The GDP per capita (PPP adjusted) of Turkey is now 19,000$, versus $26,000 for Greece. But Turkey is a land of contrasts, from the Third Word-like, heavily Kurdish east to the urbane, cosmopolitan west. Turkey’s western regions are now just as prosperous as Greece’s, and there is no fiscal/debt crisis to boot.
So really what were the parents of this child so desperately fleeing from?
Sure, it is a personal tragedy – though the tragedies are going both ways (it’s just that one side isn’t much covered by the media).
It is also a good, well-organized guilt trip campaign with a platantly politicized focus.
But inconvenient questions naturally arise.
This, of course, is why left-liberals in today’s US believe in open borders on the one hand and protectionism on the other, even though it makes far more economic sense to allow free trade in goods but be strict about handing out residency permits and citizenship to foreigners. You can guilt trip nice white people when you can put a human face on the foreign threat, while cheap foreign goods are faceless and can be vilified (though the same cheap foreign goods have helped millions of poor foreigners out of poverty in their own countries).
I don’t know why the media hasn’t covered the organ harvesting some of these smugglers are into. They found 71 dead in an Austrian truck. Refugees that have been dead for some time but only minor remarks of suspicions of organ harvesting.
Turkey is to blame for the little Kurd being in Turkey, having fuelled this war for four long years. But his parents are to blame for him drowning.
Spot on, a refreshing contrast to the mainstream media’s guilt-tripping. Thank you!
Apparently they were escaping from Kobane, in Syria. Of course, there is no reason German Reader or any European should feel guilty for the horrors of the Caliphate.
I most certainly don’t feel guilty for the death of that child, tragic as it is. If anybody should feel guilty, it is the Turks with their appalling policy towards the Kurds and their covert support of Islamists in Syria.
In a sane world the media would be clamoring for pressure on Turkey to change its policy – instead we’re getting the usual open-borders propaganda. Not acceptable.
The entire EU policy flipped with one photo. Germany, an avowed “post nationalist ” country becoming the arbiter of what is moral. The prime minister of Finland Juha Sipila, says he will offer his own home to asylum seekers.
“But inconvenient questions naturally arise“,
Yes the main one is why anyone thought Europeans were so much more than that. The awful truth.
The irony is that none of this would be happening had Germany won WW2.
“Escaping” has come to take a new meaning, apparently. The boy’s family had been in Turkey for a least a year.
Agreed.
In a Canadian video interview with the daddy’s sister (a legal resident of Canada) she explains that she was working through the paperwork to move him and his family to Canada.
Unfortunately he has bad teeth that would require $14,000 of dental work. She could only send him $1000 at a time through Western Union and a third party.
Her father recommended that the daddy and his family head to Europe first (apparently to get free dental) and then (maybe) make the move to Canada.
The desire for a good free dental job killed that kid.
It is Russia that is keeping this war going by backing Assad. Russia has a history of asymmetric responses, for example adoptions by Americans were banned after the Sergei Magnitsky thing. Putin must be aware that the refugees caused by the war he is keeping going are causing the West great difficulty. Looks like the West underestimated the dangers of annoying the bear..
Assad also is getting revenge on the West, and the wave of refugees drains Sunni manpower.