"Yussef Kanaan, a senior member of the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference, said the West started being generous only after Jan Egeland, the chief emergency co-ordinator for the United Nations, labelled it "stingy" last week.

"It took that harsh statement," he said.

But he stopped short of agreeing the rich Muslim countries should also be branded "stingy" to encourage them to pony up."

What an a$$hole....honestly...how hypocritical can you possibly be??

I started a new thread with these articles and it was deleted because of the double post, so here they are again.

Two interesting articles; I only posted the interesting parts of them but I suggest reading them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/08/opinion/08bergen.html?oref=login&oref=login

AROUND the Islamic world it is common currency that Muslims are perpetual victims of Western and Zionist conspiracies. The bill of particulars includes the handling of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Israel's inequitable treatment of the Palestinians, and the deaths of thousands of civilians in Iraq - as a result first of United Nations sanctions after the Persian Gulf war, and more recently of the American occupation. The most articulate spokesman of such views is, of course, Osama bin Laden.

Yet when Muslims are suffering, it is usually the West, and often the United States, that takes the lead in helping. For instance, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Washington mounted its largest covert aid program since Vietnam to help the Afghan resistance; when Somalis were starving in the early 1990's, President George H. W. Bush sent 25,000 American troops to help relief efforts; when Serbs were massacring Bosnian Muslims in the mid-1990's President Bill Clinton (belatedly) directed the United States Air Force to bomb Serbian positions, which led to the Dayton accords.

This anemic effort on the part of the richest countries is emblematic of a wider political problem in the Islamic world. For all of the invocations by Muslim leaders of the ummah, or the global community of believers, they typically do little to help their fellow Muslims in times of crisis.

Arab leaders and their toothless talking shops like the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference are excellent at denouncing problems in Palestine and Iraq, but most stood silent as a million died in the war between Iraq and Iran during the 1980's. When President Hafez al-Assad of Syria massacred some 20,000 people after an Islamist uprising in the city of Hama in 1982, there were no expressions of outrage from the Islamic Conference. Egypt routinely tortures political prisoners, untroubled by fears that other Arab leaders will seriously condemn such actions.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11894914%5E7583,00.html

Michael Schumacher has given $US10 million.

For purposes of comparison, Herr Schumacher's donation is the same as that of oil-rich Kuwait. As for even oil-richer Iran, its Government has earmarked $US627,000 for disaster relief.

For purposes of further comparison, that's barely a twentieth of what was raised at the Sydney Opera House concert this weekend. Today's all-star cricket match between a World XI and an Asian XI at the MCG will do more for the beleaguered Muslims of Banda Aceh than Libya, Syria and Egypt combined.

In fairness to the Saudis, they've just upped their pledge to $US30 million. But for purposes of one final comparison, consider this: a single Saudi telethon in 2002 managed to raise $US56 million. That was for widows and orphans of Palestinian suicide bombers, those deceased as well as those yet to blow. It seems nothing gets the wealthy elite of Riyadh and Jeddah adding the zeroes to the cheques like self-detonating on an Israeli bus.

Yet the deaths of 100,000 members of the club in Banda Aceh alone isn't enough to catch the eye of the big shots in the Arab world. The Arab world's principal contribution these past two weeks has been the usual paranoia: "Was it caused by American, Israeli and Indian nuclear testing?" wondered Mahmoud Bakri in the Egyptian weekly Al Usbu. "The three most recent tests appeared to be genuine American and Israeli preparations to act together with India to test a way to liquidate humanity."

There's also a major editorial in the WSJ ripping them a new one....rightly so.

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110531822787421236,00.html?mod=opinion%5Fmain%5Fcommentaries

"The defining moment came early in the crisis, when a weeping man in Aceh, Indonesia's isolated and most militantly Muslim province on the northern tip of Sumatra, sobbed to a CNN interviewer: "Where is America?" Ordinary people often understand underlying patterns of power better than most intellectuals. This grief-stricken Acehnese was not accusing America but offering an object lesson in how the world, especially Asia, really works. For he did not ask "Where is the U.N.?" Still less would it have occurred to him to cry: "Where is Saudi Arabia and the principle of international Islamic solidarity?""

All I would say is, it's better than nothing.

Hi Guys, Just so you're all aware, the State of Kuwait will actually be donating $100,000,000 (one hundred million dollars)...not so stingy, eh?

KWI