another example of the overwhelming generosity...
another example of the overwhelming generosity...
http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=80097&ran=117573
Time to put your money where your mouth is
By DAVE ADDIS, The Virginian-Pilot
? January 5, 2005
Monday afternoon on CNN, a remarkable scene appeared during Wolf Blitzer?s report on the Asian tsunami relief efforts: A young Indonesian guy stood at the door of an American military helicopter, eagerly awaiting a handout of American food. He was wearing an angry, orange-on-black T-shirt that celebrated Osama bin Laden.
As with any human who is subject to regrettable bursts of low thinking, my first thought was, ?Why don?t you go find Osama and ask him for a sandwich??
Blitzer didn?t shrink from that thought, either.
He confronted his guest, William Cohen, a former senator and defense secretary, with that very question: Why should we help people who hate us?
Cohen, a moderate Republican, gave a predictably thoughtful, Cohen-like answer. He, too, was annoyed by the guy in the Islamic revolution T-shirt. But when people are hurting on such an unimaginable scale, he said, we don?t discriminate on the basis of religion or politics.
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We help because we should, he said, and because we can. Because it?s the right thing to do, a moral obligation. Because even with our military stretched so thin through the war in Iraq, no other government on the planet can pull off an operation like this faster and better and in such overwhelming numbers.
A moment of news-anchor perfection followed: Blitzer picked up that ?moral obligation? football and threw it 80 yards for a touchdown: If there?s a moral obligation to help, he asked, then where are the Muslim nations ? especially the oil-rich Persian Gulf states ? at a time when Indonesia, the most populous Muslim nation on the planet, has been dropped to its knees?
Ohhhhh, good question, Wolfman. Bill Cohen said something along the lines that those nations should be ashamed, then he and Wolf moved on to other matters.
But it?s a question that deserves an answer. So, courtesy of the Reuters news agency of Britain, here is a synopsis of tsunami-relief aid pledged as of Tuesday. I have re-ranked the list into unabashedly nonpolitically correct order, beginning with the ?infidels?:
Japan, $500 million; United States, $350 million; Norway, $180 million; Britain, $96 million; Italy, $95 million; Sweden, $80 million; Spain, $68 million; China, $61 million; France, $56 million; Denmark, $55 million; Australia, $47 million; European Union, $40 million; Netherlands, $34 million; Canada, $33 million; Germany, $27 million; Switzerland, $23 million; Ireland, $14 million; Portugal, $11 million; South Korea, $5 million; Taiwan, $5 million; African Union, $100,000 (the AU nations have human-calamity problems of their own, but should be congratulated for caring).
Here are the predominantly Muslim nations on the list:
Qatar, $25 million; Kuwait, $10 million; Saudi Arabia, $10 million; Algeria, $2 million; Bahrain, $2 million; Libya, $2 million; United Arab Emirates, $2 million; Turkey $1.25 million.
We can forgive Afghanistan and Iraq for their absence, for obvious reasons. But where is Iran?
Egypt? Pakistan? Oman? Morocco? The oil-soaked sultanate of Brunei? Where are Jordan, Syria and Lebanon? And why are Bahrain, Kuwait and the Saudis such cheapskates when their spiritual brothers and sisters are dying by the tens of thousands?
Kuwait is a good case in point. Kuwait is running a $10 billion budget surplus, according to The New York Times, and recently distributed huge wads of cash ? some $700 million ? to its citizens, courtesy of a doubling of the price of oil.
Kuwaitis, being wealthy, do not like to get their hands dirty. They import tens of thousands of foreign workers ? more than half of Kuwait?s population, many from Indonesia and India ? to cook their meals, scrub their toilets, tend to their children and wax their Jaguars.
They are not heartless. A Kuwaiti newspaper reminded its citizens the other day that they should allow their domestic help to use the telephone to check back home to see if their families have been wiped out.
Gee, thanks, boss. May Allah, praised be his name, reward your boundless munificence.
In the early days of this disaster, President Bush was subjected to the usual international sneers for his shuffling silence and our initial, paltry-looking pledge. Bush was embarrassingly slow off the mark, that?s true. But he and the U.S. military ? particularly the Navy ? have rebounded, as have other wealthy nations, East and West. Among the first to reach Sri Lanka after the disaster was a fast-moving medical team from Israel.
Meanwhile, the leaders of several nations in the Middle East, and especially the oil-rich Persian Gulf, are where they always are: stroking their beards, sucking tea through a sugar cube, making excuses and wallowing in their victimhood while the ?infidels? haul the freight.
I sincerely hope that the young guy in the Osama bin Laden T-shirt, the one standing in line by the U.S. Navy helicopter, got fed. I hope his family is OK. I hope he survives, and that he and those who are close to him can rebuild their lives.
And I hope that the next time the mullahs try to rally that young man to sharpen his sword and slay his enemies, he will give a fair amount of thought to that proposition.
