Who’s Stingy?

Jonathan Last notes that tsunami relief donations from rich Muslim countries are – shall we say – stingy compared with Japanese, Taiwanese, and Western donations. I don’t expect fat aid packages from Afghanistan and Somalia. But surely the House of Saud can spare more than 10 million dollars. Amazon.com raised more than that. Oil-rich Iran won’t even pledge one million dollars.
Since so many people who desperately need help are Muslims, I was first tempted to say “so much for Muslim solidarity.” But I don’t think that’s the issue. Except for Turkey (which so far promises less than 2 million dollars) every rich stingy Muslim country cited is a dictatorship. And with the exception of China, the top 16 donors are Western and East Asian democracies.
Free people are generous. Tyrants are not.
UPDATE: I should not have suggested the Saudis are stingy. They spend Allah only knows how much money exporting their racist knuckle-dragging jihadist ideology to the rest of the planet.
SECOND UPDATE: It looks like the Arab states in the Gulf are contributing quite a lot for relief aid. Kuwait and Qatar have now matched Saudi Arabia’s10 million dollars, according to the New York Times. (Hat tip: Katherine in the comments.) The United Arab Emirates pledged 20 million dollars. The populations of these countries are only a miniscule fraction of the populations of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE aren’t democracies, but their governments are a lot more moderate and benign than the House of Saud and the mullahcracy. Whether or not a country is Muslim seems to have little or nothing to do with the generosity of its government. It’s the Middle East’s worst regimes that aren’t pitching in as much as the rest of us.