Entre Nous / Musings of a former Belgian

UN funds Palestinian propaganda

res ipsa loquitur.

Rope. Tree. Scrotum of the UNocrat responsible. Some assembly required.

Washington Post: Darfur and Arabian shame

Whew, is this really a Washington Post Editorial? Yup, it is.

SOME REMAIN skeptical of President Bush's concern for Africa, and there's no doubt that the United States could and should do more. But the latest report on Sudan from the United Nations offers a snapshot of an issue on which Mr. Bush has been a leader. So far this year the United States has given $468 million in foreign assistance to Sudan, mostly for humanitarian relief in the western region of Darfur. The U.S. contribution comes to 53 percent of all outside donations -- a proportion about twice the size of the nation's weight in the global economy.
A few other countries have been even more generous relative to the size of their economies, notably Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Britain. But the contribution from many others has been embarrassing. How can France, which prides itself on its leadership in Africa, give only $2 million to this year's U.N. appeal for Sudan -- an amount that, when rounded, comes to zero percent of total contributions to the country? Even if one generously ascribed, say, a fifth of the European Union's donation of $90 million to French taxpayers, France's share of the total contribution to Sudan comes to a paltry 2 percent.

There are plenty of other culprits. Japan accounts for just 2 percent of total contributions despite the size of its economy; China has made no contribution to the U.N. effort, even though it has extensive investments in Sudan's oil sector. But perhaps the most striking absentees are the oil-rich Arab countries, which have more money than ideas on how to spend it, thanks to oil prices above $60 a barrel. Saudi Arabia has contributed a grand total of $3 million, according to the U.N. data; the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have given less than $1 million between them. No other Arab country even makes the list.
This Arab indifference is shameful. The victims of Sudan's worst crisis, in Darfur, are Muslim, and aid to non-Muslim southern Sudan is essential to shoring up the fragile north-south peace deal that would help Muslims as well. Sudan borders Libya and Egypt; only the narrow Red Sea separates it from Saudi Arabia. Arabs have every reason to care about Sudan, and yet they have done far less than remote non-Muslim countries such as Norway, which has an economy roughly the same size as Saudi Arabia's.
Writing on the opposite page last month, Joseph Britt noted, "We've heard a lot since Sept. 11, 2001, about how Arabs feel humiliated, ashamed, resentful at being regarded by the West as inferior in some way." Mr. Britt continued: "Perhaps it is time to say plainly that the way to earn respect is through deeds worthy of respect."

Amen.

Guardian reporter-trainee member of extreme Islamist group

Still alive, swamped with work.

A good one here: British blog The Daily Ablution reveals thatGuardian reporter-trainee is member of extreme Islamist group. Can't say I am surprised.

Several decades ago, the late Belgian justice minister Jean Gol (an ex-Trotskyite turned what we now call "neoconservative") commented that his country suffered from political AIDS "in the etymological sense of the word" (i.e., acquired immunodeficiency syndrome). Sadly, his words get truer by the day.

UPDATE: The Daily Ablution can claim two scalps over the affair: not only was the Islamist journalist fired, but his enabler, teh Guardian's executive news editor, has resigned.

[Scott] Burgess [a.k.a. The Daily Ablution] reports that his source at The Guardian said Scardino's position had become "untenable" due to the split between Aslam's supporters and those who wanted him gone.  Editor Alan Rushbridger has conceded that this affair and its internal repercussions constitute "a significant crisis for the paper".

Go read the whole link-filled summary.

At least one leftist "gets it"

Christopher Hitchens in the Daily Mirror

In Death Ground: some quotable quotes

In the past few weeks, I have been reminded innumberable times of the following passages in David Weber and Steve White's "In Death Ground" quite a few times:

[Moonbat hack politician character, Bettina Wister:] "But surely the Fleet could have tried to communicate with them! After all, anyone who can build spaceships must be rational, and all rational beings must want peace. . . ."

Sky Marshal Hannah Avram thought beautiful thoughts and tried to tune the whiny voice out. She didn't even waste the mental effort it would have required to wonder if the Honorable Legislative Assemblywoman had forgotten the genocidal Rigelians and the fanatical Thebans, both of which races had been all too capable of building spaceships and neither of which had subscribed to the philosophy the Honorable Legislative Assemblywoman, with a parochialism fit to shame a medieval peasant, assumed must be universal.

She'd long ago given up hoping for anything better from Bettina Wister of Nova Terra and the rest of her mush-minded ilk. It wasn't that they were incapable of rational thought -— Wister, for example, was a past mistress at servicing her constituents and managing the bureaucratic political machine which assured her continual reelection to the Legislative Assembly. They were simply too lazy, ignorant and self-absorbed to look beyond their own rice bowls, and attempting to hold them to a higher standard was pointless. Better to just let this Naval Oversight Committee meeting meander to its conclusion and try to catch up on her sleep.

But the nasal platitudes wouldn't go away. "And besides," Wister bleated on, "as all civilized beings recognize, violence never settles anything. . . ."
All at once, Avram decided she'd had enough. Carried beyond a certain point, stupidity was personalty offensive to her. "Tell that to the Confederate States of America and the National Socialist German Workers' Party, Assemblywoman Wister," she cut in. "If, that is, you can find them."

Hannah Avram later in the book, addressing her Orion opposite number:

"Well, Lord Talphon, some humans tend to believe that the further removed a political philosophy is from reality, the more morally pure it must be."

"Why?" Kthaara's perplexity was manifest. "I know you better, Sky Marshal"—the title he really used was "First Fang"—"than to think you yourself believe anything of the kind."

"You're quite right. But I'm trying to explain the biases of the civilization which initially gave form to the Federation. That civilization's dominant religion—which I myself don't subscribe to, by the way—was heavily influenced in its formative years by a philosophy called Gnosticism, which held that the world as reported by the senses was inherently corrupt and deceptive. Given that assumption, the only reliable source of knowledge was correct doctrine, and the attitude lingers on in secularized form. Demonstrated unworkability in the real world merely proves a belief system's 'higher truth' in the eyes of its true believers."

Kthaara's ears twitched in the slow movement that conveyed incredulity as he listened to her explanation. "I shall never understand your species, First Fang." He sighed.

"Just as well, Lord Talphon." Avram grinned. "We'll never understand ourselves either!"

And later in the book, Admiral of the Fleet Ivan Antonov:

"You know, Ms. Wister, there is a mistaken proverb which tells us that those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it. In fact, they're lucky if they're allowed to repeat it. More probably, they're condemned to something even worse than the past. This is doubly true of those who believe that their ignorance somehow makes them morally superior to those who don't share it."

Terror strikes London

Instapundit has a meta-roundup.

When will bleeding hearts get it? That we're all in this; that the very existence of the West (not anything they do "to" the Middle East) is enough of a motive to the Islamofascists; and that we will know no peace of them until this latest incarnation of Amalek has been "utterly wiped out from under heaven".

Not the NHS's finest hour

The Times has this chilling report from England:

THE National Health Service should not have to give life- prolonging treatment to every patient who demands it because that would mean a crippling waste of resources, the Government said yesterday.
A lawyer for Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, said that a ruling granting a patient the right to request life-prolonging care had serious implications for the NHS.
The dramatic intervention came as lawyers for the General Medical Council challenged a High Court ruling that supported a terminally-ill man’s wish to be kept alive artificially.
Leslie Burke, 45, who suffers from cerebellar ataxia, a degenerative brain condition, won a landmark case last May granting him the right to stop doctors withdrawing artificial nutrition or hydration (ANH) treatment until he dies naturally.
The Department of Health, backing the GMC’s attempt to reverse the ruling, said that if that right were established, patients could demand other life-prolonging treatments. The department argues that this will create a culture in which patients request treatments “no matter how untested, inappropriate or expensive, regardless of doctors’ views”.
Philip Sales, for the Health Secretary, told a panel of three appeal judges, headed by the Master of the Rolls, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers: “A general right, as identified (in the High Court), for an individual patient to require life- prolonging treatment has very serious implications for the functioning of the NHS.
“It may be interpreted as giving patients the right to demand certain treatments, contrary to the considered judgment of their medical team, that would lead to patients obtaining access to treatment that is not appropriate for them, and to unfairly skewed use of resources within the NHS.”

If this sort of "battlefield triage medicine without the battlefield" (the politest term I can think of for this sort of attitude) is the end product of government-run socialized medicine, I'll take the supposedly "heartless" American system anyday. (Hat tip: Clayton Cramer.)

AUT boycott overturned

AUT votes by 2/3 majority to rescind boycott of Haifa U. and Bar-Ilan U.Coincidentally, tonight is the minor Jewish holiday of Lag ba-Omer.

Iraqi body count redux

Tim Worstall and Tim Blair both wonder why a recent UN report on war-related deaths in Iraq is not getting too much attention. This is the UN, Golden Calf of every self-respecting transoc journalist, after all!

Could it have something to do with the fact that the body count found was only a quarter of the "100,000" figure thrown around by Saddamorimmers "anti-war activists"?

Admittedly, the new estimate (18,000 -- 29,000, 95% statistical confidence interval) falls within the 95% uncertainty bar of the much-quoted Lancet estimate (8,000 --- 198,000, the middle of which is about 100,000). But as one critic at the time noted about this [sarcasm]sterling piece of science[/sarcasm]: this isn't an estimate but a dartboard.

Quote of the day

"It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first." - Ronald Reagan (source)