By Anas Akhzari, Hamas fighter
Gaza City, October 20 - America doesn't scare us. They've been trying to harm us for years, yet here we are, still resisting. What that fatso in the White House doesn't understand is that threatening us with infernal consequences means nothing - it's not as if Gehenna could be any worse than where we are NOW.
Open sewers that overflow. Sewage systems dismantled to make rockets. No investment in drainage infrastructure, so every significant rainfalls brings crippling floods. Corruption and cronyism that make Nero look like an amateur. Complete dependence on international largesse despite decades of putative investment in development. Leaders with no regard for human life except their own. Violent suppression of dissent. Nothing to which Trump's "We will open the gates of Hell" can compare.
Unrelenting heat? We've got that. We also have humidity, what with the Mediterranean Sea and all. The underworld doesn't intimidate us - we built our own! And countless slave-labor children died in the process. Torture? We've devised torments at which Satan himself would recoil.
In Hell, they threaten to open the gates of Gaza, is what I'm saying.
When the Devil needs to train new demons, he comes to us.
Dante was pathetically unimaginative.
The situation would be different if we lived somewhere else, somewhere tolerable, even pleasant, such as some verdant suburb of Cleveland, or a fertile region of western Massachusetts. Yes, plenty of our coreligionists and allies are moving gradually to those places, but that is not, technically, where we live at the moment. Then, the threat of exposing us to the fires and other torments of Hell might move the needle.
Ooh. Needles. That gives me ideas. But I digress.
Were we to inhabit, say, some portion of Suffolk County, New York, or perhaps southern New Jersey, then talk of satanic torture could contrast with the pleasantness and ease of semi-rural life in a modern milieu, and give us pause.
You will note, parenthetically, that I have not invoked any locales in Europe. In the US, air conditioning has become de rigeur even among the working poor, whereas in Europe, even the middle class are too deprived to afford such amenities. Uncomfortably close to our own Gazan situation, and with about the same number of violent Islamist neighbors.
Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time to replenish Hell's fetid feces supply - must go oversee the process of emptying our overflowing sewage conduits into Hell.
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