Chan's Personal Blog

Hamas looked set to complete its conquest of the entire Gaza Strip. "Muhammad Swairki, 28, a cook for Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's presidential guard, was thrown to his death, with his hands and legs tied, from a 15-story apartment building in Gaza City on Sunday."

"Muhammad al-Ra'fati, a Hamas supporter and mosque preacher, was thrown from a Gaza City high-rise apartment building."

"Fatah gunmen began firing mortars and rocket-propelled grenades at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City."

"Hamas gunmen attacked the home of a Fatah security official with mortars and grenades, killing his 14-year-old son and three women inside, security officials said. Other Fatah gunmen stormed the house of a Hamas lawmaker and burned it down."

"Jamal Abu Jadian, a top Fatah commander, fled his home in the northern Gaza Strip Tuesday evening dressed as a woman to avoid dozens of Hamas militiamen who had attacked it. When he arrived at a hospital a few hundred meters away from his house, he was discovered by a group of Hamas gunmen, who took turns shooting him in the head with automatic rifles. They literally blew his head off with more than 40 bullets,' said a doctor at Kamal Udwan Hospital."

Hamas has now completed its conquest of Gaza. The last Fatah fighters were captured and then machine-gunned to death in front of their wives and children. The Fatah compound in Gaza City will be turned into a mosque; Gaza itself into an Islamic state.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has struck back against Hamas in the West Bank, where Hamas is weak and Mr. Abbas's Fatah is stronger.

On Wednesday, Mr. Abbas declared a state of emergency. His forces have raided Hamas offices in Ramallah and Nablus and arrested some 1,500 Hamas activists. Mr. Abbas is now appealing for more American and Western military and economic aid. And he has requested an international police force for Gaza.

Good luck with that last request. Gaza looks like an Arabic Somalia, a beachfront Fallujah. No Western government will volunteer to deploy forces into such an environment.

But if Mr. Abbas is refused troops, he will certainly now receive massive new infusions of money. The big idea sweeping Western capitals is that Fatah must learn to compete with Hamas as a provider of social services. Over the years, billions of dollars of aid have been donated to the Palestinian Authority. In 2006, the Palestinians collected more Western aid per capita than any other people on earth: US$300 per year, as compared to US$44 for sub-Saharan Africa.

Much of that money has been stolen or wasted.

Even worse, because UN relief agencies have allowed themselves to be penetrated and captured by Hamas, much of the Western aid has ended up reinforcing exactly the people we supposedly want to defeat.

It's not very realistic to imagine that Fatah can suddenly change its ways and learn to run aid programs honestly. Fatah is a criminal gang, and it inevitably acts like one.

Karl -- a.k.a. John Ukec Lueth Ukec, the Sudanese ambassador to Washington -- held a news conference at the National Press Club yesterday to respond to President Bush's new sanctions against his regime. In his hour-long presentation, he described a situation in his land that bore no relation to reality.

Genocide in the Darfur region? "The United States is the only country saying that what is happening in Darfur is a genocide," Ukec shouted, gesticulating wildly and perspiring from his bald crown. "I think this is a pretext."

Ah. So what about the more than 400,000 dead? "See how many people are dying in Darfur: None," he said.

And the 2 million displaced? "I am not a statistician."

Khartoum Karl went on to say that, all evidence to the contrary, his government does not support the murderous Janjaweed militia. "It cannot happen," he said, "so rule it out." As for the Sudanese regime itself: "We are the agents of peace, people like me, my colleagues who are in the central government of Sudan."

What's more, the good and peaceful leaders of Sudan were prepared to retaliate massively: They would cut off shipments of the emulsifier gum arabic, thereby depriving the world of cola.

"I want you to know that the gum arabic which runs all the soft drinks all over the world, including the United States, mainly 80 percent is imported from my country," the ambassador said after raising a bottle of Coca-Cola.

A reporter asked if Sudan was threatening to "stop the export of gum arabic and bring down the Western world."

"I can stop that gum arabic and all of us will have lost this," Khartoum Karl warned anew, beckoning to the Coke bottle. "But I don't want to go that way."