David Aaronovitch on New Orleans

No need to panic, I'm not sure that Aaronovitch has written anything on the disaster that has befallen New Orleans over the past few days. I only mention it because while I was looking for information on New Orleans I remembered Aaronovitch writing a sneering racist gloat in the Guardian about the disaster in the Iranian city of Bam, and how things are so much better in America, back in late 2003. I googled Bam "David Aaronovitch" and up came 192 sites, most of which expressed outrage at his Guardian article. Here's how PeaceUK introduced the piece

This comment is posted, not because I agree with it, but because there is an urgent need for those of us who care for peace and harmony in the world to replace this arrogant racist nonsense with something positive and productive. People like Aaronovich feed the worst anti-Arab instincts of the rabid right, and their arguments provide exactly the kind of justifications that lunatics like Bush and Rumsfeld will use for deciding on forceful "regime change" in Iran. Please, please let me know the moment you find something with which I can replace this destructive bile. Email me instantly on john@iraqbodycount.org]

Anyway I tried - "New Orleans" "David Aaronovitch" - and whilst lots of sites appeared, in fact 262, none were articles by David Aaronovitch sneering at the people of New Orleans during their time of distress. You know it's almost as if he prefers Americans to Iranians. I know this is an apparently gratuitous swipe at the man but while I was looking for info on New Orleans and finding many websites down, his disgusting Bam article just popped into my mind. I wonder if he feels at all chastened by what is happening in the USA.

To see the multi-cultural splendour that was (and hopefully will be) New Orleans see this site. I know they're trying to sell the place but it's uplifting after all the scenes of distress. And if you know of Mike West and Katie Euliss's whereabouts, please let me know. They should have been gigging in Florida but I noticed that they had a break between dates from 28/8 to 1/9 and I wondered if they went back to New Orleans. Thanks!

Update: Got an email from Mike and Katie aka Truckstop Honeymoon and they're safe on the road but their home was under twenty feet of water.

Update II: Aaronovitch has written an article on New Orleans now. (hat-tip Particleist) It contains none of the gloating superiority of his piece on the disaster at Bam in Iran. A couple of lines hit me. Take this one "it only tells us how vulnerable we are." Whereas the Bam disaster tells us how incompetent or corrupt the Iranians are/were. But hold on

Well, not all of us equally. When disasters or fires or bombings happen, you discover just who was travelling on your trains, who was crammed into your hostels or who was living in the low-lying areas. It isn’t the failure to act in New Orleans that is the story here, it’s the sheer, uninsured, uncared for, self-disenfranchised scale of the poverty that lies revealed. It looks like a scene from the Third World because that’s the truth. It’s a quiet disaster that ’s been going on for years — a pudding-basin-full-of-poverty situation.

"self-disenfrachised"? Whatever can he mean? Anyway, check out the article and see how Aaronovitch's main thrust is to defend America from any criticism, especially, as you'd expect, over the war in Iraq.