Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
His Name Is Aylan
His name is Aylan and he is Kurdish, the small child I see lying face down on a European shore. He died as his family tried to escape Syria, and the images of his tiny lifeless body has sparked an understandable anger across the world.
I feel the same outrage in me, and I know where I want to place that pain and condemnation – at the feet of President Barack Obama.
For the better (or worse) part of six years, Obama has tilted the world to this point, where children float up on foreign shores and families place their fate and belongings in a broken vessel to go anywhere other than where they’ve been.
An hour or so before I saw this picture, I found out that Senator Barbara Mikulski became the deciding vote needed to secure Obama’s Iran deal in Congress. Because the president has been single-mindedly focused on that deal — because he’s been willing to subordinate every other concern in the Middle East to cementing his legacy — we see floods of Arab refugees seeking shelter on European soil. Those who cannot flee are either displaced within the region or become unwilling stars of one of the many horror videos touted by that group with many names and little sovereignty.
There was a time not that long ago when ISIS did not exist and when I had never seen a man beheaded or burnt alive for the world to see. Now images of Yazidi girls sold in slavery pass by my feed alongside memes and selfies. I had gotten so desensitized that I almost forgot that this brutality hasn’t always been part of my existence.
Then I saw that boy, like trash on the beach, with no one to claim him, and I remembered. I remembered how Obama chose to empower Assad, partner with Iran, forgo red lines and destabilize the Middle East.
This is supposed to be the President of humane ideals and progressive values. Yet on his watch young girls are systematically raped in the Levant while the White House spends its time fretting about hookups on college campuses? This commander-in-chief says all options are on the table — yet when Americans are beheaded on screen his response consists of offering PR advice to the terrorists responsible? Not only can’t I make sense of it, but I cannot fathom where the world will be in the 505 days we have left until this man leaves office.
His name is Aylan. He was three years old and he lost his life because his family decided that the unknown on the other side of that dark ocean was safer than the hellhole their country had become. To me, that is, and will forever be, President Obama’s legacy: That child with his face in the water, and the growing evil that placed him there.
His name is Aylan. And his life matters too.
Published in General
Full press conference with the boy’s aunt. Worth watching the full 22 minutes. See what takeaways you glean from the spectacle:
Misth’y, will check this out at home.
Seems the mother and her 2 little boys were lost.
Sounds like the Canadian government is running a reprehensible attractive nuisance. See the crime? See the system being gamed?
Holds Canadian government responsible for the deaths. Disagrees with reasonable requirements. “No comment” on whether or not Canadian government could have done more.
Feels put-upon as Syrian, nephew wanted a bicycle “like other kids want”. Well where are the young men who should defend Syria? They’re packed into Hungarian train stations making their way to the great welfare state.
I have been more sympathetic to some of this before this. The unhinged reaction of the west to a picture of a single kid is frankly hardening my heart.
This is madness.
I do not begrudge this woman her pain. At the same time, she is working this crowd as hard as she can. I get nine-tenths of this story and nine-tenths of this emotion when an interpreter explains why he could not change money today.
Where was all the world sympathy and outrage for the Christians a few months ago when isis buried all those kids in a pit still alive watching the dirt being dumped on them. and those at a beach getting their heads chopped off. Its not just one child it is a whole civilization that is changing for the worse.
Note the peasant-culture beseeching of the strongman. Ostensibly had a letter delivered to Canadian PM begging for help to bring the family over. I don’t even believe the letter was delivered. Easy to say, and your rube acquaintances from the sticks believe it happened. So grateful.
Why do you need to argue that these people are ungrateful manipulative peasants in ordeer to make the case that it is not in the West’s interests to help them?
Do we help grateful non-manipulative non-peasants when it isn’t it our interests to do so? We don’t.
Zafar, bypassing a lot of other low-hanging fruit (I am sure the thought police will be along to scoop it up presently), shouldn’t that proposition be valid? If we actually are talking about a bunch of manipulative (your word not mine) ungrateful (saw this earlier, but again, not my word) peasants (picked this up here on Ricochet, importation of a non-assimilating peasant-culture), then wouldnt that be a good reason not to bring them over in large numbers?
At issue is not “help”, but immigration. Every person mentioned so far (Tima, Muhammad, Abdul, Ghalib, Aylan, Muhammad’s wife) has been in the context of immigration, not foreign aid, not charity.
Fair enough – if that is what you’re talking about wrt refugees passing through Hungary.
It’s beginning to look like the whole story was bogus. For starters, the kid’s name wasn’t Aylan, they weren’t refugees from the fighting, they never applied for sanctuary in Canada …
“Story Begins To Unravel About Drowned Syrian Boy”
“The 5 Awkward Questions They Won’t Answer About The Drowned Boy, Syria And Our ‘Moral Duty’”
This shows the danger of reacting emotionally to a tragic story that is supposed to symbolize the plight of a large group of people.
If, as is starting to seem likely, the story is not true, then many will say, “I guess the Syrian refugee problem is a big scam,” and others will be reduced to saying, “No, the problem is real, it’s just that this story was ‘fake but accurate.'”
Better to stick to the truth and let people understand the true dimensions of the problem.
I didn’t see too many people getting upset or reacting with world wide outrage, watching a pit full of young people being buried alive by bulldozers covering them with dirt. Or seeing women being changed together and being sold at a slave market. I’m beginning to think the whole world is hypocritical. Oh and a report I read in a major newspaper yesterday that Israel, yes Israel, is #3 on the human rights commission for keeping people as slaves.