Who is Oppressing Whom in Gaza?

Organizations like Reuters and the Associated Press are prone to showing the horrors of life in the Gaza Strip through alleged journalism and a plethora of photographs. In the case of Reuters, doctored photographs on occasion, which has been proven. Here in the United States, nightly news shows quiver over the chance to show another Israeli "attack" on the people of Gaza or the effects of the blockade on the huddled masses.

But when a revelation such as has been offered recently of the splendor and prosperity in the region comes to light, those organizations choose to ignore it. This, of course, makes it easy for those who do not wish to believe it to cry foul over the sources that do report on it. On July 20th, I wrote about the subject in Adversaries of Veracity, as did many other blogs like mine, and still it was dismissed or ignored.

Many people who condemned the Flotilla incident of late May are probably unaware of the layout of the region and the circumstances of the situation over there, preferring to get their opinions from the likes of the anti-Semite Helen Thomas. But a quick look at the accompanying map reveals that the Gaza Strip enjoys roughly fifty miles of beachfront property on the Mediterranean Sea.

Recently Egyptian journalist Ashraf Abu al-Houl took a trip to Gaza and was surprised by what he saw, declaring that "in actual terms, Gaza is not under siege". In fact, he said that what he witnessed was a sense of absolute prosperity. "A sense of absolute prosperity prevails, as manifested by the grand resorts along and near Gaza's coast. Further, the site of the merchandise and luxuries filling the Gaza shops amazed me,” he reported.

He was quick to add a caveat, however. From the website LibertysFlame: Concerned that his initial impression of prosperity may have been misleading, “I toured the new resorts, most of which are quite grand, as well as the commercial markets, to verify my hypothesis. The resorts and markets have come to symbolize prosperity, and to prove that the siege is formal or political, not economic,” Al-Houl said.

Gaza's markets are filled with a “plethora of goods,” he wrote. Prices on many items, particularly food, are much lower than they are in Egypt, he said. With goods entering Gaza from both smuggling tunnels to Egypt and humanitarian aid shipments coming in via Israeli crossings, “supply is much greater than demand,” he stated.

The evident prosperity is not enjoyed by all, or even most, of Gaza's residents, according to Al-Houl. The problem is the vast differences in the distribution of wealth. The luxury resorts and wide range of consumer goods are enjoyed by “only a few groups,” he said, primarily those who own smuggling tunnels to Egypt and those who work for international organizations such as the United Nations' UNRWA and who do not include or aid the rest of the population.

Most of the new resorts “are owned by members, or associates, of Hamas,” he reported. “In addition, the Hamas municipalities charge high fees, in Gaza terms, for the use of public beaches,” he added.

According to al-Houl, only about 20% of the population of Gaza enjoys this "absolute prosperity", while 80% are left to languish in the despair of which the rest of the world routinely hears. Is Israel to blame for such a disparity? Where is the condemnation from the world of Hamas and particularly the United Nations workers who bask in luxury while the majority suffer?

According to the Jerusalem Post Palestinians in Gaza have invested twenty million dollars in resorts. The good news is that much of that money has been diverted from investment in the tunnels to Egypt, in part because the Israeli and Egyptian crackdowns have made it too risky to invest there. This is yet another positive development in the region that ABC News will not be broadcasting.

Perhaps al-Houl's caveat was designed to prevent the world from believing that Gaza was anything but a cesspool of suffering, but in my mind, he only succeeded in a stinging indictment of Hamas and the U.N. Of course, places like this are the only ones where you will learn of it. Don't expect any sort of exposé to come blaring out of your television one evening while eating dinner.

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Illegal Alien Bucket Brigade

Since the federal government seems hell bent on preventing its member states from enforcing immigration laws it refuses to enforce itself, I have a suggestion that may just work. It will require an enormous amount of cooperation between the various states in the Union, but I believe that most of them are more than ready for such laborious efforts. Frustrated by the ever-increasingly intrusive powers wielded by the federal government and its encroachment on states' rights, it might be time for the states to exercise their own rights that will be formulated in an unassailable manner.

In Colonial times, Philadelphia had a logistics problem in fighting fires in areas well developed and already having relatively tall buildings for the time. With no pumping system, it was difficult to get sufficient water to douse flames to the site of the fire, so some innovation was required.

In 1736, the Union Fire Company was formed with the assistance of Benjamin Franklin, whose name has sometimes been associated with the organization. It was a volunteer fire department, the first of its kind in Philadelphia, and one of the principles borne of its existence was the "bucket brigade". Each member of the force agreed to furnish for any alarm six leather buckets, at personal expense, to fight the flames.

They would form a line with the buckets with the first man at a well and the last at the fire, and pass buckets full of water toward the fire and the empty ones back toward the well, until the fire was extinguished. The teamwork proved much more effective than men with buckets running to and fro in haphazard fashion. Even common ants know the benefits of cooperation.

To defeat the progressive notion that illegal aliens can be protected by a federal government reticent to enforce its own laws because it's afraid to lose its perceived voting base, the states can form their own version of the bucket brigade and effectively put out the fire.

While the federal government can claim - with efficiency, apparently - that it supersedes the states' authority regarding federal law, the states still have a degree of sovereignty regarding local matters and the laws governing them. For example, states can make it illegal to reside within its boundaries if one is not a legal United States citizen. While this might be perceived as merely shoving one state's problems into neighboring states, that's where the enormous cooperation comes into play.

Rather than the state of Montana hauling a truckload of captured illegal aliens down to the Mexican border repeatedly, they could have an extradition-style agreement with Wyoming to accept custody at its southern border. Wyoming could then transport the prisoners to its southern border with Utah, and so Utah to Arizona. Once in Arizona, that state could either arrange with the Mexican government to accept its citizens, or, they could be remanded to the custody of Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department are ICE certified, trained and contracted to aid the federal government in immigration enforcement pursuant to section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act; Delegation of Immigration Authority. I somehow doubt that Sheriff Joe or his deputies would mind the responsibility of being the final arbiters of the disposition of criminal invaders in America.

It seems perfectly fitting that such a solution could have been unknowingly conceived by one of America's founding fathers.

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Ambiguous Law Enforcement

Well, chalk one up for the Left and their insidious drive to destroy America. Yesterday in Phoenix U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton issued a temporary injunction against parts of SB1070, a law approved by the Arizona legislature to protect the state from waves of illegal aliens entering. The Obama Justice Department (DOJ) did not see it that way, however, and sued Arizona to block the law.

Claiming that the law would undermine the federal government's efforts to enforce immigration policy, the DOJ convinced Bolton that the law was unconstitutional. On its face, it sounds like a reasonable argument, but one must look deeper to learn that it is an exercise in hypocrisy of the highest order.

For starters Arizona - under veritable siege along its border with Mexico - instituted its own law precisely because the federal government was derelict in its duty to protect the state from foreign invasions. So for the federal government to sue due to alleged obstruction on Arizona's part is simply ludicrous. What's worse is that Washington, having refused to enforce its own laws, has now insisted that Arizona cease and decist from doing so either.

Perhaps more confounding is the existence of section 287(g) of the
Immigration and Nationality Act; Delegation of Immigration Authority. Effective in September of 1996, The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) later added section 287(g) in June of 2007. From the website ice.gov:

This authorizes the secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to enter into agreements with state and local law enforcement agencies, permitting designated officers to perform immigration law enforcement functions, pursuant to a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA), provided that the local law enforcement officers receive appropriate training and function under the supervision of sworn U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.

Many of those contracted and trained were officers in the police forces of Arizona. It wasn't until Obama became president that the supervision of those officers under ICE ceased. One must wonder why, but also question the wisdom of that cessation and the subsequent actions to halt their activities to protect Americans.

An even better question would involve the federal government and its deliberate ignorance of the more obstructive policies of sanctuary cities. Sanctuary cities refuse to cooperate with the federal immigration laws, thereby stymieing enforcement, an infraction far worse than what may be considered a form of usurpation by SB1070 yet one that has not garnered a hint of disapproval under Obama, much less a taxpayer-funded lawsuit.

There are currently one hundred and forty-three sanctuary cities across the United States, cities that refuse to question the legality of potential violators of federal immigration law and resist the obligation to turn in those they know are in violation of such. That is 143 cities aiding and abetting criminal elements amongst us with impunity. Yet Arizona gets hauled into court.

In summary, the United States of America has laws that prohibit unlawful entry, but now refuses to criminalize criminal behavior. It punishes those who take up the mantel of justice and rewards those who ignore it through blatant inattentiveness, and chastises legal citizens for protesting against such foolhardiness.

By the time this is all sorted out, most likely in a final showdown before the Supreme Court, it becomes increasingly likely that there will be another shameful slap down at next year's State of the Union address by the president, provided the Justices show up then.

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