Tsunami
Posted: Tue Jan 04, 2005 2:56 pm
Non stop news coverage...it's a mad world.
Surely OGG you have something more to say than a media complaint?
I scribe to another web site that I copied and pasted the following. Only if not anything else to open some of your eyes to the world we live in. I hope everyone takes the time to read and respond. My response will be on the next post.
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I have learned a great deal from the response to the disaster in Southeast Asia. I will try to state what I have learned succintly because I want to hear what you feel you have learned from this.
The U.N. is even more worthless than I could have imagined...The oil for food scandal is not over, and it has shown that many of the top officials at the U.N. are corrupt money grubbing whores, selling themselves and abusing measures designed to ease the suffering of people.
Scant time after a top U.N. official Jan Egeland called the U.S. "stingy" he backed away from the statement. This could be because he got a memo from an underling that we bankroll the U.N. in large measure and always have, that we paid more than any other nation for the reconstruction and recovery of Europe under the Marshall plan, that we also rebuilt Japan which was decimated by its own aggression and which attacked us, and that we give more aid than any other country in the world.
Jan is Norwegian and the fact remains that by many measures his country is one of the most generous in the world and he said this, "There are several donors who are less generous than before in a growing world economy," he said, adding that politicians in the United States and Europe "believe that they are really burdening the taxpayers too much, and the taxpayers want to give less. It's not true. They want to give more." http://washingtontimes.com/national/200 ... -7268r.htm I guess what he is saying is that he does not think people are able to give money unless the goverment takes it from them and gives it for them. That is a dim view of humanity. Our private giving currently is almost 10 times the amount of governmental aid initially announced. This is before the planned telethons etc. http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&c ... 104/us_nm/
quake_hollywood_dc_5&printer=1 which I am confident will demonstrate the generosity of America and will establish us as the biggest donors in this disaster.
The fact that Kofi Annan was in Jackson Hole, Wyoming skiing with his family and did not leave his vacation until 3 days after the tsunami would make a much more scathing piece of attack than Bush reading to the children on 9/11, but it will probably be ignored.
China has also been interesting to observe. Japan, perhaps the greatest success of the Marshall plan (a people who seem happy and peaceful and democratic and generous after a devastating war ravaged their nation and most of the people had been committed to a militaristic empire bent on world domination) has temporarily eclipsed America as the greatest donor of aid, yet with all the money being poured in China, their response has been measly http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?f ... ijing.html
Perhaps they were too busy killing people in Sudan or crushing those who seek democracy, or persecuting religious groups like falun gong or evangelical christians. This response should serve to remind Asia that America and Japan are very different in our approach to them than China and as China seeks to become a superpower on par with those nations they will have to take the responsibility that comes with it or they will never be loved.
The final thing that this disaster has made clear is that the much of the Muslim world cannot be bothered to help anyone through charitable giving unless that giving is to the family of murdering terrorists or to set up schools that spread hatred of jews. The excuse currently being offered for why the nations of the middle east which have many more resources per capita than the U.S. are not doing much at all to help is that their charities are closed because of possible ties to terrorists. This is a bold lie, given that Red Crescent has never come under suspicion and remains the largest Muslim relief organization. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/inter ... dspecial4/
04arab.html?ei=5006&en=5ee3e8783fb13da3&ex=1105419600&partner=ALTAVISTA1&pagewanted=print&position=
This link is too long to paste whole, but if you put up both parts you should get an interesting story from the NYT about the lack of aid in the middle east.
Why should Kuwait be giving much more than the U.S.? Those reasons were stated brilliantly by Waleed al-Nusif, the editor in chief of Al Qabas, who said in a telephone interview in the aformentioned story. "The price of oil doubled, so we have no excuse."
The story continued:
"After the paper's editorial appeared, the Kuwaiti cabinet raised its announced donation on Sunday to $10 million, from $2 million, having previously doubled it.
"Kuwait is expected to run a budget surplus this year of roughly $10 billion, and Mr. Nusif noted that the government had just distributed an estimated $700 million to the Kuwaiti people themselves, the public share of the unanticipated revenue.
He said Kuwait should give a minimum of $100 million, not least because many of the country's 1.29 million foreigners of a total population of 2.25 million come from the devastated regions."
America has very little connection the region, but then again America also had very little connection to the Muslims who were being killed in the former country of Yugoslavia, yet we were the nation that stopped the genocide there. In fact America has done more for the Muslim world than any nation in the last twenty years, ending the Taliban in Afghanistan and freeing those people, liberating Iraq from a brutal genocidal dictator, and continuing to provide relief.
If you disagree with me please explain why America should bear the brunt of rebuilding after the worlds natural disasters (which cannot be blamed on us unlike most other things that go wrong) especially in areas where we have little or no connection and less to give than the rich Muslim nations which do nothing to help their stricken brothers and sisters in submission to Allah.
In summary I have learned that America is the most generous nation on earth, which will be obvious after the money for relief is counted, even without taking into account that we are sending an amazing number of military personnel who continue to do the great work they are consistently engaged in which do not involve waging war, but helping people. I have also learned that the U.N. is incapable of helping as much as 1 nation, much less to marshalling the resources of many, and that this could be in large part due to the failure of the current leadership which is implicated in massive scandal and who ignored the problem until media attention demanded action. I have also learned that the Muslim world is not interested in using its vast wealth to help other Muslims, to rebuild Muslim nations. China is also not even close to being able to match America's willingness to help others even in their own backyard.
This disaster has made me grateful to live in a nation this generous. It has made me grateful to live in a nation that is still able to make so many decisions on our own about private aid and how and when to send it. It made me grateful for global information and the ability to pray and seek to help those who are touched by a disaster we would have not even heard of in times past. It gave me pause to be grateful for my life, and for the material comforts that I enjoy. The earthquake in Bam Iran and the one in San Francisco were of similar magnitude but had dramatically different impacts and a great deal of that can be attributed to the wealth and splendor of our nation which builds well and has great responses to tragedies. I am also grateful to see the generosity of other nations like those in Scandanavia (linked to the area through tourism), Canada, Australia, Britain etc. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-p ... 145259.stm I support the idea of debt relief being discussed in the U.K.
This post should in no way be seen as a condemnation of giving which I applaud, but rather a condemnation of the Muslim world and China for their apathetic response to this tragedy and the U.N. for its mishandling and misapprenhension of the real "stingy" people in this world.
I was afraid D.A. or fellow UK Bytoreans would have seen a reaction close by. I wasn't fully aware of the details until the news much later.