Bobert,

a personal remark first. Much more often than not I'm in agreement with your basic sentiment on many things. However, your way of arguing and your disregard for accuracy often put me against you. And as for your often shown inability or unwillingness to admit clear errors unequivocally and not mixed with new attacks (not to your friends but to the people you feel to be on the opposite site), look at your friend Teribus for a good example how to admit an error with style.

The Israeli professor may have had a sinister agenda in his speech, but that particular fact he cited was correct. You could have attacked his motives, but you have attacked his data and you are wrong. Period.

Dubious data from 1996 (a term paper???) do not help here. False positives are very rare.

People on the left have learned it in their sociology courses and in history and and and that usually the individuum is not to blame but society and in particular the Western governments if something is wrong. Quite often this mantra is true. But sometimes it isn't. It is the easy way for governments to tell their citizens that someone else (outside of the country) is to blame for an evil and that there is no need to change their own behaviour. Everybody loves to hear that, for changing behaviour isn't what most people like to do.

That's why for instance the post apartheid South African government was well liked for following a discredited minority position and for telling their citizens that the source of AIDS lies outside of the behaviour of the citizens and that someone else, not their own government, was responsible. That was the easy way and the wrong way. In order not to be misunderstood, the responsibility for unequal distribution of wealth between the continents and the reponsibility for still keeping the prices for AIDS medication much too high lies still with, broadly speaking, the Western world.

But by not telling their citizens what behaviour changes might lower the incidence of AIDS and by not making more propaganda for condoms and all that the present South African governments and other governments are responsible for thousands of deaths. I have criticised the apartheid government for being reponsible for deaths and mistreatment. I criticise the post apartheid government for being responsible for a similar number of deaths in a quite short time, not by scheme and evil will this time, like the old government, but by negligence and failure to react with responsibility.

Blame the West. Often it's true, but not always.

Wolfgang