Abusing Dead Syrian Children
Thursday September 3, 2015
Images are a powerful tool in the hands of propagandists. A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes. If a powerful image can be manipulated to tell a tale even if false, it can persuade more viscerally than can a thousand reasoned arguments.
So it is with the tragic photograph making the mainstream media rounds yesterday of a lone Syrian child drowned on a Turkish shore. Reams of articles can be written about the current refugee crisis but particularly in the US they will go relatively unnoticed by those not directly affected. There may be some video clips on the nightly news but overall the story -- and particularly the context -- will go unexplained.
But the powerful image of a dead child, abandoned by the world on the capricious sway of the tide, is putty in the hands of propagandists.
And proponents of the four-year US policy of Syrian destabilization and regime change are lining up to make their case that the current refuge crisis -- now swamping Europe with Syrians desperate for something approaching a normal life -- is one hundred percent the fault of both Syrian president Assad and the western non-interventionists who objected to plans in 2013 for the US and UK to begin bombing Syria.
read on...