This is very sad (Warning: Graphic Images Shown Inside)

[subsonic]

It reminds me of the Cubans that would try to get out on the flimsy rafts. I remember fishing them out of the sea when I was in the Navy. They would lash a couple of blue poly barrels together to try to make it 90 miles across open water to the USA. A moment that makes you realize how damn good it is in the US.

Middle east peace... A topic that would fill volumes. No easy answer. I do not see a clear answer from my time spent there. I would try to make them capitalists. That is how we brought down the Iron Curtain.

Radical Islam is not a religion, but a menace. They will take over the world because people are scared of offending them. They will use your tolerance against you. The only way is the way of the sword.

 

[Anders_H]

The bottom line is that this is people (and children) who are running for their lives, shouldn't everybody try and help them?
I read a quote that touched me: "You have to understand that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land".

It's not the radicalists that are running, it's familys who just want to stay home and make an honest living but in fear of their lives they are seeking refuge elsewhere.

David Cameron said that they will accept thousands of refugees to the UK, that's a drop in the bucket, Germany will welcome 800 000 that seek help. That's an act of human kindness. These people need help.

The next mission has to be to wipe Isis, Boko Haram and every other terrorist fraction of the face of our beautiful earth.

 

[Fairwaysplitter3320]

The bottom line is that this is people (and children) who are running for their lives, shouldn't everybody try and help them?
I read a quote that touched me: "You have to understand that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land".

It's not the radicalists that are running, it's familys who just want to stay home and make an honest living but in fear of their lives they are seeking refuge elsewhere.

David Cameron said that they will accept thousands of refugees to the UK, that's a drop in the bucket, Germany will welcome 800 000 that seek help. That's an act of human kindness. These people need help.

The next mission has to be to wipe Isis, Boko Haram and every other terrorist fraction of the face of our beautiful earth.

I've said it before and I'll say it again...Operation Parking Lot.

 

[beeno374]

Thought I'd leave this here.

"HOME," by Somali poet Warsan Shire:

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbours running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won't let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it's not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn't be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i've become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here.

by Somali poet, Warsan Shire

 

[Splunge]

It almost hurts to like that, it's beautiful in a painful aching way

 

[TheTrueReview]

I've said it before and I'll say it again...Operation Parking Lot.

I might be a bit slow FWS but I don't know what you mean by OPL.

 

[azgreg]

I might be a bit slow FWS but I don't know what you mean by OPL.

 

[TheTrueReview]

Got it!

 

[limpalong]

The innocent perish in their attempt to escape the animals. The innocent cannot survive as long as the animals are allowed to behead, burn, shoot, and torture the innocent. The animals, as a defense, use the innocent as shields. The ONLY way to stop the animals is to exterminate them, knowing well many of the innocent will die. If we refuse to do what is necessary, even though there will be significant collateral damage, the animals will continue to breed and spread their carnage. Soon there will be no innocent, only animals... in Europe, America, Russia, Australia, India, Africa.......................

 

[Fairwaysplitter3320]

That's the one!

 

[TheTrueReview]

I don't usually make long posts or copy and paste long articles around here. I realise it can be way to difficult and time consuming to read. But I came across an excellent piece of journalism about the distortion and hyper-moralisation following the circulation of that photo. I will break it into three parts to make it easier to read but it's a definite must read.

 

[TheTrueReview]

Part 1

Twitterati exploit Aylan Kurdi tragedy to ‘welcome refugees’

Have you tweeted that photo of Aylan Kurdi yet? He’s the tragic three-year-old Syrian whose body washed up on a Turkish beach after his family tried to get to Greece in a dinghy. Everyone’s tweeting the sad pic of his lifeless body, his head poignantly buried in the sand. You haven’t tweeted it? Why not? Don’t you care?

Maybe you’ve taken a photograph of yourself holding up a piece of paper that says “Refugees welcome”. Everyone’s doing that, too, making sure their face can be clearly seen and that they’re pulling exactly the right expression: pained, concerned, not too hammy. You haven’t done that, either? What’s wrong with you?

You’ve surely offered to put up some refugees in your home? Celebs and the twitterati are doing that, as are leading European politicians and activists. Amnesty supporters have marched wearing huge, multicoloured sandwich boards saying: “My door is open to refugees.” Why multicoloured? So that everyone will see them, of course. What’s the point in making a public spectacle of your pro-refugee decency if the public doesn’t notice it?

You haven’t done that either? Then you’ve failed the social-media test. You have missed an opportunity to let the world know what a sensitive, emotionally literate being you are.

The refugee crisis engulfing much of the world, especially Europe, hasn’t only shown that Syria continues to fall apart and that many people are so desperate to escape that they will cross furious waters in tiny boats and walk for kilometres through eastern Europe to the west.

It also points to a crisis of solidarity. It speaks to the demise of the old, rational offering of support to those who need it and its replacement by a new virtue-signalling where the aim is to raise awareness about one’s own virtues rather than about other people’s suffering.

The virtue-signalling kicked off when that photo of poor little Aylan first appeared in the press. Some European papers splashed the photo on their front pages. Worse, the twitterati turned the image into a signifier of righteousness: anyone who’s anyone was tweeting it, alongside statements “This made me weep so hard” — the operative word being me.

...

 

[TheTrueReview]

Part 2

The photo was turned into heartstring-tugging cartoons, cynically collected together by Buzzfeed in a listicle headlined “17 Heartbreaking Cartoons From Artists All Over the World Mourning the Drowned Syrian Boy”. It was made into a meme, Aylan’s image stamped with political messages about why we must open borders. An actress in Morocco and 30 of her friends re-enacted Aylan’s death: they donned red T-shirts, what Aylan was wearing when he died, and played dead for the cameras on a beach — a child’s death turned into look-at-me performance art.

There was an ugly streak of moral pornography to this poring over an image of a dead child. “Look how tragic he is. Look how saddened I am.” Like moral vultures, the media and twitterati gathered around Aylan’s body, hoping to look good by expressing their sorrow over his awful fate.

After the exploitation of tragic Aylan came the obligatory photo-with-a-message craze. This is a peculiar 21st-century phenomenon, where it’s not enough simply to say something — you must also show your sorrowful face alongside your statement.

From students who take photos of themselves holding signs complaining about right-wing wickedness to Michelle Obama’s much-tweeted pic of herself holding a bit of paper saying “Bring Back Our Girls” — after Nigerian girls were kidnapped by the misogynists of Boko Haram — the incorporation of one’s own sad-eyed face into the display of political statements speaks volumes about the narcissism of our age.

“Refugees welcome”, said these placards next to woeful faces. Others, such as Bob Geldof, went further and declared they would throw open their homes to refugees. They didn’t say for how long they would do this or how it might be funded. But practicalities be damned — this was a performative exercise, an act of moral preening, not a clearly thought-through solution to the refugee crisis.

If the narcissism of the post-solidarity, internet-fuelled virtue-signallers was simply about saying “Look at me!”, that would be bad enough. But there’s a far worse problem: the wrenching of the refugee crisis from its political context and its transformation into a hyper-moralised drama starring good Westerners and childlike, victimised Syrians muddies reality, making it harder for us to understand what is happening and what we might do about it.

....

 

[TheTrueReview]

Part 3

So the focus on the children of the crisis, especially Aylan, gives the impression that huge numbers of dependants are trekking to Europe. A journalist in Britain is making a charity single for the refugees, mirroring Band Aid, which was designed to save desperate African children from starvation.

But the refugees are far from helpless, hapless infants. It is estimated that 75 per cent of them are young, fit, able men, searching for work. This is why they’re bypassing Hungary and Austria in favour of the economic powerhouse of Germany: because they aren’t only fleeing war; they’re also being lured by the possibility of employment. There’s nothing wrong with that — it’s cool and aspirational — but it runs counter to the pitying, child-obsessed narrative that has built up around the refugees.

What’s more, the reduction of a huge exodus of people to an opportunity for us in the West to get our moral rocks off actively discourages honest, frank debate about what is happening.

As it happens, I’m pretty much an open-borders person; but we need open debate, too, so that everyone, not just right-thinking media folk, have their say on this massive movement of people into our countries.

• Brendan O’Neill
• The Australian
• September 12, 2015

 

[Fairwaysplitter3320]

Excellent article, really brings it all into perspective.