Presidential Gaffe
President Mary McAleese has caused some upset among Northern Protestants by drawing a parallel between the anti-Semitism that spawned the Holocaust and hatred for Catholics in Northern Ireland. She made the remarks during a radio interview on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The remarks are unfortunately a double-edged sword, insulting Northern Protestants and gravely understating the horrors of the Holocaust.

Mrs. McAleese is herself a Northern Catholic. Moreover, the nationalist – mostly Catholic - areas of Ulster seem to harbour unusually strong anti-Israel sentiment.

I have been an admirer of President McAleese but unfortunately one is now left with an uncomfortable feeling that this is something of a Freudian slip.

- posted by Pat O'Sullivan @ 11:56 PM 0 comments

 
Holocaust Memorial Day
The Holocaust defies the imagination. To give the simplest sense of scale: the 21st century was transformed by a multiple act of terror on September 11, 2001, when 3,000 people died. During the Shoah, on average, 3,000 Jews were killed every day for five and a half years.


- posted by Pat O'Sullivan @ 11:16 PM 0 comments

 
International aid effort is media driven.
Addressing a press conference last week, Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the U.N. Millennium Project, was .. critical of the double standards of the donor community.
He told reporters that while the international community remained focused on the Indian Ocean disaster, "the world continues to overlook the silent tsunami of death from malaria, which takes every month the number of people that died in the Asian tragedy."
As of Wednesday, the estimated number of deaths resulting from the tsunami tragedy has exceeded 250,000.
Every month, Sachs said, 150,000 children in Africa, if not more, were dying from malaria, "a largely preventable and utterly treatable disease".

…………………………………………………………………………………….
It took but days for the Paris Club of western creditors to espouse a debt moratorium for all the tsunami-affected countries, "but time and time again -- most recently just last fall" -- the rich industrial nations refuse to cancel African debts.
"Even when they agree that it must be done, they can't agree on a formula which would make it possible." (U.N. Special Envoy ) Lewis said.
There's something indefensible at work, he said, because it's not just south and south-east Asia. "Iraq gets debt reduction, Africa festers in frustration."

Inter Press Service (Johannesburg)

- posted by Pat O'Sullivan @ 4:37 PM 0 comments