Still AWOL After All These Weeks

This article by a fellow from the conservative Hoover Institution was linked by Glenn Reynolds. It makes some interesting points, the most interesting to me being:

the myth of Islamic solidarity has been shattered. Even though most victims in Indonesia, the most populous Islamic country on the face of the earth, are Muslim, the support flowing from Arab governments has been pitifully small. The decades of petrodollars and the years of high gas prices have apparently not put the oil-rich Middle East in a position to afford to offer much help to Muslims in distress.

Are those nations unable to afford to help or do they simply not choose to help?

Beyond that, I go back to a point on which I've harped several times here: Osama bin Laden, self-styled spokesperson for the Islamic world, has been AWOL at the very moment he might have at least expressed some solidarity with his brother Muslims in the world's largest Islamic nation, Indonesia. But it has been other nations--both their governments and their publics--and not bin Laden and crew who have compassionately responded to the needs of the tsunami's victims in Muslim and Hindu nations. Check here and here.