Time to tell the unfashionable stories?

http://www.israellycool.com/2008/02/18/arab-slums-much-worse-than-palarab-refugee-camps/
(Hat Tip: Instapundit)


'I must confess that when Hamas militants blasted holes into Egypt’s border to end an Israeli blockade on Gaza, my first thought was how lucky those Gazans were. Landlocked and living on less than $2 a day—their plight rarely elicits envy, I know. But there are Egyptian slums that swim in more sewage and are submerged in even greater poverty. In those slums, chronic diseases go unchecked and uncured, and children grow up next to the dead in tombs turned into makeshift-housing.Yet nobody rushes to blast holes into the imaginary border of poverty that suffocates those slums, nor are they sporting t-shirts urging us to sympathise. Why?

Because Israel cannot be blamed.' [From a former Reuters employee, Mona Eltahawy]

We could be seeing a watershed event. Has it finally got through to the more reasonable media droids that the Palestinians, who get about $2 billion a year in subsidies (free money), are not in fact the story? Most of the 'facts' put out about the Palestinians are wrong. But thats not really the most important thing. What is more important by far is all the unregarded facts about the Arab world, about poverty, about political oppression, about why the world is as it is. Because the Palestinians have their own UN agency, and a huge megafone to blast their 'plight' around the world, their story has recieved vast amounts of attention. As the above quote shows, that has led to the annihilation of many other equally pressing stories in the public mind.

Not only is that wrong, it has been a political project of the left in both Britain and America to sustain this gross disproportion, to its great discredit. Isn't the left about solidarity with the poor, the dispossesed, the powerless? All over the world there are people like that not because of nature but because of man. Because of politics, in particular. Why can't or won't the left say anything about that? I know it doesn't fit into America/Britain/Israel-bashing, but then perhaps there are more evils out there than just ours...