Billy Beck, who is blogging from Jakarta this morning, notes with some annoyance:
“I note a story from this morning’s Asian Wall Street Journal.
Headlined “China Makes Awkward Aid Efforts”, it reports on the sheer can’t-get-out-of-their-own-way horseshit of bureaucracy. Two days ago, Beijing announced that a team of Chinese doctors would be on their way to Sri Lanka. They wait, yet, in Beijing, because, as the story reports, “The Chinese embassy in Sri Lanka told us the situation there is very unstable and they could not ensure the team’s safety.”
Now Billy’s point, of course is the massive level of BS that any government goes through to actually create motion of any sort. Of course, that’s a valid concern.
But the question of the team’s being safe comes up in that statement from Bejing, and cannot be blamed, I think on government, per se’. The team’s safety, particularly considering the response to the IDF’s attempt to help, is a valid concern, I think. And all this raises, full on, a question I had only alluded to, yesterday. I wonder how the question of SriLanka’s muslim population is going to play out here. Already, the government there rejected a team from the IDF because they were Jewish. (Which to my mind, reduces their legitimacy to fly squeeze.) But their nation is about to be decended upon by peoples from every corner of the globe. How will they react, in the end?
Will the world-wide spirit of aid and good will turn their heads away from Muslim extremism? Or will this tragedy be the opening the Islamofacists been looking for to set up shop, there?
An opportunity is here, I think to defuse much of radical Islam’s usual nonsense. If we’re in there, giving humanitarian aid, the BinLadens of the world can hardly argue we’re the great Satan anymore, and get away with it.
On the other hand, radicals seldom need an excuse to attack, logical or otherwise. So, comes the question: Will we find ourselves two years from now, being attacked by those we aided in their time of need?
I wonder.
Tags: BitsBlog
