For the love of cheese Guinastasia, can’t you deal with with the OP instead of spreading false information about US aid to Latin America. Never mind that the US spent a hell of a lot more on disaster relief in Central America for Hurricane Mitch than 320 million dollars. By the way, if Clinton got his 2001 budget request for 22 billion dollars for foreign aid approved, that would represent around a $750 donation from each American man,woman and child. Whether or not you add the private donations through NGOs it still makes Americans the most generous people in the world.
It was a rhetorical question, and I was trying to make a point to buddy that it isn’t so simple about Islam being compassionate.
Does that mean the US isn’t compassionate, and a big bunch of meanies?
Do you mean “surrounding Afghanistan”? As far as I know Afghanistan does not share any borders with an Arabic country. Do you know something I don’t?
Foreign aid is a tool of foreign policy, not an act of compassion. Arab countries rarely have the wherewithal to act out their foreign policies with large sums of cash, and besides, they don’t need to buy the co-operation of the US.
How can you possibly support this assertion with fact? Oh, right, I forgot, those “poor” Arab countries that have no cash - like Saudia Arabia and U.A.E.
I guess (from all I’ve seen) that:
-Islamic countries talk a lot about compassion, aid to the poor, but they very rarely aid the poor in Islamic countries
-the West often aids the poor of Islamic countries-why i don’t know
-Saudi Arabia alone (if it wished to) could invest some of its huge wealth into its islamic neighbors-but it doesn’t
I challenge anyone to prove to me that Islam practices what it preaches. Seems to me that Arab countries need to be more honest about their beliefs.
Sigh. Myths, mistatements, and rubbish.
- Kindly point out to me Saudi Arabia’s “huge wealth” - the CIA can’t seem to find it. According to The CIA World Factbook, Saudi Arabia’s GDP per capita is $10,500 - less than half Great Britain’s, approximately 35% of the United States’, and just a tad above Malaysia’s. Saudi Arabia is doing OK, but they are accurately described as a “middle income” country.
- Perhaps Islamic countries “very rarely aid the poor in Islamic countries” because Islamic countries are generally poor. A sampling of the CIA Factbook indicates that Saudi Arabia, that middle income country, is the wealthiest significant Islamic country.[sup]1[/sup] Here are the per capita GDP’s of a few other Islamic countries:
Morocco - $3,500
Algeria - $5,500
Sudan - $1,000
Indonesia - $2,900
Iran - $6,300
While corruption and imbalance in income and assets certainly contributes greatly to poverty in Islamic countries, at root the cause of poverty in Islamic countries, and the fact that Islamic countries don’t give much of aid to Islamic poor is that the countries themselves are poor.
- Despite this poverty, Islamic countries do in fact provide a great deal of assistance to Islamic poor. As three examples, (a) Iran shelters over 1 million Afghani refugees, at great cost; (b) ditto Pakistan, which shelters a slightly smaller number of refugees; © Islamic countries have given significant amounts of aid to the poor in Palestine, Kosovo and Bosnia.
Sua
[sup]1[/sup] There are four Islamic countries with higher per capita GDPs - Kuwait, Brunei, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. The GDPs of the UAE and Brunei match those of some European Union members. However, I do not include them in the discussion because in each case the populations are tiny and therefore the overall size of their economies is relatively miniscule.
Saudi Arabia is hardly so cash poor that it cannot afford to send its poor Islamic bretheren any assistance. Per capita GDP is one measure of wealth, certainly not the only one. When dealing with a country with much subsistence agriculture and huge liquid petroleum reserves it is misleading. Many people make 0 dollars and are in no danger of starving to death. The Saudis collect billions in oil revenue each year.
In fact SA does have a foreign aid program. (That is a good Saudi information website) Here are the specifics. So, that makes everyone on this thread wrong about the Saudis, including myself.
Also some of the other Gulf states have aid programs mostly aimed at Muslim countries, just Yahoo the country names. The Saudis do the most. They still don’t match the U.S. efforts.
Regardless of how you measure GDP and wealth, wouldn’t you consider a subsistence herder who makes 0 dollars “poor”, even if he/she isn’t in danger of starving?
Sua
No. Why?, you ask. Simple, in a developed nation 0 is poor because a “0” income denies one the basics of life. Whereas, in an agrarian culture “0” may mean that you simply are not part of what we call “modern” life. Subsistence farming, ranching, et al does not make one “poor.”
Making $15,000 dollars a year in a major city in the United States, THAT makes you poor (but “rich” among herdsmen in Saudi Arabia). One cannot afford basic housing, clothing, or food on 15K in, say, San Francisco, Miami, Atlanta, Chicago, or New York City. Still, that totally inadequate income would be 5K more than the number you cite for Saudi Arabia. Therefore someone making “0” in Saudi Arabia, or in rural America for that matter, might well have all the necessities of life the “rich” urban dweller cannot afford.
One who makes “0” might well have 50 goats, 20 sheep, and 2 horses. Clothes can be made, food grown, housing built, and one can travel around, but only if one has access to land, the skills, and supporting culture to make that possible. These things exist in so-called “primitive” subsistence farming cultures, but not among so-called “civilized and modern” urban dwellers for the most part. Of course, even if the skills exist the materials and land often are not available in cities. So, as usual, statistics only tell one small part of the story.
I do not reject the “simple” life out of hand the way biased modern urbanists do. Many “primitives” live with a roof over their heads, eat a balanced diet, and wear clean clothes every day. Yet, they still make “0” in a modern sense. Ah, do I want to live like that? No, but only because I have no agrarian skills, not because I think we are always superior. Dentistry? You got me there.
Back of the envelope calculation based on the data from site shows that Saudi grants-in-aid over the past 15 years total approximately $20 billion. Given a current population of approximately 20 million, that works out to around $70 per person per year. Nowhere near American efforts, but not insignificant.
I do know something you don’t know: I am going stupid.
For “Arab” read “Islamic”, which of course is what the OP was asking.
Buddy1, I’m going to email you this great column by a Canadian named Gordon Sinclair. Should answer this question for you! 
Beagle: I find your arguments intriguing, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
But, a few points.
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My understanding of calculations of a nation’s GDP includes non-monetary assets. Therefore, the goats, sheep and horses you mention are included in the calculations of Saudi Arabia’s GDP. I admit that my understanding is based on fuzzy recollection of college courses, and if I am incorrect, please correct me;
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I dispute that adequate food and shelter is the dividing line between “poor” and “not poor”. First of all, the overwhelming majority of the “poor” in America do have adequate food and shelter, yet we consider them still to be poor. I submit that poverty includes lack of access to adequate health care, education, etc. (Personally, I think the most important indicator of poverty is the likelihood that your child will survive you.) And if we look at poverty from that point of view, Saudi Arabia still remains a “middle income” state.
Comparisons:
Saudi Arabia
Infant mortality - 51.25 deaths/1000 live births
Life expectancy - 66.4 years (male); 69.85 years (female
Literacy - 62.8%
Malaysia
Infant mortality - 20.31 deaths/1000 live births
Life expectancy - 68.48 years (male); 73.98 years (female)
Literacy - 83.5%
Germany
Infant mortality - 4.71 deaths/1000 live births
Life expectancy - 75.47 years (male); 80.92 years (female)
Literacy - 99%.
I do not think that a nation where over 5% of infants do not survive to celebrate their first birthday is anything but a poor or, at best “middle income” nation, regardless of the pleasures and benefits of an agrarian lifestyle. When you are more than ten times more likely to survive infancy in Germany, you are better-off in Germany.
Sua
The Sultan of Dubai, Sheikh Muhammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, gave $5,000,000 to the New York Heroes Fund. Notes at this site: http://news.bloodhorse.com/viewstory.asp?id=5908
(Man, those Arab names are a mouthful - I hope I got it all right )
SuaSponte A newsletter, moi? I think if I could get a website going, that would be cool. I would call it, “Don’t Believe Anything.org” GDP statistics debate? No thanks, I’ll take the sharp stick in the eye instead. How many goats does it take to make $100 in GDP? If it has come to this, I give up. All I know, living in a tourist town, is there is no shortage of obscenely rich Saudis. Not exactly scientific, I know.
As for poverty indicators, sure, there are lots of them. I still maintain that they reflect a cultural bias. Something you take for granted as essential, like modern health care or education, may not be viewed as necessary in another culture.
I am not going to argue the finer points of infant mortality [sub](for one thing, I don’t know jack about it)[/sub] except to say that it is not necessarily an indicator of a national ability to give out foreign aid. If you are right that the Saudis have a serious infant mortality problem they are not addressing, I wonder why they do give out so much money in foreign aid? A guess: they do not perceive the statistics the same way you do. It is possible that a country could spend much more on a particular problem, which I would suggest the Saudis could, yet don’t because they do not think it is serious.
My favorite example: swimming pools. People are mostly oblivious to the carnage swimming pools cause in our culture. A child is much more likely to die or be paralyzed in a pool accident than a firearms accident. (Para. 10 and beyond may surprise you.)
Yet, the outrage over guns is almost religious, where pools are viewed as benign. Someone from another country looking at the statistics might say “The pool crisis in the United States is very serious. They must not have the money to solve the problem.” Meanwhile, here, nobody seems to notice.
My core belief: the “hype” is everything to most people–damn the facts, full speed ahead. If the Saudis were convinced that infant mortality was as important as the intifada in Israel/Palestine/Lebanon, they would solve the problem quickly.