We Can Leave Today

Today I'd like to point you to Mona Charen's excellent column on "Muslims and the Tsunami" on Townhall.com . Mona does an excellent job capturing the disgust and irritation I feel concerning the ingratitude of the Muslim world toward America's involvement in the relief effort.

First it was the U.N. carping about America and the West being "stingy". Never mind the track record of America always being sacrifial and generous in disaster relief. The UN functionary had to poke his finger in our eye.

Now, it's the governments of the disaster affected Muslim nations, with legions of suffering citizens, who have to make a show of their hatred of America as we're flying aid in via military transport at great risk to the crews. Demanding that the U.S. Marines show up unarmed. That America agree to withdraw any military troops by March 31st. Why wait that long, I say. We can leave today. Ingrates.

Dennis Prager, an excellent editorial columnist, has pointed out this phenomenon before. Muslim countries routinely refuse aid from Israel in times of disaster. Israel has world class resue teams trained and ready and often offers them to countries that are overtly hostile to Israel's survival - like Iran. Muslim countries often refuse the help, preferring that their citizens suffer and die rather than accept aid from their enemy Israel. Apparently, we fall into that category now too.

Here's the unvarnished truth about America and the West, versus Muslim nations, regarding disaster aid. America and Western democracies provide a huge amount of aid to to the world because we can. Not because we're privileged or elitist or resource hogs or any of the other evils that liberals attribute to us. It's because we've built civilizations and technologies that are capable of supporting ourselves and generating excess capacity to give aid to others. Period. Muslim nations, on the other hand, are intentionally backward third world nations that cannot support themselves (without oil money) on a day-to-day basis, let alone rescue themselves in times of disaster.

How many Muslim nations are stepping up to aid Indonesia versus the amount of aid America will generate? They won't because they can't. They haven't built the infrastructure to do it. We have.

In fact, how many Indonesian ships, aircraft, water purification stations showed up in Florida last year to aid the hurricane victims?

Yet they want to insult us even as we gear up, once again, to rescue them.

I repeat: We can leave today.