Flood money or blood money?

While the US and UK pour money into the human disaster that is Pakistan, its Arab Islamic neighbours have not, on the whole, done so. Neither group comes out of the situation particularly well.

The UK has put in 23 times more than Iran and 15 times more than the Saudis....a belated recognition by the Government that it screwed up the week before last. The Saudis have given nothing because Pakistan's President Zardari is a Shia muslim, which is not quite their colour. And as most of you know already, the Saudi royal family lives in obscene and corrupt luxury while their subjects muddle along on not very much. As for Ahmadinnejhad's Iran, well - Pakistanis are a useful recruiting source for ignorant suicide bombers, but they're not short of those. And anyway, their priority right now is building a nuclear bomb with which to wipe the Israeli stain from the surface of the Earth....that's assuming all those short skirts don't cause a deadly earthquake there before then anyway.

They're not a nice lot on the whole in this region. Good at preaching to the West about its decadence, but not good on the morality/ethics/fairness/21st century dimensions. One chap (featured in several papers and on various sites yesterday) arrived from Iraq as an 'asylum seeker' in 2005. Since then he has married an English woman, sired two kids, committed four criminal offences, and tried on several occasions to pervert the course of his umpteen appeals against deportation. Thanks to smart lawyers (paid for by us) a tribunal last week granted him the right to stay in Britain.

You can only ask why and move on, really - to asking why the hell we went into Iraq in the first place. True to US form, Eye-Rack is now electorally unpopular and so must be ceremoniously dumped. Thus the wet-dream for Iranian insurgents begins, with every day bringing more and more bombs detonated in order to bring the one true God to the people. Sorry, the one true version of the one true God to the people.

The West has been stupid (Bush), vainglorious (Blair), hypocritical (Brown), naive (Cameron) and weak (all of them, especially Obama) in its 'approach' to this hornets' nest. Now it promises to get tough in Afghanistan while clarifying for every opponent the exact date upon which it will do a Pontius Pilate. Our standing in the Muslim world is at rock bottom - which I don't mind because I see that on the whole as a compliment: what I object to is why we're seen as vermin - the perceived total lack of spine and ruthlessness. For these are (as I've written on endless occasions in the past) the only thing that matter to a fundamentalist, misogynist, insanely controlling mindset....and the only things they respect.

We are going to have to deal with these nazis sooner or later. And opening our arms to a Turkey in the EU is not the way to do it.

Source: http://nbyslog.blogspot.com/2010/08/flood-money-or-blood-money.html

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Poor Marketing blamed for Aid Shortfall

As international aid trickled into Pakistan to help flood victims, Mark Malloch Brown, a former deputy secretary general of the United Nations, criticized the country’s leader for failing to make the scope of the destruction and the urgency of the need clear to international donors.

In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Brown told the BBC, “this is a very confusing crisis” and a visit by President Asif Ali Zardari to Europe – with a stop at his family’s chateau in France – while monsoon rains ravaged large portions of his country, had not been helpful:

The leadership of Pakistan on the civilian side has gotten off to a rather muddled and slow start. It’s very hard for donor governments — let alone donor public opinion — to be entirely convinced at the seriousness of a crisis when the country’s president is filmed at his own private chateau in France or continuing with government visits to the U.K.

Crises, it’s a terrible thing to say but, you know, they require disciplined marketing. There needs to be a clear message that lives are at stake and the whole of the domestic effort of the country is devoted to trying to save those lives.

Mr. Brown also said that Pakistan’s military leaders “were very effective in Kashmir a couple of years ago after the earthquake and again they seem to be sort of pushing the civilian leadership aside and taking control and frankly that’s probably good news.”

Her added that the relief effort was now a competition between “the efficiency of these two rival systems: Islamic relief agencies versus the one institution of the Pakistani state which works, the army.”

Source: http://irfan-a-sheikh.blogspot.com/2010/08/poor-marketing-blamed-for-aid-shortfall.html

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