Britain revealed recently a pledge to give £19 million in aid to Gaza. The announcement came a few hours after the flotilla incident in which Israeli commandos stormed a Turkish aid boat transporting baseball bats, knives, out-of-date medicines and suicidal humanitarian aid workers to the tiny Gaza Strip. Andrew Mitchell, the British International Development Secretary, also called on Israel to lift the blockade it has in place to stop weapons entering the region.
Ismail Hernia, a leading Hamas official has declared to the media that the £19 million will be invested in bringing Japanese Sumo wrestling coaches to the Gaza Strip. Puzzled journalists were told that ten of the top Sumo experts from Japan will be invited over as well as the purchasing of thousands of Sumo loincloths which will be converted to bomb belts.
Middle East and Hamas experts are predicting a new intifada in the coming months, probably in parallel with an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear plants. The investment in Sumo coaching is believed to be a new offensive element in the Palestinian’s plans to wipe out the state of Israel. Thousands of Gazan men will be fattened up with the excess food delivered weekly to the Strip and trained in the art of wrestling their opponents to the ground. The martyrs would aim to sit on and suffocate as many of the enemy as possible before blowing themselves up.
The brains behind the latest Hamas initiative is Sheik Yunus al-Wacky who came up with the idea when watching Hamas senior members dining at the exclusive Gaza City hotel. Britain has yet to respond to the decision but it’s expected they will offer cautionary advice to both sides to avoid violence, confrontation and anything which could put a heavy burden on the Middle East peace process.
Israel has refused to comment on the possibility of hundreds of half-naked and obese Arabs running over the border. They are however making contingency plans to strengthen bomb shelters and buildings for fear the act of shiko (the traditional sumo leg stomping) could weaken walls and foundations.
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As an aside, a few dozen people were quite horribly murdered in late-80s and early-90s Japan by a millennial, Buddhist-fundamentalist terrorist cult known as the Aum Shinrikyo, which boasted 1000s of members, some as far afield as Russia, and whose stated aim seemed nothing less than religiously-inspired slaughter and chaos. (I should know: I was living in the country at the time.)
Did the government of Japan declare itself to be at war with an enemy capable of destroying the both country and democracy? Did it introduce a repressive raft of ‘anti-terror’ measures, suspend Habeas Corpus and issue scaremongering justifications for the use of torture? Did it invade Russia, for harbouring terrorists?
No on all 3 counts — instead it employed, simply but thoroughly, the existing criminal laws, sending police en masse to raid cult establishments, seize all its funds and properties, and round up cult members. Then Japan used the evidence thus gathered (including the testimony of low-ranking, less fanatical members, in exchange for reduced sentences and subject to continuing surveillance by the security services) to assemble such compelling cases against the leaders that most if not all of them ended up getting the death sentence.
No torture, no Guantanamo, no ‘executive presidency’, no Patriot Act — just existing powers of the state coupled with the rule of law versus a terroristic fanaticism that didn’t hesitate to unleash nerve gas on the Tokyo subway. And guess what? The good guys didn’t only win, they remained the good guys in doing so.
NeoConservatives ought to try it sometime.