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Nov, 21, 2008

Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: Money matters?

Caroline B. Glick: Civilization walks the plank

Nov, 20, 2008

Rabbi Avi Shafran: Bronfman's blindness

The Kosher Gourmet By Linda Gassenheimer: Portobellos add a hearty flavor to pasta with pesto

Nov, 19, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Spread the wealth? Jewish tradition and income equality

Elliot B. Gertel: 'Mad Men': Tackling prejudices or reinforcing them?

Nov, 18, 2008

Dr. Debby Schwarz Hirschhorn: The End of the Age of Reason

Jonathan Tobin: Does Barack + Bibi = Disaster?

Nov, 17, 2008

Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The End of the Age of Reason

Diana West: Gulling Americans into making terror legit?

Nov, 14, 2008

Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: The Power of Spiritual Inertia

Caroline B. Glick: The perils ahead

Nov, 13, 2008

Stratfor Intelligence Briefing: How Bush and Obama together could change the Middle East dynamic

The Kosher Gourmet by JeanMarie Brownson: Sweet and savory, crispy and meltingly tender bestilla

Nov, 12, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Tyrannical Co-Workers

Michael Doyle: High Court to consider today donated monuments that may have religious messages in public parks

Nov, 11, 2008

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Will Obama stop government officials considering institutionalizing financial jihad?

Jonathan Tobin: They Will Decide Their Own Fate

Nov, 10, 2008

Rabbi Avi Shafran: $8 billion, modern-day Tower of Babel being built?

Barry Rubin: A letter to the president-elect from a Middle East realist

Nov, 7, 2008

Rabbi Francis Nataf: Of Children and Immortality

Caroline B. Glick: Livni's Obama strategy

Nov, 6, 2008

Rabbi Yonason Goldson: How I tricked a classroom of apathetic students into grasping the fallacy of moral relativism

The Kosher Gourmet By Gina Kim: Tips for making the perfect soup --- includes recipes

Nov, 5, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist By Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Destitute Debtors

Bruce Weinstein: 'Religulos': Bad title,even worse movie

Nov, 4, 2008

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Treasury Dept. submits to Shariah law

Frida Ghitis: A surprise for Obama in the Middle East

Nov, 3, 2008

Jonathan Rosenblum: Who says Jews are Smart?

Jonathan Tobin: Was He Wrong About Everything?

Oct. 31, 2008

Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: Our Immutable Noble Essence

Caroline B. Glick: Running against Bush

Oct. 30, 2008

Jonathan Rosenblum: The End of the Special Relationship?

Steve Lipman: 'Kid Kosher' Gets A Title Shot

Oct. 29, 2008

Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: GET US THE TAPE THE L.A. TIMES REFUSES TO RELEASE, AND WE'LL GIVE YOU CASH!

Dr. Ari Korenblit: Making The Write Choice for President

Oct. 28, 2008

Mona Charen: Denial runs through American Jewry

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Sell-off to capitalism or sell-out to Islam?

Oct. 27, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Are tax deductions for charitable donations moral?

Jonathan Mark: The Mystery Of The Arab-American Vote

Oct. 24, 2008

'Why aren't all religious people vegetarians?': Response by Miriam Kosman

Caroline B. Glick: Testing Obama's mettle

Oct. 23, 2008

Daniel Pipes: Obama Would Fail Security Clearance

The Kosher Gourmet by Linda Gassenheimer: A fast chicken dish with an Asian accent

Oct. 20, 2008

Gary Rosenblatt: Still One Torah

Jonathan Tobin: Government 'Gifts' Are Not Free

Oct. 17, 2008

Jonathan Rosenblum: Sukkos and the Great Meltdown

Caroline B. Glick: The disappearance of law

Oct. 16, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Copying DVDs: RIP OR RIPOFF?

Cal Thomas: Blaming the Jews (again)

March 22, 2007

J-Rhythms with Avraham Rosenblum: JWR's cutting-edge music program showcasing performers -- singers, song writers, musicians, and bands -- who learn and live the Torah lifestyle (OUR NEWEST IGODCAST !)

Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Dec. 27, 2005 / 26 Kislev, 5766

Waiting for real aid

By Mark Steyn


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | One year ago a tsunami walloped a huge swathe of the world from Indonesia all the way to Africa. Some 300,000 people were swept to their deaths, from the grandson of the king of Thailand and the daughter and granddaughter of film director Richard Attenborough to Njoroge, a Nairobi car mechanic, who picked the wrong day for his first visit to the beautiful East African coast and died a statistical fluke, his country's solitary fatality from the disaster.


Across the Western world, TV viewers reached into their wallets, chipped in the best part of $5 billion, and left it in the hands of the United Nations and the "nongovernmental organizations," the world's self-proclaimed moral consciences.


You'll recall that, immediately after the tsunami, Jan Egeland, the Norwegian bureaucrat and big U.N. humanitarian honcho, gave a press conference attacking the "stinginess" of wealthy nations, like the Great Satan. Given that, at that moment, Mr. Egeland's vast, permanent 24/7 "humanitarian relief" bureaucracy was focusing on giving press conferences in New York, while the only actual "relief effort" was conducted ad hoc by the Pentagon and the Royal Australian Navy, his remarks seemed a little churlish, to say the least.


But the trick when something unexpected happens is to make it fit with your general theory. Thus, if you're one of those wacky cultists worshipping at the Church of Global Warming, the tsunami obviously has something to do with America not signing the Kyoto Treaty. Likewise, if you're Mr. Egeland, the point of the tsunami is to emphasize his own indispensability. A bunch of Yanks and Aussies saving lives and restoring water is no use to him unless they do so under his agency's aegis.


But even folks who aren't on the Turtle Bay payroll have somehow bought into the curious proposition that helping people without going through the U.N. bureaucracy — saving lives unilaterally, so to speak — is illegitimate. So Mr. Egeland and the like-minded got their way: Billions and billions of dollars were contributed to tsunami relief. And what happened to it? A year later, of the 1.8 million left homeless, only 20 percent have been rehoused. The rest are still in temporary shelters.


Well, OK, but what about their communities' economic revitalization? If you go to the South Indian coast near the town of Nagapattinam, you'll see a fleet of brand-new fishing boats sitting on the beach. A Western charity had them built and delivered. But they've never been used because they're not seaworthy, having only two skins of fiberglass.


In Sumatra, relief agencies gave interest-free loans to boatbuilders to replace the region's lost vessels: The replacement skiffs now sit unsold in Indonesian boatyards because nobody thought to also give interest-free loans to the fishermen, who can't afford to buy the new skiffs.


I don't pretend to be an expert in the Indonesian fishing industry. I pretend to be an expert in Islamic terrorism and U.S. foreign policy and a bunch of other stuff, and believe me that's hard enough without trying to feign expertise in the watery economy of Banda Aceh.


So who ought to be the experts? Well, how about Jan Egeland and his U.N. staff? These guys get full-time salaries to think about nothing but international disaster relief, and yet the best they can do when disaster strikes is stand in front of a camera in New York and announce they're sending someone to the region for an "assessment" of the "situation," just as soon as the U.S. Air Force emergency team have flown in and restored room service to the five-star hotel.


It was obvious at the time that Western TV viewers had donated more money than could ever be usefully spent. Even so, it's fascinating to learn quite the multitude of ways in which the dough was squandered. Hitherto somnolent bureaucracies cranked themselves into action for lean mean Tsunami shakedown operations. Oxfam paid the best part of a million bucks to Sri Lankan customs for the privilege of having 25 four-wheel-drive vehicles allowed into the country to get aid out to remote villages on washed-out roads hit by the Boxing Day tsunami. Your charitable donations at work, folks.


In fact, Mr. Egeland was wrong. Had Western nations been more "stingy," the aid might have been better targeted and more effective. As it was, your average Third World kleptocrat official quickly figured out every NGO on the planet was trying to catch his eye by waving large amounts of dollar bills.


Next time it might be easier just to eliminate the middle man and have Bongo and Sting and Sir Bob Geldof and Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney hold an all-star fundraising gala for the Indonesian Customs Inspectors' Retirement Fund.


I confess I've been antipathetic to the NGOs ever since one of them — in the usual gleaming white Suburban — almost ran me off the road between Rutba and Ramadi in the Sunni Triangle.


The Western do-gooders are an arrogant lot and, if Iraq is anything to go by, deeply resented by the locals. And, to be honest, I long ago got sick of their predictions of disasters that never happened: "The head of the World Food Program has warned that Iraq could spiral into a massive humanitarian disaster"; "The U.N. Children's Fund has estimated that as many as 100,000 Afghan children could die of cold, disease and hunger," etc.


It's one thing to invent humanitarian disasters to disparage President Bush's unilateralist warmongering. But after the tsunami the U.N. was reduced to inventing a humanitarian disaster to distract attention from the existing humanitarian disaster it wasn't doing anything about.


So its agencies issued hysterical warnings about post-tsunami health effects — dysentery, cholera, BSE from water-logged cattle, etc. — that, they assured us, would kill as many people as the original disaster. How much difference would it have made if the professional humanitarian bureaucracy had gone to the Riviera for the month after the tsunami? The NGOs skedaddled out of Iraq after the U.N. headquarters was bombed in summer 2003 — and it made absolutely no difference.


How come no one is interested in what happened to those billions of dollars? Within 24 hours of Hurricane Katrina making landfall, the media demanded investigations into what, by historical standards, was a better-than-average federal performance. With the tsunami, who cares? The glow of moral virtue in chipping in your donation is so bright the fact that it accomplishes nothing is unimportant.


As if to confirm that, Time magazine, in yet another milestone on its accelerating plummet into irrelevance, nominated as its Persons of the Year Bongo, Bill Gates and Bill Gates' missus — three do-gooders who believe the solution to the problems of the developing world require more Western money.


No, the solution is more accountability for the money they've already had, and the tsunami would be a good place to start.


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JWR contributor Mark Steyn is North American Editor of The (London) Spectator. Comment by clicking here.

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