Mark Potok
In Haiti, tens of thousands of earthquake victims are dead, with at least one official estimating the number could reach half a million when the full, horrifying effects of Tuesday afternoon’s earthquake in the island nation are finally known.

In Arkansas, Billy Roper figured that made for a pretty amusing joke. So the former high school teacher and current head of the neo-Nazi White Revolution group today announced a food drive he called “Nutrition for Neutering.” “Yes,” Roper’s White Revolution website said, “you can get started on the ground floor with this charitable effort to provide one can of nonperishable food to each and every Haitian citizen affected by the earthquake who agrees to be sterilized.”

Roper’s charming post, featuring a photo of castration shears, goes on to say that if those citizens then go for nine months without producing children, he will send them a can opener. “Physical evidence of the castration process should be mailed by the applying food aid recipients to Barack Obama,” he adds.

For most Americans, the sight of the catastrophe in Haiti provoked an outpouring of sympathy and support for the victims. Early reports suggest that most structures in the island’s capital city of Port-au-Prince were damaged or destroyed. Men, women and children are wandering the streets with horrific injuries, and the cries of trapped victims still are emanating from underneath tons of rubble.

But Billy Roper and those with similar ideas — characters like the sterling defenders of the white race who populate the loathsome Stormfront.org, the world’s largest white supremacist Web forum — are not like most Americans.

Just have a listen to some of the voices on Stormfront:

•    ”Money showered on simians is wasted.” — “Karl von Muller”

•    ”F*ck Haiti. …. I’m fed [up] to the core with hearing of Haiti and how we must help these ‘poor’ abominations to [sic] humankind.” — “Iberian88”

•    ”Negroes left to their own devices turn everything into a pest hole.” — “Herr Leutnant”

•    ”Nature left to its own devices will clear itself of the blight.” — “AngelEyez”

And on the web page of the Council of Conservative Citizens — a group that has described black people as a “retrograde species of humanity” — a report on Haiti was illustrated with an engraving of a white man being hanged by blacks, presumably in Haiti.

Most of these comments are far beyond the pale of what most Americans, of any race, felt when they heard news of the Haitian tragedy. But it wasn’t only neo-Nazis who said ugly things. Some of the most astounding comments came from people in the ostensible mainstream — people like radio heavyweight Rush Limbaugh.

To Limbaugh, President Obama, in calling for Americans to open their hearts and their wallets to the plight of the Haitians, is interested in nothing but political gain. “This will play right into Obama’s hands,” Limbaugh said on his Wednesday radio show. “He’s humanitarian, compassionate. They’ll use this to burnish their, shall we say, ‘credibility’ with the black community ? in the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country.” Anyway, Haiti “has been run by dictators and communists.” It produces “zilch, zero, nada.” And Obama is asking “people who have lost their jobs because of his policies to donate.”

Limbaugh: Obama will use Haiti to boost credibility with “light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country“

[ Find More Videos Here ]

“Besides,” the millionaire broadcaster added later in his show, “we’ve already donated to Haiti. It’s called the U.S. income tax.’

For his part, Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson said on Wednesday’s “700 Club” on the Christian Broadcasting Network that the Haitians had brought it all on themselves. “They were under the heel of the French… . And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’ … [E]ver since, they have been cursed by one thing after another.”

Robertson’s “true story“: Haiti “swore a pact to the devil” to get “free from the French” and “ever since, they have been cursed“

[ Find More Videos Here ]

Robertson, who once blamed the 9/11 attacks on abortionists, feminists and others, didn’t mention how he knew this to be a “true story.”

————————————————————————————————————————————————-

————————————————————————————————————————————————-

   [ By: Charles Onyango-Obbo ]
The Haitian government recently confirmed that the death toll from the earthquake just over two weeks ago was 150,000. This figure, however, is set to climb.

If Haiti were China, tragic as it is, that number would still be peanuts because the country’s population is 1.3 billion. For Haiti, though, with 9,780,064 people, the death toll so far is 1.5 per cent of the population.

A better way to understand this is that if 1.5 per cent of Kenya’s population had been killed in the 2008 post-election violence, we would have had 585,000 deaths, not the official figure of 1,360.

Where there is death, there is sorrow and, almost inevitably, controversy too: For example, who or what was the real killer? In the case of Haiti, there is the right-wing American preacher, the Rev Pat Robertson, who has stirred the hornet’s nest.

Robertson blamed the Haitian earthquake on what, he alleged, is the country’s “pact to the devil”. Voodoo is big in Haiti, and even in regular church services, voodoo practices often intrude in the proceedings.

The Haitians “were under the heel of the French…,” Robertson said on his “700 Club” broadcast the other week.

“And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’

“You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other,” Robertson claimed.

Robertson’s “true story“: Haiti “swore a pact to the devil” to get “free from the French” and “ever since, they have been cursed“

The Haitians defeated French colonists in 1804 and became the first colonised black nation to become independent, but its last 50 years have been among the worst a country can suffer.

It was governed by some of the most incompetent, corrupt and cruel rulers in the world, the Duvaliers, father and son.

Robertson has got a lot of stick since then. I, too, think he was wrong, but not because of his claim that the earthquake was Haiti’s punishment for its devil worship.

Rather, because he didn’t appreciate that the destruction of a country often presents it with its best chance to rebuild as a modern society.

Take the example of Sudan, after the Nairobi peace agreement between the Khartoum government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement rebels ended the war there and established a semi-autonomous administration in the south.

Southern Sudan had fallen back into the Dark Ages, and didn’t have an economy, a school system, or a phone system.

Experts who came in to advise with building a phone system thought southern Sudan had an opportunity to build a whole new digital system, unencumbered by the old regime with its poles, copper wires, transformers and giant exchanges. That would be cheaper, and could be built very quickly.

The SPLA’S former commander, who was in-charge of infrastructure was suspicious, thinking they were con men.

Having spent all the years fighting in the bush, he didn’t understand much about things like mobile mobiles, and he wanted something that people could see and touch ? telephone poles and lines. In the end, common sense prevailed.

After the 1979 war in Uganda that ousted military dictator Idi Amin, the capital, Kampala, and many towns in the west lay in ruins. It seemed impossible then that the country would rebuild all that had been lost.

Eventually it did, providing an opportunity to replace unworkable 70-year-old houses that would have taken another 50 years to tear down, and build new ones in their places.

Rwanda was the same. After the war and genocide in 1994, travelling around the country, you were left with a Robertson-like impression that it had been punished by God for some past transgressions. Everything had been wasted.

Rather than recreate the old telephone system, Rwanda became the second country after South Africa to have a mobile phone system on the continent.

That, in many ways, eventually led to the decision by Rwanda to become East Africa’s digital technology capital. In another two years, for example, the whole country will be a hotspot.

It also allowed Rwanda to become probably the first country in Africa, to rationalise the way peasants built their homes and used land in the villages.

The earthquake offers Haiti an opportunity to get rid of slums no politicians could touch because it would lose them votes; and to build something almost no Third World has been able to do ? a new sewer system.

This is no comfort to the Haitians who are suffering today, but their grandchildren might inherit a better country and a modern Port-au-Prince, because of the tragedy of the earthquake. The earthquake might well have been God’s work.

————————————————————————————————————————————————-

————————————————————————————————————————————————-