Hundreds Dead In Saudi Arabia Stampede
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in The WorldMINA, Saudi Arabia (CNN) — At least 345 people have been killed in a stampede during a symbolic stoning ritual at the annual Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, according to the country’s Health Ministry.Health Minister Hamad al-Maneh told Saudi TV that 289 others were injured in the stampede near Mecca and taken to the hospital.
Many of those injured were not seriously hurt and have been released from the hospital, al-Maneh said. The number of injured does not include those treated on the scene, he said.
And yet, I feel so removed from these stories. We rarely hear about them from our media, and if we do, they’re buried on page 24, simply a sidenote in our life and times. We become so focused in on somebody’s wife crying at a hearing, we beging to lose the full scope of this human story.
In any event, just a post-midnight meditation from yours truly. Treat it accordingly.
This entry was posted on Friday, January 13th, 2006 and is filed under The World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 13th, 2006 at 10:05 am
Unfortunately this sort of thing seems to happen at just about every hajj in recent years; this one is just one of the worst in terms of casualties.
I read recently that the number of people making the pilgrimage to Mecca each year has grown exponentially in the last half-century. In the mid-20th century the pilgrims were typically numbered in the tens of thousands; nowadays they’re in the millions. Are the local authorities capable of handling that many people in town at one time? With all their oil money, you’d think the KSA would be able to upgrade the security and infrastructure at Mecca to accommodate that many people and minimize the risks associated with large crowds in close quarters. Or has the event simply become too big to handle without more drastic measures, or even departures from Islamic tradition such as, say, replacing the annual hajj with a bunch of monthly mini-hajjs?
Of course this is also an object lesson for Islamist types in being careful what you wish for. They basically want the entire planet and its population converted to Islam. As it stands now, Muslims make up about one-sixth of the global population, so converting the rest of the planet would increase the number of Muslims by a factor of six. That translates to roughly eighteen million people making the hajj in this year’s numbers. Something’s gotta give.
January 13th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
Agreed. People being trampled to death during the hajj has become an annual event. Tragic, but not unexpected.