HEY, WHERE'S ALL THAT HAMAS LAW AND ORDER WE WERE PROMISED?

We've been hearing a lot of "at least Hamas has brought law and order to the streets of Gaza." Yeah? Let's see how that's going:

Hamas security men scuffled with rowdy Fatah supporters, fired in the air and briefly detained journalists at a protest against the Islamic group's rule in the Strip.... The protesters converged on a former Fatah compound in Gaza City now occupied by Hamas, chanting pro-Fatah slogans, throwing stones and empty bottles and waving yellow Fatah flags. It was the second time in recent weeks that Hamas men have clashed violently with Fatah protesters - and could signal possible cracks in Hamas's two-month-old ironclad rule of Gaza... When several Hamas security men roughed up a Reuters TV cameraman filming the protest and tried to confiscate his camera, protesters surrounded the Hamas men, beat them to the ground and prevented the cameraman's arrest. The demonstrators cursed the Hamas men, calling them "Shiites" - a derogatory allusion to Hamas' alliance with the hardline Shiite Muslim regime in Iran.

Notice that even the relatively uneducated Gaza residents - with their relative lack of Western media - know enough to think that the center-left "Shiites and Sunnis don't cooperate" meme is idiotic. So there are two ways to take this post. One is to play up the education angle, and punchline with something like "apparently even the most hysterical criticisms of the American educational system are true: a total lack of schooling really does leave you smarter than any amount of what passes as advantaged education." The other way is to go with the Western media angle, and make is something like "we're not saying that the absence of CNN and the NYT makes Gaza residents not totally misguided about the reality of the Middle East. That would be a post hoc fallacy, and we've got exams on argumentation theory coming up later this afternoon. But there does appear to be, as the social scientists say, something of a correlation". But it's shaping up to be an incredibly long week, and it's way too early in the morning to be making tough decisions. So on this one, you get to choose your own adventure.

[Cross-posted to Mere Rhetoric]