"There’s a sucker born every minute.” The words are generally attributed to my fellow Nutmegger, "master showman” P.T. (Phineas Taylor) Barnum, creator and promoter of the Greatest Show On Earth^®. No one better understands and uses the Sucker Concept than does Hamas.

Last week’s "Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza” followed by the still continuing "Great Breakout from Gaza” had all the earmarks and trappings of a SideShow at an old fashioned Three-Ring Circus. Both were productions created and promoted by Hamas terrorists. Nowadays war is waged more in the press than on the battlefield. Photos and video are more powerful than tanks and artillery. Smart bombs take out targets. Images stop offensives. Soldiers win battles. PR consultants win wars. In today’s world of instant communication more than ever before Rudyard Kipling’s words ring true, "The first victim of war is truth.”

Give the Devil his due. Hamas terrorists are not ignorant, dirty, craggy-looking individuals wearing robes, sitting around in the sand, scheming against the Infidels. A large percentage of Hamas terrorists are well-educated, insightful, especially savvy and creative individuals. The Masters of Media Manipulation, they sit around conference tables, scheming against the Infidels. And their productions are world-class, perhaps even better than the productions of the Lebanon based Hezbollah.

If you remember, Hamas surprised the Bush Administration by winning a clear majority in the Palestinian Legislature. But its popular mandate to rule was thwarted by Palestinian President Abbas’s maneuverings. President Abbas is a member of the Old Guard Fatah party, the rival Hamas so soundly defeated at the election booth. This summer Hamas’s Gaza army also defeated the Fatah in "battle,” driving all Fatah security and police personnel out of the Gaza Strip. In this instance I define "battle” as Western trained and equipped - our US taxpayer dollars at work - Fatah security forces shedding their uniforms, throwing away their weapons and running away without so much as even destroying their secret records and files and the special equipment given them by America. Let me put it this way, Fatah security personnel are even bigger losers than this year’s Miami Dolphins, no disrespect to the Dolphins intended.

Once completely in control of Gaza, Hamas’s training military forces and manufacturing weaponry and munitions surged. The firing of rockets and mortar bombs into Israeli towns was no longer interfered with nor impeded. The stream of arms, explosives, terrorists and funding - millions of dollars in cash in super-sized suitcases, being smuggled into the Gaza Strip from Egypt, turned into a raging river. The smuggling was now de facto Hamas "State-Run.” The flow of Hamas members from Gaza into Egypt and from Egypt to terrorist training camps world-wide, for all manner of advanced training, increased dramatically. Egypt did little more than turn a blind-eye to the smuggling, as it had been doing for time in memorial.

However the refusal of most of the nations of the world to provide funding to the illegitimate Hamas Gaza government was causing Hamas some angst. Government workers salaries were not being paid, unemployment and poverty were increasing. Most Gazans were denied entrance into Egypt. They were only allowed in to Israel for medical care or other humanitarian or demonstrated legitimate reason. Whenever the daily, constant and continuous drizzle of rockets and mortar bombs fired from Gaza into Israel turned into a steady, hard rain or had serious consequence that the Israeli government could not ignore, sanctions were imposed on Gaza. The border crossings from Israel were closed to all but humanitarian concerns. And the residents of Gaza, feeling "captive,” grew restless, resentful and rebellious. As the saying goes, "Something had to give.” Hamas decided it would be the border between Egypt and Gaza, literally.

No one can honestly state that there was no suffering in the Gaza Strip. There was. I would argue it was sustained by the terrorists exploiting Israeli’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip as an opportunity to gain forward firebases for Kassam rockets instead of an opportunity to gain a higher standard of living and better lives for the population. We can argue about that. But Israel has been sensitive to the constant charges of its committing War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity by blockading Gaza. Such accusations go all the way back to ancient times and Samson’s destruction of the Philistine Temple of Dagan in Biblical Gaza.

Food flows into the Gaza Strip, as does medicine, fuel and all manner of essential goods. There are a great number of humanitarian organizations, NGOs, as well as the UN, trucking such supplies into Gaza. Israel keeps track of the amounts of food and other basic essential commodities. It wants to be sure a crisis does not happen. Doing otherwise would simply be stupid. While to my mind the current Israeli government is deserving of enormous criticism, it is not stupid. But it is incapable of effective communication with the media, both foreign and domestic. It is also incapable of figuring out what Hamas will do next and thus is left to merely react.

So Hamas decided upon a two-step plan. First it would create an artificial humanitarian crisis. It could easily manufacturing genuine suffering by seeing to it that essential commodities were not readily obtainable. Hamas held the keys to the warehouses and to public services like electricity generating and distribution. Creating its bogus crisis was even easier and became more believable once Hamas put Israel in a position where it had no alternative but to act on its public threat and actually decreased the amount of the fuel getting into Gaza. This Hamas accomplished by unleashing a barrage of Kassam rockets and mortar fire on Israeli towns lasting until Israel responded with the sanctions Hamas desired be imposed.

And right on cue, exactly as Hamas preplanned and orchestrated, it turned off the electricity and provided a wonderful photo opportunity in time for the Israeli and Arab world evening news, BBC, CNN, FOX TV News, Al-Jazeera and most newspapers on the planet.

Hamas the master showman absolutely caught the Israeli government with its collective pants down. Before Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesmen and phalanx of spin-doctors, media consultants, communications experts and talking heads could get their acts together (they never have, not this time, not ever) it was game, set and match to the Hamas. The world media rushed to broadcast the Hamas story line of a humanitarian crisis caused by Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Few media outlets even bothered to mention that whatever action Israel was taking, that action was a response to an unprecedented 150 rockets and an even greater number of mortar bombs in the space of 3-4 days being fired from Gaza into Israeli towns. P.T. was absolutely right. There really is a sucker born every minute and the world’s press is certainly included in his astute observation.

Now that Hamas had sold its work of fiction, it was time to implement the second step in its plan – bringing about the cessation of all supervision of border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Egyptian supervision of the border, poor as that supervision was, and Israeli, Egyptian and International supervision of the border crossings was semi-effective in preventing the means of waging war from getting into the hands of Hamas’s Gaza forces. The tunnels between Egyptian Rafah and Gaza and the over-ground smuggling routes no longer satisfied the quantity of arms, munitions, terrorists and other contraband such as illegal drugs Hamas needed to move. So a few days into the "humanitarian crisis” Hamas personnel went out overnight, planted numerous demolition charges and blew huge gaps in the wall that separated the Gaza Strip from Egypt. At best Egypt was complicit by its inaction. Ever since the flow of people, goods and contraband in and out of Gaza has been beyond belief. Hamas has used bulldozers to turn the gaps it created, at first mere pedestrian pathways, into highways now traveled by cars, buses and trucks. As of this morning there are reports that surface-to-air missiles have been brought into Gaza, along with great numbers of arms, ammunition, explosives, RPGs, rockets, terrorists and $$$s.

Nor has the traffic been simply in and out of Gaza. The main road along Israel’s border with Egypt, and a dozen tourist locations in that area, are closed. There is grave concern that terrorists in large numbers, who were until now unable to leave Gaza by passing through border crossings, are now free and circulating in Sinai, already positioning themselves to carry out terror attacks in Israel.

Hamas is laughing in its non-alcoholic beer! It has scored a huge PR victory. Moreover it has destroyed all normal, rational, conventional and internationally practiced immigration and customs supervision of an international border. The means with which to wage all-out war with Israel are now pouring into what is now truly Gaza-Hamastan. As of noon Sunday Al-Jazerra was reporting that Egypt continues to do nothing to reestablish regulated border crossing and that Hamas bulldozers continue widening the holes blown in the international border and turning them into permanent highways out of and into the Gaza Strip. The prospects of a full-scale regional war in the Middle East, unlike any of those in the past, have just increased exponentially.

Only one word accurately describes the situation - FUBAR!