Submitted by Dan Sanchez via TheAntiMedia.org,
A baby boy turned to flotsam. Washed up on the shore, face down in the mud. His family, refugees from Syria’s civil war, had tried to reach Greece, but their over-crowded raft overturned in the Mediterranean Sea and he drowned along with his brother and mother. The viral image of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless little body on a Turkish beach has shaken the conscience of the West and wrenched America’s attention to the refugee crisis now rocking Europe.
Newsflash to the oblivious citizenry of the power-projecting “free world”: this is what war looks like. This times ten million. That which is mere “foreign policy” to you and your government is desperation and death to those on the receiving end of it.
Children just as innocent and precious as Aylan are being driven into the sea in Libya, incinerated by drone in Pakistan, or starved to death in Yemen all the time, and it is all on your dime. And every single instance creates a sight just as achingly forlorn and horrifically tragic as the one above, even if it isn’t photographed and seen by millions.
Aylan drowned in the arms of his father, who had been desperately trying to keep his head above water. The prelude to the disaster probably looked something like this photo of another Syrian refugee family.
It actually shows an arrival and not a departure. Still, especially for anyone with young children, the picture is a punch in the gut. It only takes a shred of empathy to instantly imagine how the father must feel. Overwhelmed and near the end of his rope. His daughter’s arms wrapped around his neck. His son’s face buried in his chest. Both looking to him for protection and provision he ultimately might not be able to give. It is no wonder this visceral photograph has also gone viral.
Another newsflash: this is what war displacement looks like, both in the sea and on dry land. What you see in his face is the anguish felt right this very moment by the many millions of mothers and fathers driven from their homes and sources of livelihood throughout the countries shattered by weapons from the West: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Palestine, Ukraine, and more.
It is a shame that the curiosity, empathy, and imagination of most are so stunted that they require such vivid imagery as this showing up in their news feeds to feel concern for the havoc wreaked by their governments’ policies.
And then they are stirred, not enough to actually learn a damn thing about it, but only enough to be manipulated into demanding— or at least countenancing — more of the very same kind of intervention that caused the tragedies in the first place.
Warmongers in government and the media are perversely but predictably trying to conscript Aylan’s corpse into their march to escalation. They are contending that Aylan died because the West has not intervened against Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad, and that it must do so now to spare other children the same fate.
Um, no, Aylan’s family were Kurdish refugees from Kobani who had to flee that city when it was besieged, not by Assad, but by Assad’s enemy: ISIS.
And ISIS is running rampant in that part of Syria only because the US-led West and its regional allies have given them cover by supporting and arming the jihadist-dominated uprising against Assad.
The West has been intervening in Syria heavily since at least 2012. Indeed, it is Western intervention that has exacerbated and prolonged the conflict, which has now claimed a quarter of a million lives.
But because much of the intervention has been covert and by proxy, it has received little media coverage and public attention. So the “blowback” that results from it, including Aylan’s death, can be conveniently blamed on alleged “non-intervention” and used to justify more overt and direct intervention.
In this way, governments have long exploited public obliviousness and gullibility to get their wars.
Moreover, if the hawks were to get their wish of seeing Assad finally overthrown and his forces dismantled, there would then be zero local resistance to ISIS, Syrian Al Qaeda, and the other jihadist groups completely overrunning Syria.
As bad as the refugee crisis is now, just imagine what it will be like as all of Syria’s many religious minorities desperately flee from these hyper-violent and hyper-sectarian Sunnis, armed to the teeth with Western weapons.
Far from preventing such tragedies as Aylan’s drowning, intervening further would only produce many more.
You are troubled by that picture you saw on Facebook. Good. It means your heart hasn’t been completely hardened by nationalistic and xenophobic indoctrination. But don’t let it make you susceptible to war party manipulation. And don’t just “raise awareness” of it by liking and sharing the tragedy and then forgetting about it in a month. To truly contribute to justice for Aylan, work to set things right.
And the first step to setting things right is understanding. Make it a project to learn about the role of foreign intervention in the Syrian Civil War that is creating so many of these refugees, and in the wars roiling the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia in general. And once you’ve acquired understanding for yourself, work to spread it to others.
* * *
An indispensable resource for this is Antiwar.com. And a few good starting points are these essays of my own:
Mass-Producing Huddled Masses
Refugees from the Footfall of the American Colossus
Flytrap to Breeding Ground
How America’s wars produced a terrorist infestation
Where Does ISIS Get Those Wonderful Toys?
From Uncle Sam, the Bruce Wayne of Jihad, and his Cronies
Clean Break to Dirty Wars
Shattering the Middle East for Israel’s Northern Front
Salafists Gaining Ground
Throughout the Middle East, thanks to US intervention
The US Government’s Not-So-Secret Support for al-Qaeda and ISIS
The Biggest State Sponsor of Terrorism of Them All
When I first viewed the picture yesterday morning, my very first thought was, “…look what we have wrought.”
WE have created this mess and WE are making it worse by the second.
Christians lived in relative peace under Assad. Not so much under the Saud’s or ISIS.
Someday when this shit truly comes home to roost, millions of my “fellow” ‘murkins will be wailing and gnashing their teeth, saying things like, “…nobody saw it coming…” or “…they hate us for our freedoms…”
While my mind will be silently screaming, “…IT’S OUR OWN FAULT!” “WE DID THIS TO OURSELVES!”
The only question is, will the pictures of dead bodies of our children cause the world to send help, or shake their heads, laugh and say a prayer that our 100 year reign of terror is coming to a close?
“We” implies “me.”
“I” didn’t do jack shit.
“I” pay my taxes (that support whatever our demonic rulers choose to do) out of simple self-preservation. I live under the gaze of Guido-the-Extortionist, and he works for the most vicious people on the planet. That’s my reality, and rather than have Guido break my legs or burn down my house, I pay.
“We” aren’t doing this to ourselves. Historical inertia carries the world (and everything in it) forward in a sine-wave of adventure, tragedy, farce and joy. The goal is to personally avoid the tragedy…while knowing that tragedy will befall someone, probably hundreds of millions of someones, possibly billions of someones.
My job is to do all in my power to protect my family, hopefully while observing my “Rule #1” which is, “The world is full of pain; try not to add to it.”
This “story” affects me NOT ONE BIT.
Every day there is tragedy. Last Friday a teen girl blew a stop sign in a nearby community and collided with a pick-up truck. A 62 year old man minding his own business and one of the girl’s teenaged passengers were killed.
Are the losses of those two families any less painful? Methinks not.
I don’t know about YOU, but I’m about fed up with being manipulated by PR firms, by advertisers, by our rulers and by the leftists in the news media.
Everywhere I turn I find myself subjected to mind control so pervasive that discussing it has become like discussing “being wet” with a fish.
I’m sick of it. My family is in a Western Civilization lifeboat. If any more 3 year olds climb into the boat, my own children and grandchildren will be doomed to live in the WORLD THOSE 3 YEAR OLDS WILL PRODUCE as soon as they can.
I don’t WANT my children and grandchildren to live in that society. I like the society we have NOW (actually, I prefer Mayberry RFD and the Dick Van Dyke Show, but hey, that’s just me.)
I’ve joined the “sink some boats, drown a bunch of people and maybe that’ll stop the flood” crowd.
I know what’s at stake.
Do you?
Sorry to be a sob sister party pooper but it now appears that the story about the little boy dead on the beach is a crock. According to various investigators the father has lied about everything. It seems he was not even on the boat. The ugly truth is that this reckless fool placed his family on a boat hoping to send them on by that route to reach Canada.. Once there the mother would falsely declare refugee status and then bring him over (single mothers are treated with less suspicion). They were not war refugees. They had been living in Turkey in complete safety for three years. Once the story blew up the father invented a line of b.s. You do not need to use made-up media stories to prove the point that war is terrible or that we are largely to blame for what is going on in Syria. That said, the current “refugee crisis” is fake. These are almost all economic illegal aliens, and there will be many more.
This is an article by Thierry Meyssan. > “The phony refugee crisis”
http://www.voltairenet.org/article188623.html
The picture of the little boy has been posed! the todler was washed up between the rocks and can be seen online
My first thought when I saw the picture was that it was posed. I immediately thought back to the lies about Iraqi soldiers killing Kuwaiti babies in incubators spread by the daughter of a Kuwaiti official. Propaganda is used to stir emotions and allow the ruling elite to accomplish their goals.
@Southern Sage: Nailed it. This “refugee” crisis is a carefully orchestrated attempt to acheive what failed at the gates of Vienna in 1683, ie, the Islamization of Europe.
The whole narrative of this little boy drowning is a COMPLETE LIE
This is heading toward a “war” that will make prior dirty wars seem pristine by comparison.
“You are troubled by that picture you saw on Facebook. Good. It means your heart hasn’t been completely hardened by nationalistic and xenophobic indoctrination.” ———– article
So solly, it hardly troubled me at all.
How many MILLIONS of men, women, and children have died in ME wars in the past 20 years? Should I be troubled over all of them? Could I? There is currently a land war going on in Yemen … boots on the ground and tanks, also …. American weaponry, Saudi soldiers … virtually unreported by the MSM. Many dead children there also … whose is weeping for them? My tear ducts have dried up.
The 5 Awkward Questions They Won’t Answer About The Drowned Boy, Syria And Our ‘Moral Duty’
by James Delingpole
1. What’s the truth behind the story of the drowned boy Aylan Kurdi?
There’s just so much that doesn’t add up. Starting with the fact that the boy’s name is actually Alan Shenu. His father Abdullah claims he and his family were fleeing the fighting in his ‘home town’ Kobani.
Yet according to the Guardian they have been living in Turkey for three years – long before the fighting in Kobani started or indeed ISIS really existed – and before that in Damascus.
In Turkey, their rent appears to have been paid for by a sister in Canada and they had over $4,400 in cash so they were in no immediate danger. Abdullah’s accounts of his motives, of his intentions and what actually happened are wildly inconsistent. In some versions he was heading for Sweden.
In others he was off to Canada (which had already once denied his asylum application), where his sister said he intended to have his teeth fixed. As for what he tells us about the tragic boat journey in which his wife and children drowned: was he even with them when it happened?
For example, he told the Mail that he watched his wife and children drown in front of him. But then later in his account, he says: “I looked for my wife and child on the beach but couldn’t find them. I thought they had got scared and had run away and I went back to Bodrum.”
2. Who invented the story about the torture and the teeth?
Tima Kurdi’s unhelpful revelation that her brother had risked his family’s life to “get his damaged teeth fixed” did not sit well with the media narrative that the Kurdis were tragic victims of the Syrian conflict.
When people began pointing this out on social media, it threatened to undermine the power “photo that changed the world” story. But then, astonishingly quickly, a handy explanation emerged: the people pouring scorn on Kurdi’s story were “right wing extremists”; the reason Kurdi had lost his teeth was that he had been tortured by the Assad regime and had them all removed.
The meme – for that’s what it quickly became as people began reposting it on social media – appears to have originated with this Syrian blogger Kenan Rahmani.
Here’s what it says:
1) Abdullah Kurdi, the father, was detained for 5 months in Air Force Intelligence in Damascus. While in detention, he was tortured and his teeth were pulled out. He had to sell his shop in Damascus in order to bribe the officers to let him out. This cost him 5,000,000 Syrian Liras (around $25,000)
2) After he bribed his way out of jail, Abdullah fled to Aleppo with his wife and sons, Alyan and Ghalib. The situation in Aleppo became dangerous due to the constant aerial bombardment, so he fled again to Kobani, his hometown.
3) When ISIS attacked Kobani last year, the family could no longer live in their hometown, so they fled to Turkey. Once in Turkey, the Turkish government did not provide them with assistance, so they paid almost $6,000 to secure 4 spots on a rubber dingy to the Greek island of Kos.
4) While on the boat, rough waters caused the boat to flip. The lifejackets they were given were fake. His sons and wife all drowned in front of his eyes, in his arms.
5) Kurdi had applied in June for refuge to Canada, but was rejected. After Aylan’s photo became a media story, he was reportedly offered citizenship to Canada. But he doesn’t want to go to Canada or Europe anymore. He says he will go bury his family in Kobani and stay there to fight against ISIS, because everything has been taken away from him and he has “nothing to live for.”
So if the world wants to no more Aylans on the beach, someone needs to do some combination of the following based on above: (1) stop torture and arbitrary detention by the Assad regime, (2) stop the regime’s aerial bombardment, (3) stop ISIS, (4) make traveling to Europe safe, (5) get Canada and the USA to accept more refugees.
Do we believe this? Any of it? (I fell for it myself briefly. Before I started asking questions like: “OK. So Kurdi had his teeth pulled under torture by Assad’s people. Wouldn’t this have been one of the first bits of information he gave to all the reporters who crowded round him hungry for tear-jerking autobiographical details? How come we only got to discover this back story from some random blogger in Damascus?
3. Why this dead boy in particular and why now?
Yes, it was a moving photograph. Not least because, as has since become clear, the photograph was carefully stage managed (see the comments section here for further details).
Drowned bodies do not have their hair flattened against their head, clothes which aren’t disarrayed, or legs and arms lying straight. It also remains a mystery why, if it has been floating in the sea for hours, the boy’s body is so pink.
So, yes, a moving picture. (Though surely a great deal more dishonest and contrived than, say, the photograph of the naked little girl who has been struck by napalm running down a road in Vietnam). But over the last five or ten years, hundreds of dead children will have been washed up on the shores of the Mediterranean from Lesbos to Lampedusa – all largely ignored by the media.
What I think we’d all like to know is: why this boy, why now? What was it that prompted the world’s editors to make this particular photograph their big story? Who started it? And what – given that they must have been aware of the effects it would have, over and above selling more newspapers – was their motivation?
4. What does a “moral duty” look like when it’s at home?
David Cameron has just bumped up the number of Syrian refugees Britain is going to accept from 4,000 to 20,000. Many other European countries are being bullied by Germany into doing likewise. The media narrative – promulgated by organisations like the BBC and the talking heads it chooses to sound off on this issue – is that this is no more than our “moral duty”. But it has been many decades since any EU nation bore any responsibility for what’s going on in Syria. Indeed, it’s one of the very few places in the Middle East where, conspicuously, nay miraculously, we haven’t intervened.
Is the rule, now, that we have to feel bad not just about the countries (Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc) where our meddling has made things worse – but also that we should feel personally responsible for those countries (Syria, etc) where we have made no difference?
And if this “moral duty” to save refugees extends to the whole world how come it didn’t apply when in Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo when babies were having their heads bashed against trees and pregnant mothers were being eviscerated with machetes? Or is that black people are just too much trouble?
5. Where is the Ummah?
Douglas Murray makes this point so brilliantly I’ll leave it to him. Short version: if the Muslim world is one big protective family, then how come large swathes of the Muslim world are doing absolutely zilch to house the displaced peoples of mostly-Muslim Syria.
Well Iran and Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Turkey and almost every other Muslim country in the Middle East have been involving themselves in the Syrian civil war for four years now. Many have sent fully-equipped armies of their own to fight intra-Islamic rivalries in the homeland of the Syrian peoples. And yet it is Europeans who are falling for the idea that because of this, it is our responsibility – not theirs – to pay for the mess they have created.
Well it seems to me that at the very least we should ask these countries ‘Where is your “Ummah” now?’ Sure, Jordan and Lebanon are grudgingly having to cope with plenty of refugees from Syria. But not one of the Gulf States – not one – has a resettlement programme for a single Syrian refugee.
It’s hard to dispute his conclusion, either:
But one thing I think we can all take away is that the ‘Ummah’ is a croc[k]. There’s no such thing. It’s just a trick to beat Americans and Brits and Israelis with as and when it suits.
“The camp of the saints” is an appropriate read for today.
The question for me is who is it that is “orchestrating” the Islamization of Europe? Is it the powerful Islamic lobby in the West? Is it what’s left of the Christians who beat back Muslim armies when those armies were armed? One might wish to answer this question by seeking out the composer of the orchestration and perhaps the conductor as well, asking oneself who has an axe to grind with Europeans as an ethnicity.
The destabilization of nations far from what were once national borders is not in the interest of the US nor of Europe nor of South America or practically anywhere else for that matter; it is of interest only to globalists.
@Admin: Bingo.
Here’s my new hastag activism:
#DrownedRefugeesMatter
Doesn’t matter a lick that it is a totally false narrative. So is #BlackLivesMatter and a host of others.
Beware the Weaponization of Empathy.
This kid doesn’t matter, only a stupid fucking mindless nignog would think he does. Fuck all the sorry ass simps that say otherwise. I don’t give the slightest shit that there is some god damn dead kid, not my fucking problem.
FUCK the author of this shit, he is the one we should be figthting
One more thing, fuck the sorry ass cartoonist that drew those stupid fucking pictures.
THIS KID DOES NOT MATTER AT ALL
I haven’t seen the picture and after reading this thread and comments, I have no desire to see it.
Maybe we will start drone attacks in Hungary now.
Sad,But why didn’t these people go to one of their neighboring countries? The ones that follow Islam,That religion of peace and love. Where is the compassion by fellow Muslims?
Couldn’t care less. Little nits grow up to be lice. Let’s put the picture of the dead nit next to the picture of the beautiful White girl murdered by an illegal alien in San Francisco.
Apples and oranges you say? Not so fast, my friend, they mean exactly the same thing. It’s either them or us. Let them in and they are likely to grow up to kill you, or shut them out and they are the ones dying. Make a choice. It’s come down to this.
I was just listening to the radio today, and there was a correspondent in Hungary talking about the conditions for the refugees there. Most of them are Syrian, and he described a couple with three kids and the wife was hugely pregnant with the fourth on the way.
And I’m thinking, Syria has been fucked up for a long time! Why didn’t these boobs get out and move someplace else BEFORE they had that fourth kid (or maybe even the third one)?
I mean granted, I can scarcely understand the desire to have kids at all, but if you live in a war-torn shithole? WTF?
They pop out kids like they are Pez, and then show up on some other country’s doorstep wanting food and blankets and whatnot. I think they need birth control in the water.
If you’re bothered by that type picture, fine no one likes to see a child hurt. But if you feel you need to respond to that by doing something like open the borders to help these people then you obviously don’t have a clue.
You better wake the fuck up. I suggest you get out of your cocoon and take a look at the third world and find out what’s out there. What you’ll find is you can take pictures of pathetic children by the thousands. Dirty abandoned children living on the street and people there just walk past them every day. And there is not a fucking thing you can do to fix that. Period!!! If anyone thinks absorbing some number of thousand or hundreds of thousands or millions of these people into the developed world will fix anything you need to understand one basic fact. And pay attention, this is important to remember. —— THEY ARE REPRODUCING AT A RATE FAR FASTER THAN ANY AMOUNT THAT CAN BE ABSORBED INTO THE DEVELOPED WORLD!!!!
You need to respond to this type of picture by sealing the borders to protect what is here. This invasion will only result in the transformation of the developed world into the same conditions that are the third world.
The son was taken back to Syria for burial. Kind of throws a monkey wrench into the whole “fleeing a warzone” narrative. Guess it was perfectly safe to go back along, that or insane militants have the utmost respect for funeral processions.
Billions and billions will be spent on this, saving the refugees.
Wonder if all that moolah was spent saving children from malaria, etc., in Africa, how many lives would be saved? Perhaps millions?
Saving lives has a cost. Saving these refugees, if indeed that is what they are, is poor use of money, and far better returns can be made elsewhere.
I notice these folks are not fleeing to Egypt and then on to Sudan and Ethiopia. No sir. Gotta get to Germany and the UK.
What a crock.
I don’t board airplanes because I can’t fly, I don’t board boats because I can’t swim, maybe they should heed that warning and stayed off that boat too.
100% propaganda. and the world will feel better for a day and send the dollar.
Millions raised to help the Etheopean feed the world BS years back and all that money found its way to the black market to disappear down the corrupt hands of politicians to feed that war too.
Smart man once told me, when you see a priest heading your way grab your wallet and your asshole because either way they are wanting something from you.
Drown the rest of them. Problem solved.
While we’re at it, throw in the pseudo-media ‘news’ propagandist whores and their owners, too.
Even if the picture of the boy was staged, that doesn’t change the argument. War is the most horrible thing and it’s the western governments foreign policies that either create or exacerbate it.
I am somewhat consoled that there will be no Muslims in Heaven, not even pitiful refugees from the Mideast, North Africa or Islamic Asia but Hell will be overflowing with them. The little boy was lucky to have died before he became an incorrigible barbarian and he is with the Lord of Lords now. .
If Muslims are as non-threatening as the euro fags want to believe, then why are the Muslim countries as backward and repressive as they are?
Officials: US to increase number of refugees by 5K next year to 75,000
WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States is prepared to increase the number of refugees it resettles by at least 5,000 next year as European countries struggle to accommodate tens of thousands of refugees from the Middle East and Africa.
Two officials and a congressional aide said that Secretary of State John Kerry told members of Congress in a private meeting Wednesday that the United States will boost its worldwide quota for resettling refugees from 70,000 to 75,000 next year, and that number could rise. A fraction of those would be from Syria.
http://news.yahoo.com/kerry-meet-lawmakers-migrant-crisis-abroad-072712030–politics.html
Related Stories:
John Kerry: Administration Is ‘Committed’ To Taking In More Refugees Amid Syrian Crisis
McCain displays photo of dead Syrian boy on Senate floor Associated Press
US vows to help Europe, but will it take in more migrants? Associated Press
U.S. plans to increase refugee intake next year: officials Reuters
US mulling more help to stanch refugee crisis AFP
If I knew how to do it I would post a picture that ann barnhardt has on her blog page.
The picture of a beautiful Swedish girl raped and brutally murdered by mooslime “immigrants”.
THAT is what is invading. THAT is reality.
For Crying out loud, wake up people, western civilization is committing suicide!
Here is a great article that also has some links to what is happening on the ground in Europe.
http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=34198
Hmmm…..maybe a Georgia Guidestone type monument for the 3rd world would be appropriate.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/06/03/us-syria-population-idUSTRE6522FS20100603
From the link:
Ibrahim Issa, a jovial Syrian taxi-driver who wears a blue robe over an ample belly, has nine children from two wives. He plans to marry a third wife soon.
He says it is up to Allah whether more children arrive, and not for him to interfere, say, by using contraception. Like all Damascus taxi-drivers, he complains about the cost of living and how hard it is to make ends meet on the $300 a month he earns.
Issa, 43, shrugs when asked if all those mouths to feed don’t make life harder for him. “No, I’m delighted,” he grins.
Syria now has a population of 20 million people, with a growth rate that remains one of the world’s highest at about 2.4 percent.
President Trump said he did not want to take any of the refugees, I totally agree, let the surrounding Mooslum countries take care of their own!