Thursday, January 27, 2005

Tsunami salvation and speculation

In the month since the devastating tsunami struck southern Asia, a few alarming thoughts have struck me from some of the reporting (and non-reporting). First, how could the British base (used by America to bomb Afghanistan) at Diego Garcia not make headlines. There surely would have been damage to it given its location in the Indian Ocean. To be a conspiracy theorist for a second, how could they not have been affected by the tsunami. One could theorize that they knew in advance that a tsunami was coming and have taken precautions to prevent any loss of life. If so, they could have alerted countries in the region to the impending disaster which could have saved thousands of lives.
Regardless of that situation, it is alarming that there has been much relief work done by organizations that are strongly evangelical in the affected countries, particularly Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation in the world. It sends the wrong signal to the Islamic world if the West sends in relief workers that have a religious agenda in their relief work. Do you want clean water? Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior? It brings to attention the possibility that much relief work may be detrimental to the recipient countries’ image of the West. If we are not denouncing groups that provide aid with a religious component attached, we could be doing more harm than good in terms of our reputation as a generous, caring country. The evangelical relief work could be seen as a way to establish a foothold for a broader agenda of religious conversion within the Muslim world. What a way to isolate and marginalize the very modeate Muslims we should be allied with to fight the more militant groups who claim Islam as their guide.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home