Jack Kemp Quotes
Government at every level failed the Katrina victims.
Jack Kemp, U.S. Congressman (Republican, NY), U. S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Republican Vice Presidential Candidate, NBC Meet the Press, March 5, 2006
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This quotation shows the naivety of the Islamic terrorists about America. They assumed that because the Federal Government did not send help to New Orleans and other communities hit by the hurricane, it was because there was a shortage of military personnel to send and they took credit for tying down all the troops. They just could not accept the possibility that some American administrations were totally incompetent and were not be prepared or that an American President could appoint someone with no real qualification. Ironically, they would believe that of the Arab countries in the Middle East, but not the vaunted USA. The terrible response to Katrina had nothing to do with the shortage of troops and civilian first line responders. There were more than enough. They just were never prepared and never deployed on time.
Thousands of people were trapped in the New Orleans convention center without food, water, sanitary or medical facilities. A number died. While the head of FEMA claimed Federal ignorance, the plight of the people at the Superdome and the Convention Center was constantly being broadcast on the radio and television, including on location video and pleas for help. Mr. Brown’s qualifications for emergency management before he was appointed to head FEMA was to head up an organization for Arabian Horses.
This quotation has been used to illustrate a number of points. First is illustrates the fundamentalist Islamic view, not terribly different from a fundamentalist Christian view, that God punishes man for his sins be producing natural disasters. Second that the foreign policy of America is sinful per se. However, what is interesting is that Sallah is an Israeli citizen who not only heads a movement opposed to Israel but like any other Israeli citizen has a freedom of the press the is unknown in any Islamic country. Sallah and his Muslim coreligionists living in Israel, together with the Muslims living in the hated West, are the only Muslims in the world who have total freedom of speech, thought, expression and conscience.
Unlike terrorism and natural disasters like earthquakes, a hurricane is known about a week in advance and can be tracked as it makes landfall. So his view was that the prime failure of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security occurred the week earlier. In addition a few weeks before Katrina, Leibersbach lead a delegation of State Homeland Security Directors to meet with Secretary Chertoff of Homeland Security. Their message was that the reorganization of DHS has so downgraded FEMA that the nation’s capacity to deal with national disaster had been diminished as a result of the reorganizations.
For this statement, MSNBC’s Keith Oberman named him “Worst Person in the World."
The George W. Bush administration had been caught ill prepared and with the exception of the Coast Guard, was slow and inadequate in responding to the emergency.
Jack French Kemp was an American politician and a professional player in both American football and Canadian football. A member of the Republican Party from New York, he served as Housing Secretary in the administration of President George H. W. Bush from 1989 to 1993, having previously served nine terms in the United States House of Representatives from 1971 to 1989. He was the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee in the 1996 election, as the running mate of presidential nominee Bob Dole. Kemp had previously contended for the presidential nomination in the 1988 Republican primaries.
