Give Generously! (Because the Arabs won’t…)

• Shame on Muslims for not Helping their Pakistani Neighbours (Islamist Monitor)
• So why don’t the oil-rich Arabs help the poor? (Barenaked)

Pakistan flooding: Aid officials note “the absence of substantial commitments from the Gulf states”

Meanwhile, America sent in the Marines today. And of course, this isn’t the first time Gulf countries — particularly Saudi Arabia, so glutted with petrodollars — have been slow or stingy in their response to a disaster that affects their non-Arab Muslim brethren. There was the tsunami, and the needs of the World Food Program. Even in one of the latest crises in Pakistan in 2009, their slowness to respond was noted.

If anything that can be blamed on Israel happens in Gaza, they’re on it yesterday. Widespread suffering and disease from natural disasters? Meh. Allah’s will, apparently. Or maybe they’d just rather be agitating for jihad.

“Pakistan president visits flooded regions as official response criticised,” by Mark Tran for the Guardian, August 12/via JW

Great  Idea

Instead of spending $100 million on a mega-mosque at Ground Zero, why doesn’t the Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and financier Sharif El-Gamal take the $100 million and donate it to the Pakistani flood victims?

In doing so, they’d make up for the umma’s indifference to those victims’ plight, and create a great deal of good will — which is what they keep claiming they’re trying to do. And they’d be aiding their fellow Muslims.

It’s a win/win situation! (JW)

How come the wealthy Arabs don’t aid their Muslim brothers in Pakistan?

While Gaza is lavished with attention, money, and weapons for a vastly exaggerated “crisis” that is of Hamas’ engineering and staging (those poor people have to smuggle in luxury cars!), tens of millions of Muslims are suffering in Pakistan after the floods — hungry, wet, and under the threat of outbreaks of cholera and dysentery. The response from Islamic nations in the Arab world? Beyond lackluster, while the U.S., Britain, Japan, and other non-Muslim countries bend over backwards.

The question for the Muslim governments of the petrodollar-glutted Gulf: Are you racists, regarding the needs of your non-Arab brethren as less important, or would you just rather be waging jihad?

An update on this story, though it’s not so much an update as it is more of the same. “Islamic nations snub UN plea to help flood victims,” by James Bone and Zahid Hussain for the Times Online/Generous donations stream from wealthy Islamic nations to their desperate brethren in Pakistan — no, wait…

Pakistan refuses Indian offer of flood aid

The jihad against India is more important than aid to Pakistani flood victims.

“Accept Indian aid, no role for politics in disaster: US to Pak,” from the Press Trust of India,

EU: Aid to PA not linked to peace talks

BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — Aid to the Palestinians “is not linked to negotiations  in any way,” the head of operations at the Office of the EU Representative  in Jerusalem said Thursday. (Just don’t hurt us/IMRA)

Arab states cut aid to PA

Arab states have cut financial aid to the Palestinian Authority so far this year and the United Nations has warned of a looming Palestinian cash crisis.

“The Arabs are not paying. We urge them to meet their financial pledges,” said Saleh Rafat, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee and one of the few Palestinian officials willing to speak out on the matter.

Arab government officials declined to comment on the issue.

The failure of some wealthy Arab states to pay up is frustrating Western governments, which are big contributors to the Palestinian territories. The situation is also leaving officials in the West Bank with a budget headache. (IMRA)

Tagged as: aid for Pakistan