It seems the Philistines of Gaza are not waiting for Egyptian ambulances to evacuate their wounded from Gaza.

At about 1:10 on Sunday, December 28, 2008, the BBC anchor Peter Dobbie found out, along with his audience, that there were 40 Egyptian ambulances ready to evacuate wounded, and lorries full of medical goods sent by Qatar to restock Gazan hospitals, waiting at the border crossing in Egypt. (According to another source there were also 50 Egyptian doctors ready to go into the Strip to help.) Since Dobbie and his audience had heard the repeated complaint from the people in Gaza that the hospitals were overwhelmed by the injured and desperately lacking in supplies, one would have expected the border to be full of purposeful activity. Instead, nothing was happening. The Gazan side lay silent.

A real journalist, someone with a smell for revealing anomalies, would have immediately recognized this as an important story to follow up on. After all, Dobbie had not hesitated to interrupt and challenge Israeli spokesmen on precisely the issues at stake: the disproportion between Israeli-caused fatalities and Israeli-suffered fatalities, the inevitable suffering of innocent civilians when such a bombing campaign takes place in so densely populated an area. "The math doesn't work," said Dobbie, implying what commentators emphasized elsewhere -- the "disproportionate use of force" the Israelis were employing.

So here was a perfect issue with which to challenge Hamas spokesmen: If they were so distraught at the loss of life of their own people, why didn't they take care of them? What on earth would possess Hamas not to avail themselves of what they pleadingly told the world they so desperately needed? As the honest and courageous Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey put it, "My head hurts."

First Hamas refuses to let Egypt receive the wounded through the Rafah crossing, saying that Egypt has to open the entire crossing for the million and a half Ghazan, or else they won't get to treat their wounded.. Think about this one for a minute. Let it simmer. When it makes sense to you, let me know.

Then Israeli pundits say that while the air strike is successful, they might need to do a ground incursion, thus proving that Israel is a nation suffering from an Alzheimer epidemic and doesn't remember anything about the last war with Lebanon.

And then the Palestinians in Ghaza break through the Rafah crossing, and kill an egyptian officer in the process, and nobody minds, of course..

BAGHDAD - A suicide bomber on a bicycle blew himself up Sunday amid a crowd of demonstrators in northern Iraq who were protesting Israel's airstrikes on Gaza, killing one demonstrator and wounding 16 others, Iraqi police said.

The bomber rode his bicycle into the demonstration of about 1,300 people in the center of the northern city of Mosul, said a police officer who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with news media.

The demonstration was organized by the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party. The party's Mosul spokesman, Yahiya Abid Mahjoub, complained that police and the Iraqi army had not taken security precautions for the demonstration.

There has been no claim of responsibility for the attack, the officer said.

"The ones who targeted our brothers in Gaza are the same who targeted us in Mosul today. They are agents of Israel," Mahjoub said.

Getting back to the story at hand re: the ambulances. Dead Philistines are not a tragedy for Hamas. They are a weapon of war. Which is why the help offered has been refused. Saving Philistine lives serves no useful purpose for Hamas.

And Hamas is definitely a purpose driven organization. Well, what is their purpose?

Hamas Parliament Member Fathi Hammad tells Al-Aqsa TV, the television station of the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip, that Allah hates the Jews more than anyone and that the 15 million Jews in the world are worse than the 4.5 billion infidels in the world. Hammad adds that killing one Jew is like killing 30 million Jews in the eyes of Allah.

You know, the last time there was this much Jew hatred in the world some very ugly things happened. The Muslim fanatics explain their position with the words "We love death." It is unfortunate that the fanatics can't all be rounded up and accommodated in short order. I guess we will just have to deal with them in penny packets.

I think this all can be encapsulated in a very short phrase.

Cross Posted at Power and Control