated 14,000 Cubans were killed in Fidel's revolutionary adventures abroad, most notably his dispatch of 50,000 soldiers to Angola in the 1980s to help the Soviet-backed regime fight off the Unita insurgency.

The death of Castro exposes the double standard of the Left, the so-called "human rights community"  as well as the so-called Palestinian "moderates" and their friends who are so enamored with this symbol of the fight against imperialism and capitalism that they are willing to overlook mass murder.

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