Charities fail to attract cash as 'human crisis overlooked'

[spindrifter]

The Times August 15, 2006

By Rosemary Bennett and Helen Nugent

CHARITIES are facing difficulties paying for humanitarian relief work in Lebanon because the public has shunned their appeals.

The British Red Cross and Unicef have managed to raise only a fraction of their multimillion-pound appeal targets, with the public and corporate donors shying away from what they consider to be a highly political conflict.

<snip>

Mark Astarita, the director of fundraising at the British Red Cross, told The Times that the complex political issues surrounding the Middle East conflict were deterring even the most generous. “It has proved very tough indeed to raise money from the general public and, although we are usually successful with corporate donors, this has proved a very difficult appeal for them to respond to,” he said.

<snip>

The poor public response is in sharp contrast to other recent British Red Cross appeals. One for the Darfur region of Sudan raised twice as much in its first four weeks, the Pakistani earthquake appeal brought in ten times as much, and the Asian tsunami a hundred times as much. After the Beslan massacre in Russia, the charity raised as much in one day as the Lebanon appeal has in a month.

<snip>

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2313128,00.html

[Kutjara]

1. Gotta love it.

We not only structure our societies into heirarchies of inequality and injustice, we even apply our tribal thinking to the victims of war and disaster. There are 'deserving victims' and 'undeserving victims' and God help those who belong to the wrong group.

[shain from kane]

2. I got an old car that I can give them. n/t

[Kagemusha]

3. That's OK, Hezbollah will take care of its own.

And will become even more deeply entrenched politically in Lebanon as a result.