Arabs ignore tsunami

Editorial

Saudi Arabia has said it will contribute $30 million to the relief efforts in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that has killed more than 150,000 people in Asia. Kuwait and Qatar each have pledged $10 million. (All figures are in U.S. dollars.) The United Arab Emirates has scraped together $20 million. These four nations, which collectively suck in $500 million a day in oil revenue, have pledged a total of $70 million to tsunami relief, even though many of the laborers in those countries originate from countries worst hit by the disaster.
By contrast, Canada has committed $425 million, the United States $350 million, Australia $815 million, Germany $660 million, the United Kingdom $96 million and Japan $500 million.

The point of raising these numbers is not to suggest that oil-rich Arab states are insensitive to human disaster. But it should raise questions. For decades, Arab states have encouraged, funded, trained, armed and provided safe havens for violent terrorists who attack Israel. They have done this, ostensibly, out of a sense of fraternity with the Palestinians' Arab and largely Muslim population. Jerusalem, of course, is home to holy Muslim sites, which Southeast Asia is not. But the abandonment by rich Arab states of fellow Muslims who suffered in the tsunami disaster is so near-total that it can hardly be dismissed.

It is difficult not to suspect that, in light of the refusal by Arab states to offer substantial assistance in this international crisis, six decades of rhetoric about Islamic fraternity when it comes to the Palestinians proved hollow when it came to Asian Muslims. Writers like the Canadian Irshad Manji have addressed the racial superiority felt by some Arab Muslims against their non-Arab coreligionists whose skin tends to be darker. Racism may be at play. More likely, and worthy of far more consideration, is the idea that pan-Arab allegiance to the Palestinian cause has less to do with pro-Palestinian sensitivity or Arab or Muslim fraternity than with that familiar old standby, Jew-hatred.

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