A young child drowns as his parents force him into a tiny boat to go from Turkey to Europe and it turns over not long into the trip throwing all into the sea. The boy, his brother and many of the adults drown.
Those who are demanding the borders be opened wide to immigrants are delighted, who can doubt that this is what they have longed for, a tragedy to use as ‘click-bait’ and Twitter-agitprop, to exploit as propaganda to ‘shake the conscience of the world’?
The BBC indeed has recognised the importance of the photographs as it is being ruthlessly exploited by the likes of the Independent and the Guardian…as every journalist knows ‘the tears of a child says more than a thousand words ever can.’
The BBC however, to be fair, has stepped back slightly from such exploitation of a dead child, but it is usually more than happy to paint a picture of terrible tragedy and use migrant deaths to leverage our ‘moral obligations’.
The question that is not asked is why the parents of these children decided to make such an obviously dangerous journey in an overcrowded boat with no life jackets for their children when they had no need to leave Turkey, a safe location for them…they decided to make the journey not because of real need but because they wanted, not a safe life, but a better life. They risked their children’s lives completely unnecessarily. This is not a ‘refugee’ tragedy but an economic migrant one. Remember the complete outrage at this...’Bear Grylls blasted by RNLI for ‘leaving young son on rocks’ during lifeboat training exercise’ and yet no such outraged opprobrium for the wreckless parents of these two kids aged 3 and 5.
Yesterday we had the self-righteous Tony Livesey on 5Live tag-teaming with the LibDem’s morally challenged Tim Farron against the Tory Tim Laughton and making the dubious connection between the deaths of the migrants in the lorry in Austria, the Iraq War and our ‘obligation’ to take in migrants.
The LibDems say Cameron is playing politics…
Tim Farron retweeted
#Cameron and#May should stop playing politics over humanitarian crisis says .@timfarron http://goo.gl/YAyXf3
Steve Beasant Which kind of suggests it is the LibDems who are actually playing politics as Cameron has not bowed to the sanctimonious moralisers but has actually stood firm against those, like Farron, and Livesey, who make grandly sanctimonious statements, which are more about them than the refugees/migrants….
Tim Farron retweeted
There is a humanitarian crisis on our doorstep, but UK Government appears disengaged, cold and irrelevant
Lib Dem Press Office Farron makes this meaningless statement that is only intended to burnish his compassionate and humane credentials but in fact says absolutley nothing at all about the problem or the solution…all it says is ‘let all the migrants come here’. It is empty, simplistic posturing for the cameras….
“When mothers are desperately trying to stop their babies from drowning when their boat has capsized, when people are being left to suffocate in the backs of lorries by evil gangs of traffickers and when children’s bodies are being washed to shore, Britain needs to act.”
“It is heartbreaking what is happening on our continent. We cannot keep turning our backs on this. We can – and must – do more.”
Livesey was pretty much a disgrace, his programme had nothing to do with journalism, merely intent on berating those who take a more rational view of events and see that the issues will not be solved by short term grandiose gestures that are pure compassion ‘showbiz’…so we take in a few migrants…then what? Take in 10,000 as Labour suggest and then what? The migrants from around the world will suddenly go ‘Well OK then, that’s it…we’ll all go back home then…the UK has done it’s bit’? Like hell. They’ll keep on coming…in their thousands, millions.
Taking in a few migrants does nothing to solve the crisis.
Yesterday Sarah Montague struggled through an interview (08:14) with Guy Verhofstadt former Belgian prime minister, which she opened with the words of Germany’s Bild that Britain was among the ‘slackers of Europe’ when it comes to taking in migrants. She rather suggestively wanted to know if that was correct. Now the moral grandstander Tim Farron yesterday also drew support from those same words…even though he described Bild as a ‘scurrilous red top’…curious how alarmist sensationalism from a ‘scurrilous red top’ is now used by the normally sneeringly disdainful BBC to bolster its pro-migrant stance.
Verhofstadt went off thread though and stated that the root cause of this crisis was the failure of Europe to deal with the Syrian war and support the takedown of Assad…we are now suffering the consequences of that failure…a failure that the BBC and the Left had no small part in creating. Which is no doubt why Montague rapidly moved on and demanded to know ‘What is the chance that this crisis can be solved by accepting more migrants?’…so you know exactly what her priorities are…going on to proclaim ‘So the answer is quota’s’ [of migrants] and demanding to know ‘Is it acceptable that Britain has opted out?’
Whilst saying the UK should take some of the migrants who make it to Europe Verhofstad again went off message and said that the real solution was to stop migrants coming here in the first place and that their asylum claims should be processed in safe haven countries near the zone of conflict. Again Montague didn’t want to explore that suggestion.
Here The Spectator makes a similar point in a reasoned and measured manner that by far outstrips any of the ‘intellectually lazy feel-good policy for the bien‑pensant’ analysis the BBC does itself…Here’s the answer to your migrant crisis, Mr Cameron
If you step outside the usual angry ding-dong, the posturing of those both pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant; if you resist the easy option taken by the chattering classes who claim the moral high ground by insisting on open borders, you can see that European policy is the result of moral confusion.
What does rescue imply and to whom does it apply? Just being poor does not make someone eligible for being ‘rescued’ by a life in Europe. Mass poverty has to be tackled, but the only way it can be done is for poor countries to catch up with the rich ones. There are ways in which we can help that process, but encouraging the mass emigration of their most enterprising young people is not one of them.
Europe has a moral obligation to rescue, not to make dreams come true.
How can Europe help these people?
Should we invite them to Europe? This has been the defining issue so far in European discussion of the Syrian refugee crisis: ‘How many refugees should Europe take?’ It’s all about us. Unfortunately, while well meaning, this approach is fundamentally irresponsible when judged from the perspective not of the consequences for Europe, but the consequences for Syrians.
The smart way to meet the duty to rescue is to incubate that economic recovery now, before the conflict ends.
Europe can do that by fostering a Syria–in-exile economy located in Jordan and other neighbouring countries. Working in this economy would restore some dignity to the daily lives of refugees and offer them credible hope of a return to normality.
Europe has a duty to fish refugees out of the sea because it is morally responsible for tempting them on to the sea. So whatever else Europe does, it must stop this policy of temptation. Paying a crook thousands of dollars for a place on a boat should not entitle a Syrian refugee to a more privileged entry to Europe. It is profoundly unfair to the other suffering refugees.
Montague didn’t take issue with Verhofstadt when he claimed that the issue of economic migration within Europe has nothing to do with how many refugees we can take. The reality is that of course it has everything to do with that issue. When you are taking in over 330,000 new people a year, and that’s just the legal migrants we know about, you have to recognise the difficulties, the pressures on resources,that creates.
The BBC has been trumpeting that ‘A number of Conservative MPs have called for the government to take in more migrants’ trying to create the impression that the world stands in judgement against Cameron, even his own party, but coming up with only two…so they must have had high hopes for this interview…..
Today Jim Naughtie inteviewed Baroness Warsi.(around 08:10)..I’m sure you like me, and Naughtie, might have expected this to go one way as Warsi is well known to be highly critical of Cameron and his Middle East and associated policies. Wrong.
Warsi was far more circumspect and measured, refusing to be drawn into making emotive statements about accepting unlimited numbers of migrants and the heartlessness of government policy. Instead she the key was to distinguish between genuine refugees and economic migrants who are effecting the willingness of EU countries to accept refugees.
Naughtie’s interpretation of that was that ‘That must mean we have to take in more [refugees]‘ rather than the obvious take from her words that ‘We should be taking in far fewer EU economic migrants so that resources are freed up to cope with the genuine refugees.’
Curious how the BBC keeps dodging that conclusion….and that Germany, that saviour of the migrants, is deporting what it considers economic migrants…
More than a third of all asylum-seekers arriving in Germany come from Albania, Kosovo and Serbia. Young, poor and disillusioned with their home countries, they are searching for a better future. But almost none of them will be allowed to stay.
Here admitting that economic migrants are ‘blocking’ the refugees….
Migrants from Kosovo are blocking the lodging capacities, “that we urgently need for actual refugee cases”, said Bavarian Internal Affairs Minister Joachim Hermann. Kosovars “unnecessarily cost the state a load of money”, he said.
Warsi made the point that perhaps the most eligible candidates for bringing to the UK are the children who are separated or orphaned a point made by Toby Young in the Telegraph saying ‘I think the moral case for allowing 1,500 unaccompanied refugee children to settle here is overwhelming. ‘
What was interesting in the interview with Warsi was that Naughtie actually raised the suggestion that maybe the answer was to try and deal with the actual cause of the crisis, the conflict in Syria, though he did say ‘not necessarily militarily’.…but that was obviously also in his thoughts, the option was on the table.
Perhaps that is the start of a genuine debate about the causes and the real solution rather than the moral posturing and bullying from the likes of other BBC presenters such as Montague and Livesey and the exploitation of the tragic death of a baby who in reality was a victim of his parent’s bad decision not David Cameron’s ‘cold and heartless’ policies.
Wow a story which can actually put a mute on the usual BBC coverage of the Labour leadership farce !
Quote (lie) from the Grauniad “Justin Forsyth, CEO of Save the Children, said: “This tragic image of a little boy who’s lost his life fleeing Syria is shocking ”
Except he wasn’t fleeing Syria, because if he was he would have had to have set off from the Syrian coast, in reality he set off from the Turkish coast and was fleeing Turkey, which is regarded as a safe country. Who ever thought it was a good idea to set off in an inflatable dinghy is the one to blame, and unless the nut jobs suggesting we throw the borders open are prepared to arrange the transport of ALL 6.5 million Syrian displaced people, plus an equal amount of others claiming to be Syrian then it will not be stopped.
Yes it’s tragic, but it’s not our fault and it’s not our responsibility.
Total agreement with you-it’s not our fault or our responsibility. One has to ask as to where did this father get the 5000,euro’s he claims he paid to smugglers-under the UN rules of a refugee, any payment made to a smuggler/traffiker to proved transport to get into a country is deemed illigal, so without doubt these so called immigrants are all entering European shores illigally, so contrary to what some politicians might say, there is no moral standpoint that Europe has to accpet them.
I enclose an essay from a man who is not of the Islamic faith but is of Middle East origin, and has a deep & clear understanding of what this sudden flood of people crossing seas will mean if our weakened governments fall to the various pressure groups.
‘From Northern Iraq to Northeastern Syria, from Nairobi, Kenya to Benghazi, Libya, from Lahore, Pakistan to the rugged mountains of Mali and Afghanistan, militant Muslims have executed tens of thousands of their fellow Muslims and are on a killing rampage against Christians. The world is shocked and distressed.
The Muslims’ killing campaign did not end with their defeat at the gates of Vienna. Their eviction from Spain was a temporary forced retreat. But now Muslims have, in huge numbers, penetrated the gates of every city and town in Europe and North America without even having to use their swords.
Distressed by the Muslims’ trouble-making and killing sprees, civilized nations are bending over backwards in the hope of placating them and helping them join the family of humanity by admitting hordes of immigrants and offering them all manner of hospitality and assistance. All these gestures remain in vain and to no avail. Many of the new arrivals, deeply infected by the Islamic ethos, find it impossible to assimilate in the host countries. Instead, they strive to impose their defunct order which is the cause of their own backwardness and inhumanity on the host nations.
The non-Muslim world is at its wits’ end. No accommodation or kindness seems to stem the tide of Islamic violence. Countless numbers of proposals have been advanced in dealing with this systemic Islamic disorder. Some feel that, in general, Muslims are law-abiding citizens of their adopted countries and it is only a minority that is responsible for the violence and mayhem. Thinking along these lines has prompted people to say that the solution to Islamic violence rests with Islamic leaders. That is, Islamic leaders should speak up and condemn jihad and jihadists.
No way-Western armchair theorizers and wishful thinkers need to take time and study the Islamic system in order to avoid making demands on Muslim leaders – demands that will never be met because they are completely unrealistic.
Islam presently has its stranglehold on over a billion humans, posing an existential threat to all non-Muslims. *When, this billion and a half, adhere to the pathological belief of Islam and use it as their marching orders of life, the rest of humanity ignores this threat at its peril.
I have been sounding the alarm for decades about the ever-increasing menace Islam is posing to America and Europe and our way of life. Apathy, political correctness, and massive Islamic lobbying have successfully prevented the public from truly grasping the all-pervasive Islamic assault.With heavy assurances like this, coming from so many know-it-all authoritative figures, we can sleep soundly without the aid of sleeping pills. Yet, the Islam problem is very real and deadly. Neither the pronouncements of the experts, nor the tranquilizing pills of the mind can make it go away. Islam will continue its bloody conquest.’
Sorry it was so long, however you can appreciate what he is saying. We must all be beware of what is really happening-why this sudden invasion? Who is funding it? ISIL maybe, who knows.
It’s all turned into a horrible, deadly farce.
Those less compassionate than any in the West debating the merits of various policies will have noted the power of a dead child delivered to the doorstep of a waiting photo-journalist. How long before such a scenario is ‘assisted’ to further the cause, exploiting clearly deranged media reaction and spineless political will in face of those who make the most noise and have easiest access to the means to make it in public?
Then, maybe, the inevitable expose, with all so vocal now either silent or in full cover up or moving on mode.
The only constant is dead innocents and the dinner party consciences flit to the next issue.
This little boy would still be alive if they had stopped the boats coming last year. The fault lies fully with the PC lefties.
By accepting these migrants Europe will then be responsible for more deaths, children & adults, because more will think it worth the risk to set off on such a foolish venture. Up to now Europe is not exactly responsible, but Merkel will change all that.
Excellent article Alan. I hope I can use some of the material here with our local press & Labour councillors who are crowing about the tolerance & reconciliation that our city stands for.
Indeed, Alan.
Sanctimony is a particularly repellent form of goulishness. It speaks for others in a way which denies them their own voice – in this case, the lie is being propagated that we, the people of the UK, are predominantly in favour of a soap-opera emotional response to a situation, which will do little more than vomit over it and make things worse.
Our national broadcaster needs urgently bringing to heel, and it needs to be done publicly, so that their political capering can be seen for what it is – rank opportunism and an attempt to confiscate our right to speak freely and openly, regardless of whether it furthers a particular establishment viewpoint.
This will not in itself cure the level of debate in our nation, but it would be a start.
This has probably been mentioned elsewhere but the funeral of this family has been held back in Syria…..Why would the Father go back there ?
Apparently he died because his dad wanted new teeth.
What dad does that? Unbelievable!