(Sung the tune of "Blame Canada")

This is amazing. The Vatican has blamed Israel for not providing disaster support, after they offered it and were turned down by Sri Lanka, who apparently didn't want any help from the evil Jews. As is often the case, no good deed goes unpunished.

[Update on Friday afternoon]

Catholic World News says that it was a mistranslation and that the Vatican was actually criticizing Sri Lanka for refusing the aid.

Glad to hear it.

In all fairness, the Sri Lankans appeared to object to the military presence in the delegation, not that it was Israeli; the article you link says other Israeli aid offers and delegations not including soldiers have been wholeheartedly accepted.

I'm hard pressed to see what the big deal is. 60 IDF soldiers is a short platoon. They were probably engineers and medics. And?

Correction. 60 soldiers would be several platoons. Sorry about that.

Of course they are military!
Who do you think handles disaster recovery in Israel? there are military usints trained in serch&resque, fast deployement medical operations and such.
Israel isn't big enough to have a FEMA like organization, so the military handles the job.
It was never a problem in previous cases, those units were used on many other occasions (most notably in the last earthquake to hit Turkey).

Remind me - why is it wrong for the US to use aid as a political tool? (We made the Brits give us long-term leases in partial payment for equipment before/during WWII.)

And, if they can afford to turn down a shipment of Jimmy Dean packed by a menstruating Jew, do they really need any help?

Reminds me of Guiliani turing down that Saudi money after 9/11. Right?

Does it remind you of that, Bill? Does it really?

I must have missed the story in which the Israeli government made a speech blaming the Sri Lankans for the tsunami before offering the aid. Do you have a URL?

Rand,

Bill probably bought that French book explaining how Rove remotely piloted the plane/cruise missile into the Pentagon, so that we would have a reason to attack Afghanistan.

Of course this was to help broker that pipeline deal in Afghanistan that would help our buddies the Saudis, which Guiliani screwed up by refusing their money. Yeah, Bush though made right by accepting larger shipments of Saudi oil to drive down the cost at the pump BEFORE the election. Stupid red staters though voted for Bush anyway because of the gay marriage stuff.

Sorry, just stunned by the absurdity of these people. Maybe it's Crighton's new book, or maybe it's that The Scotsman article I just read about Bush undermining the UN by building an aid coalition, just days after Bush/US was bashed by the UN as being stingy. It would be nice if these nutcases would get their stories in order.

Catholic World News has corrected this. There was a mistranslation, and the Vatican was in fact blaming Sri Lanka for refusing to accept Israel's offer...

http://www.cwnews.com/news/viewstory.cfm?recnum=34348