Posted by
The Interface on Thursday, January 28, 2010 10:41:11 PM
Much has been written and done regarding the current disaster in Haiti, but Melanie Phillips has made a key observation over on her blog that stimulates an interesting mixture of admiration and disgust, with different entities eliciting those responses.After observing the fecklessness of the United Nations yet again and the lethargic response of the Obama administration (there’s the disgust part), she writes:
In Haiti, however, there has been one foreign nation that has conspicuously broken free of this paralysis and has had no difficulty in setting up emergency aid for the Haitian victims. That country is Israel. Within hours of the earthquake striking, the Israeli media was reporting that Israel was assembling a team of no fewer than 220 emergency aid personnel to fly to the stricken country. As this CNN report shows, the Israelis have set up a fully equipped field hospital in Port-au-Prince treating wounded and sick Haitian victims.
That’s right, Israel, that hated evil capitalistic Jewish state that refuses to die though bombarded with missiles on nearly a daily basis. The nation which, lambasted if ever it raises a hand in self defense, is the target for annihilation for every Arab state in the world. If ever there were an example of 1 Peter 2:12, this is most certainly one.
Ms. Phillips, herself an Englishwoman, continues:
A further Israel Foreign Ministry bulletin states that so far 200 patients have been treated. It would appear that it is only Israel which has managed to establish such advanced assistance this quickly. One desperate American aid worker tells CNN:
I’ve been here since Thursday; no-one except the Israeli hospital has taken any of our patients.
Another remarks of the Israeli field hospital:
It’s like another world here compared to the other hospitals. They have imaging... my God, they have machines here, operating theatres, ventilators, monitoring, it’s just amazing.
Of any American field hospital, there is apparently not yet any sign. The reporter observes that the Israelis have come from the other side of the world. Another aid worker says it makes them ashamed to be Americans.
Israel sent a team of 220 aid workers. Israel has a population of six million. The population of Britain is 60 million. I’d say that was a disproportionate Israeli response, wouldn’t you?
Disproportionate indeed! There’s the admiration part. Perhaps this is in part what God meant in Genesis 12:2-3?