Arab aid to Haiti. Can you see it?

The following perceptive comment by Kevin Myers appeared yesterday in the Irish Independent.

One of the first aid-planes to arrive in Haiti was Israeli. If the people of Haiti were gazing up, looking for aid from Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, or anywhere in the Arab world, they're still looking up, still gazing. This is the same Arab world that has refused to integrate the Palestinians exiled from their homeland in 1948, so obviously it has no difficulty looking away when people in another hemisphere need help.

Meanwhile, the Israelis will naturally get no kudos for their goodness. They are perhaps the only people in the world for whom extenuating circumstances are routinely cited in explanation of their charitable deeds. Extenuating circumstances usually occur in mitigation for criminal acts: but for the Jews of Israel they are used instead to explain away corporal works of mercy. That is the underlying and unspoken anti-Semitism of the anti-Israeli lobby: it cannot accept that Jews, as a group, have unselfish, charitable motives.

It is five years since the Asian tsunami killed hundreds of thousands of people. The aid-planes to Indonesia arrived in remarkably similar order to those in Haiti, with Israeli and American being amongst the first. Saudi aid arrived weeks later, and went only to Muslim communities. No doubt this is why the Irish government is allowing a Saudi school to be established in Ireland, in order to promulgate Saudi values (you know, just as Irish schools are flourishing everywhere in Saudi Arabia).

And at this point in our history, it is simply impossible to parody or lampoon the abjectness that allows a special place in our educational system for the culture which gave the world Wahhabism, the 9/11 bombers, stoning to death for adulteresses, and judicially-authorised beheadings and amputations. But instead of erecting barriers to the intellectual barbarism of Wahhabism, we are actually inviting it in to spread its toxins amongst our rapidly growing Muslim communities. How they'll laugh when they talk about it all in Dublinistan in 2111.

Read the entire article.