Monday, December 18, 2006
No good deed goes without punishment...
Islamists have used the world's charity to oppress people:
When people around the world sent millions of pounds to help the stricken Indonesian province of Aceh after the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, few could have imagined that their money would end up subsidising the lashing of women in public.
But militant Islamists have since imposed sharia law in Aceh and have cornered Indonesian government funds to organise a moral vigilante force that harasses women and stages frequent displays of humiliation and state-sanctioned violence.
International aid workers and Indonesian women’s organisations are now expressing dismay that the flow of foreign cash for reconstruction has allowed the government to spend scarce money on a new bureaucracy and religious police to enforce puritan laws, such as the compulsory wearing of headscarves.
Some say there are more “sharia police” than regular police on the local government payroll and that many of them are aggressive young men.
“Who are these sharia police?” demanded Nurjannah Ismail, a lecturer at Aceh’s Ar-Raniri University. “They are men who, most of the time, are trying to send the message that their position is higher than women.”
It will be interesting to see whether the West's "social change" activists muster even a fraction of the outrage over this atrocity as they did over, say, Nike's labor practices. I'm not betting on it.
The more challenging question is whether Western aid organizations will change what they do as a result of this. It seems to me that in the giving of aid there are three possibilities. First, one might exert tight control over the disposition of the aid, even at the risk of being accused of "imperialism" or simply being resented for it. Second, one might give the aid with few controls and openly acknowledge the possibility that the aid will be perverted into corrupt or violent consequences. Third, one might decide that the net consequences of the granting of financial aid are too difficult to estimate in advance, so it should not be done at all.
Finally, there is the fourth, most likely option: Everybody in a position to influence decisions in Western NGOs and aid agencies will decide to ignore the adverse consequences of the aid that they granted in Aceh (and, undoubtedly, elsewhere), because it is too painful to confront any of the three possibilities in the preceding paragraph.
CWCID: Glenn Reynolds and Pajamas Media.
9 Comments:
By 
, at
Mon Dec 18, 11:45:00 AM:
I'm betting you won't see that story on the evening news.
By , at
Mon Dec 18, 01:26:00 PM:
You know it will be option 4. Aid agencies have proven time and time again that they would rather stick their collective heads in the sand than confront the abuse that occurs. After all, that would be JUDGING them, and we can't have that, now can we.
By , at
Mon Dec 18, 01:27:00 PM:
Over and over again, the right tries desperately to convince us of what we already know; that radical Islam wants a different society than we have (hint: we all already know this). And yet, your solution to this problem is to try to commit violence against your enemies as the first course of action and supress those at home who dissent. You see, most of us want to draw a contrast between ourselves and radical Islam, not behave exactly like it.
By 
TigerHawk, at
Mon Dec 18, 02:05:00 PM:
Last Anonymous -- that seems to be painting with a broad brush, don't you think? Even accepting that your characterization of the righty response is more than characiture, if you do not see the difference between even the most "authoritarian" policy ideas from legitimate American hawks and radical Islam than you reflect the most common criticism of the left -- that it lacks the nuance or the will to distinguish between American military and non-military responses and far more extreme actions of our enemies. This is why the left is so open to the charge that it is "not patriotic."
By SR, at
Mon Dec 18, 05:29:00 PM:
So in your mind there is no difference between intended deaths of innocent people as an instrument of war (terror) and
incidental deaths of innocent deaths of individuals trapped in a war zone because of cynical tactics of the terrorists.
By , at
Mon Dec 18, 07:07:00 PM:
I know the Left contends that there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq pre-9/11.
And I know the Right contends that there was al-Qaeda in Iraq pre-9/11.
Weren't Saddam and al-Qaeda enemies, though? I'm no Middle East expert, but I try to stay informed. And wasn't our intention to eliminate al-Qaeda?
It seems like we have no business being in Iraq. Regardless, what we've caused there is totally disproportionate and irrational. It makes me sick to think that almost 3,000 American soldiers have died and continue to die for this. What is our purpose? Do we even know at this point?
And as it was mentioned earlier, we're responsible for all those dead Iraqis, too. Some say 60,000. Some say half a million. Either way, that's terrible.
what a bummer
By Dawnfire82, at
Mon Dec 18, 08:35:00 PM:
"we're responsible for all those dead Iraqis, too."
I hate this kind of twisted logic.
Far more Iraqis are killed by *other Arabs* than we even dream of. 'Car Bomb at Mosque, 35 dead,' 'death squad hijacks bus, 40 dead.' We're not responsible for that. We fight AGAINST the people who do that. So do many Iraqis.
And what's worse, we know who's responsible. It isn't a secret. (anymore) But we can't do anything about it yet because of Iraqi domestic politics.
But we're responsible. Pft.
By , at
Tue Dec 19, 08:35:00 PM:
We are responsible for the safety and stability of Iraq because we conqured it. If we had not invaded Iraq, we would not be responsible. Its simple.
The "Left" protests Nike because our consumption empowers those that exploit laborers for our benefit. We are responsible for our consumption decisions and the consequences that consumption. It can be said that we are somewhat responsible for the abuse at Aceh because our giving to them empowers them. I think we should do something about this. BUT... there is a big difference between these two.
By Dawnfire82, at
Thu Dec 21, 04:03:00 PM:
Not since we handed over control to the new Iraqi government. They are once again a sovereign power, with a budget and an army and all the other nice things that go along with being such, and we are now there at their own request.
And the way that the post I responded to was written, "we're responsible for all those dead Iraqis." That's like saying that our own government is responsible for murders and lynchings and riots and so forth in our own country. It isn't. It actively prosecutes (and sometimes executes) those people as a deterrence.
If you want to find responsibility for the sectarian strife in Iraq, visit Zarqawi's grave, then Muqtada al-Sadr's house, then Tehran, in that order.
