Aaron Broussard Quotes
We have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast, but the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history.
Aaron Broussard, Jefferson County, Lousiana, Parish President, NBC Meet the Press, September 4, 2005
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
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.
The Hurricane Katrina flood destroyed neighborhoods of whites and blacks, rich and poor. While there were differential responses by the authorities during and just after the hurricane, all the subgroups of New Orleans needed assistance which was slow in coming and not extensive.
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.
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.
Aaron Francis Broussard was the president, a combined municipal-parish position, of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana from 2003 to 2010. A Democrat, Broussard is known nationally for appearances he made in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
