Bonkers, just about sums it up. As Domino said earlier, you could trace this bloodthirsty tit-for-tat back to the Crusades in the 11th century.

I still think it would be much harder for them to recruit footsoldiers for their holy wars if everyone had enough to eat, access to education, comfortable lives and good jobs. And that brings us back to the topic ...

I think that is exactly right Poca - any idea how we do this with the current international system?

Er - No!

is that the Royal "We" or are you saying that you have personally been involved??
and your maths is crap Cman
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
shows only 121,000 civilian deaths since 2003 - that includes those like the taxi driver killed by a brick during unrest and "civvie on civvie" related incidents.

OK one death is more than is necessary, but if it stops the death of thousand ......

it must be getting harder all the time to recruit, after all so many have given their lives to gain the maximum of kafir lives taken that the hooris in Jannah must be running out by now

`

Except many of the hardline recruits are British born muslims. At least one of the tube bombers was a Teacher.

Getting back to topic, the only way the worlds resources could be distributed equally would be to have a world Government and we have enough trouble with a European one

Charities have lost our trust. Who would object to giving £20 per month to clothe and feed an African child not I, but 10 people would have to give this after the charities have taken out their cut. Paid workers are mostly unaccountable, they fill Management Committees with their own cronies and sit back and build little empires.

Well again Einstein, you've managed to pee all over yourself in your sanctimonious quest for sensationalism;

According to the Geneva convention:
"Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group:

I certainly didn't support the Iraq war, but the intention certainly wasn't to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

So the deaths were just through incompetence?

Of course not, the 100,000s of civilians who have been killed (The Lancet quotes 650,000, others quote around 100k-200k it depends on whether the deaths are directly or indirectly caused by the war) were collateral damage so that the US could get their hands on the oil pipelines

I dont care what the Geneva convention defines genecide as. The US - and UK - and Spain in some respect - couldnt care less about Iraqi lives, they just want more oil and more money. The evil b*stards, Al Qaida have nothing on them in terms of being a threat to the world

Oxfam and all the others have become big business. take the ads on TV now for "Water Aid". They ask for £2 a month to give water to the needy in Africa. Out of those 200 pennies, how many are actually spent on water projects ? As for Chuggers, I make a point of publicly insulting and humiliating them !

I never do that with Al Qaeda because they stay away from me. It must be my reputation.

OK you win, then:

Despite all evidence to the contrary, the real purpose of the Iraq war was to kill all people of Arabian ethnicity. It had nothing to do with the fact that the Saudis were terrified of Saddam and pressured their close friends the Bush's to make up any excuse to take him down, it had nothing to do with security in the middle east (mainly for the purpose of ensuring the flow of oil to EUROPE and the rest of the world), and it had nothing to do with anything else than killing arabs for the fun of it (with full support of the major Middle eastern oil exporters, by the way).

Ironically, there are still billions of arabs in the world. What a failure! (but Europe does have a good supply of oil ).

Right then. Any more theories for us, Einstein?

NOTE: Not only does the US not need Iraqi oil, but Russia, China, and Europe get most of it nowadays..

So, a question for you people who are cynical about Oxfam etc. Are they redundant? Would the world be better off if it was left to governments to administer foreign aid?

Experience in Haiti, where virtually all the money collected after the earthquake was handed over to the US govt and used to rebuild their sweatshops and related infrastructure, would suggest not.

Sure, there is a lot of duplicated effort and wastage amongst the NGOs. But they are making real progress in lots of areas and there are thousands of dedicated, hardworking aid workers who are not slobbing around in Gucci shoes and fiddling their expenses.

It's a shame that some people use this as an excuse not to make donations.

What leave it to well-meaning but incompetent idiots like those we have in DFID, are you stark raving mad?

But seriously, there are good NGOs/Charities and bad ones - my answer is select the right one/ones.

OXFAM was good originally but now is bad and has lots of fatcats living off money people want spent on the good causes. money that was not donated for funding houses in the stockbroker belt and public school education for the fatcatkiddies. Some of the cancer charities are even worse btw.

That is a very good question. Who will do the work of these charities if we get rid of them? Let's not forget some of them are huge organisations which need talented people to manage them. Will the right calibre of people be persuaded do the work on a voluntary basis? Or are we saying these charities just shouldn't exist?

Well two plumbers from our village (and I'm sure they weren't alone) went out there for months rebuilding water supply and waste disposal infrastructure courtesy of the Spanish Red Cross so that money certainly didn't go to the US government. Nor incidentally was it given to the Haitian people which is another complaint I've often heard - "The people there haven't seen a penny". What on earth do they expect - people handing out wads of cash in the street?

Incidentally "virtually all the money collected after the earthquake was handed over to the US govt" - any evidence of that?

Yes - I'm sure that some people (although surely none on here) would use that as an excuse.

I don't really know what people expect - that multi-million pound organisations should be run entirely, from fundraising to aid delivery and everything in between, by unpaid volunteers?

Like any other sector, there are obviously good ones doing good work on a shoestring, and bad ones spending far too much on salaries and administration and not enough on their primary purposes. I worked for a charity in the UK for 3 years and we certainly didn't have any freeloaders - twice within 3 years I and the rest of the small staff were on the brink of being made redundant as funding applications which had been approved were slow in coming through. We worked in a converted church in a not very salubrious area of Manchester, no luxurious offices there.

Part of the problem with charity funding is that funding is only normally available short term - anything from 1 to 3 years but rarely any longer. Also, a lot of work has to go into preparing the budget monitoring reports that the funders, quite rightly, demand - but somebody has to do the work. The ESF (European Social Fund) was one of the worst in that respect, it was very nearly a full time job in itself to keep up with their requirements. A combination of these two things means that charity staff have to spend too much time researching available funding, putting together bids and preparing all the material that has to be submitted as "evidence" of how money has been spent, so they are being paid for doing that rather than delivering the services the charity was set up for.

Lynn I agree, at the other end of the scale there are workers who put in many unpaid hours etc. I used to evaluate ESF projects, there was a lot paperwork but there was also a lot of fiddling and useless projects too. When some local charities have been given grants, employ a worker etc. the grass root unpaid workers are often shoved out and lose control of the project.

Speculation as to where the money for Haiti went. Have heard that the place is swarming with charity workers and a lot of time was spent constructing places for them in the beginning. Says it all

A friends Daughter went to work in an orphanage in Africa. (salary paid by a charity, no childcare experience!)We visited whilst on holiday, all the carers were from the UK as was the Manager, handyman etc. Why?? they only needed one person to oversee the place, local people were capable of caring for the children, they would have had a wage which would have gone back into the economy. Save the Children is another rubbish charity BTW. Most of their bread and butter comes from little old ladies watching emotive TV ads!