Posted at 09:58 AM ET, 09/14/2005

Aid for Katrina Victims Spurned

"I hope people don't play politics," said President Bush in the hurricane's aftermath. But that message didn't get through at the State Department, which is playing politics by continuing to ignore Cuba's offer to send 34 tons of aid and the services of 1,586 doctors.

On the face of it, the State Department’s inaction is puzzling. Cuban doctors have much experience in helping the victims of tropical storms. In 1998, Cuba sent 2,000 doctors to Central America to help the victims of Hurricane Mitch, a storm far more devastating than Katrina. Cuba’s assistance was just part of a massive international outpouring, led by the United States, which sent more than $1 billion in aid. There is also a need for Spanish-speaking doctors in the Gulf Coast region. Americans obsessed by Katrina's racial angle have largely overlooked the fact that up to 40,000 Honduran immigrants, most of them poor, lived in Katrina’s path.

The problem isn’t logistical. Cuba is far closer to the scene than the Czech Republic, whose assistance arrived Monday.

The problem isn’t that Cuba’s poor human rights record has been condemned by the international community. Israel's human rights practices are also controversial, but the United States has sensibly welcomed aid offered by the Israel Defense Forces.

The problem isn’t that Cuba has an authoritarian government. So does Russia. But the United States isn't so petty as to turn away the 17 tons of medication sent by Moscow on Wednesday.

Only politics explains why the United States has yet to respond to Cuba’s offer. The Bush administration, like every administration since Eisenhower, has a policy of trying to overthrow the Cuban communist government, and that policy apparently takes precedent over helping the Spanish-speaking victims of Katrina.

Meanwhile, the Cuban doctors, according to Granma, continue to train for a mission to the United States “while awaiting a response that has not yet arrived and perhaps never will.”

By Jefferson Morley | Permalink* | Comments (13)

Posted at 03:09 PM ET, 09/13/2005

The Not So Superpower

Katrina's racial dimension, discussed earlier today, isn't the only theme in the global reaction to America's natural disaster. There's also a muted sense of satisfaction.

For some, Katrina provides occasion to boast. In impoverished, monsoon-prone Bangladesh, Asma Akhter brags that, when it comes to flood recovery, "We have a better record than the Americans."

For others, it is time to remind Americans they are not invincible. In El Salvador’s La Prensa Grafica, a conservative and pro-American newspaper, TV newsman Jorge Ramos Ávalos, observes (in Spanish) that since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 Americans have believed that they can do anything they put their minds to. “With Katrina,” he concludes, “came the day when America couldn’t.”

And still others admit that Katrina has generated some schadenfreude, a German word for taking pleasure in the suffering of others. Liberal Britons, quick to give to tsunami victims or starving Africans, balk at Katrina contributions, writes Julian Baggini in a piece published both in South Africa and Britain. “We don’t want to plug the gaping hole created by inegalitarian American social policy because we want to expose it for what it is, and shatter the US’s self-image as the most fair and free country in the world,” he says.

For a world that often hears about “the only superpower,” there seems to be a measure of pleasure in noting that its powers are not always so super.

By Jefferson Morley | Permalink* | Comments (34)

Posted at 09:00 AM ET, 09/13/2005

America in Black and White

Most black Americans think race was a factor in the government’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.  And many observers in the international online media agree.

The Scotsman, a conservative newspaper in Scotland, described Michael Brown, the hapless horseman who just got fired as head of the Federal Emergency Management Administration, as "The man who left poor blacks to their fate." Leigh Sales, North American correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, visited some of the most devastated areas and concluded “if you are black, poor, old, sick or disabled, you are a second-class citizen in this country.” In the view of The Statesman in Delhi, India, “unabashedly racist” policies “enabled the US President to convert a natural calamity to a national disgrace.”

When asked to compare governmental responses to Katrina and the South Asia tsunami, Daniel Lak, a BBC correspondent who covered both, wrote “In Sri Lanka, with 60-70 per cent of the coastline devastated, the government was powerless to meet everyone’s needs. But the international community stepped in to eventually get a decent relief effort going. Including psychological counseling for those who had lost loved ones. In America, I saw none of this for days. Instead I saw bureaucratic boondoggling, government rescue workers who rarely missed a meal or a coffee break, political leaders who’d rather point fingers of blame than roll up their sleeves and help out. I saw an impressive private and voluntary sector effort thwarted by government. I saw the poor, the black, the old, the obese, the sick neglected by the middle class and the rich who fled to higher ground and lived off their credit cards. Those without cars or amex platinum were left to fend for themselves. Many of them died from sheer neglect.

"If there’s a ray of hope," he wrote, "it’s in the growing disgust among many Americans with the state of their Union. There are now nearly 50 million Americans without health insurance, a third of US children living in poverty, more people losing jobs every year. Race and class are becoming issues again. One can only hope this wonderful place, this nation of so many great achievements alongside a few shameful episodes, will again set an example for all of us, instead of being the land we all loathe far too readily. If Katrina has a legacy, let it be this.”

By Jefferson Morley | Permalink* | Comments (94)

Posted at 04:00 PM ET, 09/12/2005

Salman Rushdie on Reforming Islam

Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born British novelist and target of a lethal fatwa for his impious prose,  offers nine provocative thoughts about bringing British Muslims "into the modern age" in a  piece for the Times of London. Here’s one of them:

“Reformed Islam would encourage diaspora Muslims to emerge from their self-imposed ghettoes and stop worrying so much about locking up their daughters. It would emerge from the intellectual ghetto of literalism and subservience to mullahs and ulema, allowing open, historically based scholarship to emerge from the shadows to which the madrassas and seminaries have condemned it.”

Editor's Note:  Rushdie is scheduled to participate in a washingtonpost.com Web chat at 3 p.m. ET on Sept. 13. Here's the link to participate.

By Jefferson Morley | Permalink* | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Posted at 07:56 AM ET, 09/12/2005

Launching

Starting today, the World Opinion Roundup blog will do on a daily basis what the column of the same name does every Tuesday: Present a balanced selection of what the world thinks about the stories that are -- and are not -- covered by the U.S. media. 

The day after the fourth anniversary of Sept. 11 seems an appropriate time to launch. Since the attacks in 2001, the steady growth of the Internet has linked the world's news sources and consumers ever more efficiently. The number of quality news sites and blogs around the world has multiplied exponentially. So has the need and demand for perspectives from other countries.

The only agenda of this blog is diversity and debate. Strong comments, neglected facts and unpopular dissent are welcome. Verbal abuse is not.

By Jefferson Morley | Permalink* | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Posted at 07:55 AM ET, 09/12/2005

Unhappy Anniversary

Four years ago this morning, the French newspaper Le Monde memorably proclaimed in a banner headline: "Nous sommes tous Américains -- We are all Americans." Today the Paris daily offers an utterly forgettable Sept. 11 piece (in French) by U.S. Ambassador Craig Roberts Stapleton, about "our French friends" blah blah blah. The contrast between genuine emotion and routine boilerplate shows how much global opinion has diverged since 2001. The spontaneous memorials to the American victims that sprang up in world capitals have long since vanished. The largest foreign ceremony yesterday was a peace march in Assisi, Italy, where demonstrators called for "an end to poverty and hunger" --a theme that I suspect went unmentioned in the Pentagon-sponsored memorial march in Washington.

The reason for the flat world reaction is, in a word, Iraq. The Guardian of London calls the U.S.-led war “a recruiting sergeant for the very forces it sought to destroy.” The Gulf News in the United Arab Emirates sees only "opportunities lost" since Sept. 11. And the Sydney Morning Herald has a piece by conservative intellectual Francis Fukayama saying President Bush has squandered victory.

Those who don’t care for the views of leftists, Arabs and eggheads, will want to read today’s edition of the Australian, the new flagship site of Rupert Murdoch’s conservative media empire. Harlan Ullman, the former Pentagon planner who coined the term “shock and awe” -- you can’t call him an un-American wimp -- writes that the Iraq war is "full of errors" and “needs a rethink.” About the only upbeat pundit is Israeli columnist Sever Plocker, who argues Islamic extremism has suffered many defeats since Sept.11. In Iraq, he says, “civil institutions are being established.”

By Jefferson Morley | Permalink* | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)