Monday, April 30, 2007
Name That Place
What do you call a place where a man is kidnapped by a rival clan, murdered, and the murder then proclaimed to be a mistake because they'd meant to kill someone else?
What do you call a place where raw sewage flows into an open-air pond; where foreign funds for construction of a modern sewage plant are stolen; and where the sand-bars holding back the sewage are ransacked by building constructors, and sewage pipes turned into homemade terrorist rockets; until a tidal wave of utter filth washes through a village, drowning several people and creating an unbelievable hazard to public hygiene?
What do you call a place that claims to have an elected government, yet has little to no control over law and order, where order is kept -- if at all -- by a 'council of elders', consisting of the heads of the family clans that try every day to kill one another?
The correct name for all these things is The Gaza Strip. And the residents thereof have no one to blame but themselves.
