What Role Are Islamists Playing In the Tsunami Relief Effort?

Commentary by Greg Lewis / TheRant.US
January 11, 2005

We need to take another look at the role of radical Islamist terrorist groups in the global response to the recent tsunami tragedy. First, one of the immediate reactions of Islamists (and environmentalists, by the way, who are cut from the same cloth with regard to their hatred of the Great Satan) was that the United States somehow caused the enormous and tragic loss of (overwhelmingly) Muslim lives in the disaster that befell the world's most populous Muslim countries.

My sense is that casting the tragedy in these terms was the only way the Muslim world community could hope to raise money for the victims. It's a lot like the payments of tens of thousands of dollars that go to child homicide bombers who sacrifice themselves to the cause of destroying Israel and western democracy in general. To think that the Islamic community would actually raise money for humanitarian aid to their fellow Muslims, let alone to infidels, is, given the evidence of the past weeks, ludicrous. With a few exceptions, Muslims have basically shrugged their shoulders while the United States, Australia, and Japan (in particular) have rushed 1,000-bed floating hospitals, mobile water purification facilities, and drugs to the afflicted areas and made sure they were delivered by committed people using helicopters and other means of transportation, again of western manufacture.

Is it impolitic to ask why such Islamist political groups as Hezbollah and al Qaeda and the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, which are disingenuously trotted out by the liberal media as promoting and supporting "humanitarian" causes among Muslim people, are not somehow assuming more of a leadership role in ameliorating the suffering of their Muslim brethren who have been victimized by the recent natural disaster in the Indian Ocean? Indeed, where is Usama bin Laden when Muslims really need him? What good are the broadly touted Hezbollah educational initiatives in the wake of the current natural disaster?

Or should we turn our heads in the wake of the embarrassingly perverse abdication of responsibility displayed by Muslim countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia? Apparently not even the argument that the tsunami victims are martyrs in the war against the Great Satan (and, one has to assume, all the Satanettes that have appeared to advance humanitarianism in the past weeks) is enough to get these psychopathic Islamist flunkies off their duffs and heading for their checkbooks. Indeed, so perverse has been the response of the American Left and the Islamists around the world to this situation that it would appear that if you are making a meaningful contribution to the relief effort, you're going to be a target for invective, not to say terrorist atrocities.

To phrase the issue in another way: How does it happen that western democracies, led by the United States, are inarguably taking the lead in providing financial and medical aid to the hundreds of thousands of predominantly Muslim people whose lives have been devastated by the tidal waves that swept through their communities, destroying their homes, carrying away so many of their loved ones, and depriving them of their very livelihoods? How is it that the people who are attempting against enormous odds to bring relief to the stricken are overwhelmingly from western capitalistic Christian democratic nations?

Despite the pathetic whines of those who have attempted to denigrate the United States for the insufficiency of its initial commitment to the enormous rescue and rebuilding effort that has resulted from this natural disaster of utterly biblical proportions, it is America that, in the end, delivers. When human lives are on the line, America is absolutely color-blind and culturally- and religiously-neutral.

Our surgeons and internists, our soldiers and civilian volunteers, the humans who administer the programs that provide relief to those in need around the world, no matter what their nationality or religion or ethnicity, could not give a fig about whether the person whose life they are saving is black, brown, red, yellow, or white, nor whether he or she is a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Christian or, for that matter, an atheist. It is in times of crisis such as the one we are currently dealing with that America's true humanity, our truly spiritual commitment to the welfare of our fellow inhabitants of this planet, is made manifest.