Should know better than to put in my tuppence, but:

1) Appropriateness.

        a. The "it seems calm enough to _us_" messages relayed on the list
        were a nice balance to the "all Hades is breaking loose" one was
        getting elsewhence. (Besides, wasn't it nice to hear from people
        who _weren't_ trying to sell newspapers or beef up ratings?!)

        b. The IFLA people are colleagues-by-extension, which makes their
        situation relevant to _any_ library-oriented list.

        c. Enough people on this list _do_ know an IFLA'er in Moscow to
        justify the very few*, very brief messages we got. (If the list had
        been absolutely _clogged_ with these messages, it _might_ have been
        another matter altogether.)

*(I'd here venture a wager that the current debate lasts longer than the
crisis, or at least generates more messages than the ones that started the
debate in the first place.)

2) Initialisms for the uninitiated.

We cannot assume that everyone on the list has an MLS; we cannot even
assume that everyone on the list is a "professional" librarian; what we CAN
assume with some degree of safety, I think, is that the people on this list
who do not work in or have access to a library are so few as to be
statistically negligible. What therefore bothers me is not why JANAND
didn't know what IFLA meant -- ;-) to JANAND: neither did I, although the
"LA" seemed a sure bet to mean "Library Association" -- but that (s)he was
unable to consult, say, Ralph De Sola's _Abbreviations Dictionary_ or a
similar reference work. (Hey, I didn't know that the International
Federation of Landscape Architects is secretly behind SERIALST!)