What Makes the World Go Round?
Mahjabeen Islam-Husain, MD, Toledo, Ohio

In one week of clashes in Israel over 60 persons are dead and violence continues. The medium of this violence runs the gamut of crude rocks to sophisticated weaponry, even tanks.Madeleine Albright has talked of immense pain and has offered her personal condolences to the bereaved families. Our ineffectiveness in stopping the needless killing makes her sympathies sound terribly trite.

National Public Radio reported that a Palestinian youth was gunned down for trying to rip the Israeli flag from a pole. The graphic images of nine-year-old Rami being killed will forever remain etched in the mind of every parent who saw them.

Why are we so ineffective? Why did the world watch the decimation in the Holocaust, the massacre of the Tutsis, the mass murders of the Bosnians, with no effort while they happened and much chest thumping later on? And yet when Iraq marched into Kuwait we declared war in a heartbeat and were saving our Kuwaiti brethren from the mother of all monstrosities. Saddam had not even enough time to do too much. Not only did we act with amazing alacrity, we continue to act, we paint pictures of Saddam manufacturing missiles and we punish the nine-year olds of Iraq by raining missiles on them and starving them with our sanctions.

The genesis of our schizoid actions is that familiar enticer of individuals and communities - what makes the world go round and round. Kuwait had plenty of it in the form that we love - oil. When we are hurt at the pump, when our style is cramped at the mall, when stocks could nose-dive, we are there to save and euphemistically say that we are acting out of conscience and for justice. Yeah, right!

Six million Jews, two million Tutsis and an unknown number of Bosnians died silent deaths, away from the attention of the policy makers of the world, only because world leaders had no vested material interest in their lives (or deaths for that matter).

Similarly, the death of more than 60, mainly Palestinians, is no blip in our horizon. They have nothing but a claim on Masjid-al-Aqsa, and that is pesky politics anyway. We act quickly so that oil is not spilled. As far as blood goes, God bless procreation, for in just a few years we will have some more to spill.