Thank you for the update, Carol. However, this is still well below the level of contributions (adjusted for GDP) from other countries.

Following various PMs, Carol's asked me to clarify my earlier post. It seems that Martin Gibson and others are using it as justification for "Muslims are stingy". That wasn't my intention, and I dislike my posts being used for justifying bigotry. It was imprecise though and so could be read that way.

What I intended to point out was that the governments of the richest Muslim nations (exception: Qatar) are failing to pull their weight. This is not a criticism because they are Muslim, it's a criticism because they're rich and they're not doing anything substantial.

Another intention of that post was about suggestions that Muslims would think better of the US for donating money to Muslim nations hit by the earthquake - I don't think it would make a blind bit of difference when the US is still in Iraq. And a third intention was that I don't believe there is such a thing as a "Muslim community" who could be influenced by US donations to Muslim countries, because the suggestion that all Muslims from Istanbul to Indonesia are "one community" is dangerously simplistic and factually incorrect - I believe the failure of Middle Eastern governments to put significant money in the pot is an example of that.

What I did *not* intend was to say that Muslim individuals are failing to pull their weight. In fact I'm sure they are doing so (see Carol's latest post), because your religion has no bearing on whether you care about people caught in something like this.

By the way, if people have an issue with a post, please PM or post on the thread to ask "did you really mean that?" in reasonable language. I'll gladly correct it, and I'm sure anyone else would too. But for myself, I'll be ignoring anyone calling my posts "bigoted hatemongering" in future, because that is not reasonable language but a personal insult, and I don't do flame wars.

Graham.