Trust Richard Littlejohn to be a voice of sanity amongst a cacophony of insanity.
RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: This child's death was tragic but it was not our fault
	
	
	
		
		
		
		
	
	
 By  
Richard Littlejohn for the Daily Mail   
    4 September 2015  
              
Daily Mail
         
 By  any standards, it was a horrible, harrowing, heart-wrenching image. A  young boy, washed up dead on a Mediterranean beach, cradled in the arms  of a Turkish policeman.
I  defy anyone with a shred of humanity not to be moved by the photograph,  which was beamed into our living rooms by television and plastered over  the front page of yesterday’s newspapers.
We are told that it was the body of 
Syrian  three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, who drowned along with his five-year-old  brother, their mother and eight others when a recklessly overloaded  rubber dinghy transporting them from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos  capsized and sank.
But if this stark picture graphically illustrated the tragic human cost of the tidal wave of 
migrants trying to enter mainland Europe, the reaction to it has been deranged.
  
	
	
	
		
		
		
		
	
	
    
Heartbreaking: The tiny boy is cradled in the arms of a Turkish gendarme on a beach in the holiday resort
Objective  reporting, especially on the broadcast media, has been thrown out of  the window, to be replaced by New Age emoting and political posturing on  behalf of the ‘Let Them All In’ and ‘We’re All To Blame’ Brigade. It  has proved once again Stalin’s cynical maxim that while one death is  always a tragedy, a million deaths is a mere statistic.
In  this case, one photogenic dead child is worth in propaganda terms a  million times the lives of the estimated 2,000-plus people who have died  trying to cross the Med in the past year. Not to mention the tens of  thousands of innocent men, women and children still being slaughtered by  ISIS, which the West refuses to properly confront.
Within minutes of this photo being screened, preening pundits were queueing up to parade their compassion.
The  first sight I had of the picture was on Sky News, during the late-night  newspaper review. The thick-as-Bisto former Labour Home Secretary  ‘Jackboots’ Jacqui Smith immediately seized upon it as a convenient  baseball bat to bash the Tories’ heartless immigration policies.
Her  separated-at-birth, pseudo-sibling sidekick, the normally sensible Iain  Dale, an LBC radio presenter, worked himself up into such a lather of  righteous indignation, wondering how the likes of David Cameron could  dare call themselves ‘Compassionate Conservatives’, that I thought he  might spontaneously explode, like Monty Python’s Mr Creosote.
Since  she was kicked out of Parliament by her constituents — following  revelations about her creative expenses claims involving patio heaters,  porn movies and pretending her sister’s spare bedroom was her ‘main  home’ — Jackboots has reinvented herself as a go-to, gob-on-a-stick for  desperate radio and TV producers.
She’s  swapped her jackboots for nude heels and submitted to the make-up  artist’s full cosmetic palette, so much so that on Wednesday night she  looked like a cross between an Avon Lady and a barmaid from a Seventies  Northern nightclub.
Perhaps  she’s tarted herself up so her husband no longer feels the need to blow  part of her Parliamentary allowances relaxing in a gentleman’s way in  front of College Girls Gone Wild on pay-per-view. (Or should that be  pay-perv-view?)
I  shouldn’t think for a moment it ever occurred to Jackboots that most of  the blame for the present crisis can be laid at the door of the Labour  government, of which she was such an ineffective and undistinguished  member.
  
	
	
	
		
		
		
		
	
	
    
Labour leadership hopeful Yvette Cooper suggested that every town in Britain should take ten migrant families
Smith  was Home Secretary when Labour was, in Peter Mandelson’s worlds,  ‘scouring the world’ for immigrants. Labour utterly debased the term  ‘asylum-seekers’ to embrace everyone from economic migrants to African  warlords guilty of genocide.
Perhaps  if the demography of Britain had not been so speedily and irreversibly  transformed by Labour’s outrageous and deliberately anti-democratic  decision to dismantle our borders in the name of ‘diversity’, people  might be prepared to be more accommodating.
Then  up pops her ex-Labour Cabinet colleague and current leadership  contender Yvette Balls-Cooper to suggest that every town in Britain  should take ten Syrian migrant families, as part of a scheme to let  10,000 settle here.
Sounds  like a plan, eh? Who could argue with that? Britain has always found  room for genuine refugees. As Stephen Glover observed in yesterday’s  Mail, we don’t need any lectures from the Germans about how to deal with  a refugee crisis.
The  outdated, but still current, laws governing asylum were created to deal  with the massive refugee crisis created by Nazi Germany. And it’s a  waste of time expecting our EU ‘partners’ to show any solidarity. So  thanks, Angela, pet, but Nein Danke.
Unlike  Germany, we’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. I can remember as a young  reporter in Peterborough in 1972, going along with the Labour council  leader Charlie Swift to welcome Ugandan Asians fleeing the tyrant Idi  Amin.
Charlie  was proud of the fact that his city was the first in the country to  provide 50 council homes for these gifted and hard-working Commonwealth  citizens. Since then, this properly compassionate and decent man has  reluctantly changed his tune as Peterborough has been swamped by foreign  newcomers, a direct result of the Blair/Brown government policies,  without any popular consent.
In  protest, Charlie has resigned his lifelong Labour membership. So it’s  not just knuckle-scraping BNP skinheads and halitosis-stricken Ukippers  in blazers questioning our ‘asylum’ policy, as the BBC would have you  believe.
(Meanwhile,  the dopey actress and Labour supporter Emma Thompson says Britain’s  refusal to take more migrants is because we’re all ‘RAY-CIST!’ Oh, do  grow up, love.)
Those  who have been hardest hit are the settled immigrant communities, who  came here legally and have made Britain their true homeland.
For  instance, take a walk down Green Lanes in Haringey, North London, and  ask those remaining Turkish and Greek Cypriots, who haven’t yet fled to  suburban Southgate and Palmers Green, just how delighted they are to  have Albanian and Kurdish gangsters fighting it out on their streets;  itinerant Somalis spitting in the gutters; and Islamist recruiting  sergeants spouting their poison on street corners.
This  is the kind of joyous ‘diversity’ we are all ordered to ‘celebrate’ by  self-righteous metropolitan Guardianistas — whose only interaction with  immigrants is that nice woman who comes in to clean their toilet; that  Stavros chap who runs the organic kebab van in Kentish Town; and the  Eritrean taxi driver who takes them to Broadcasting House to pontificate  about immigration on Newsnight.
      
	
	
	
		
		
		
		
	
	
    
Having pleaded for his family not to  be taken to a migrant camp, the refugee father was dragged from the  scene in tears by police officers
 
If  Yvette is so keen on welcoming Syrian migrants, maybe she could invite a  couple of families to live in one of her two, taxpayer-funded houses.  I’m sure her husband, Ed Balls, a keen cook, would happily rustle them  up his version of Kale Pesto Pasta, with added quinoa. He hasn’t got  much else on these days.
Perhaps she could roll out the red carpet Chez Balls-Cooper for some of those massing at Calais and on the Hungarian border.
The  other distressing image doing the rounds yesterday was the father who  lay down on the railway lines in Hungary, clutching his wife and baby,  after being refused permission to catch a train bound for Austria and  Germany.
This  was cited as evidence of the Hungarian government’s ‘heartlessness’ and  further proof that Britain must do more for these poor migrants.
You  can’t blame Hungary. When they signed up for the EU, they thought they  were joining a democratic, free-trade union. They didn’t expect to be  cast as a departure lounge for thousands of people who want to get into  Europe illegally.
What  wasn’t explained was where this man came from or whether he was really  ‘oppressed’. We are expected to take it as read that everyone laying  siege to Europe is fleeing tyranny.
Sorry,  but while I accept that many are genuine asylum cases, most aren’t.  What about those bouncing up and down outside Budapest station chanting  ‘Germany, Germany’?
      
	
	
	
		
		
		
		
	
	
    
Just as at Calais (pictured), 99 per cent of the young migrants in Budapest are young men, aged between 15 and 25
If they were wearing red and white scarves and chanting ‘United’, the police would turn the flame-throwers on them.
Just as at Calais, 99 per cent of them are young men, aged between 15 and 25. Where are all the women and girls?
If  you were truly fleeing tyranny and certain death, wouldn’t you bring  your wives, sisters, mothers and daughters with you, instead of  abandoning them to their fate?
The  first thing any decent man would do, as per Neil Diamond in Brother  Love’s Travelling Salvation Show, is ‘pack up the babies and grab the  old ladies’.
Which  brings us back to the child’s corpse on the beach in Turkey. I repeat,  it’s awful. Heartbreaking. But it’s not our fault, and it’s not our  responsibility, however compassionate we might feel.
The father told the Mail that the family were fleeing the war in Syria when the dinghy capsized.
Miraculously, he survived, although he couldn’t save his wife and two children.
But  here’s what puzzles me. They’d been living in Turkey for the past year.  So why didn’t he apply for asylum there? After all, surely culturally  Syria has more in common with Turkey, another Muslim country, than with  Tunbridge Wells or Trondheim.
We’re  also told that he’s a Kurd. So why didn’t he move to Kurdistan? Who  knows? And that’s just the point. No one knows anything for sure.
Similarly,  the shocking death of a child should never be exploited just because  media tarts and ‘liberal’ luvvies such as Jackboots Jacqui and the  absurd Emma Thompson can feel good about themselves.
However horrible, however tragic such cases are, they’re not a sensible basis for a realistic asylum policy.