James Delingpole writes: It’s a pretty low-down trick, you might have thought, to use a harrowing photograph of a dead child to advance your political agenda and signal the depths of your compassion.
But almost everyone has been at it over the last couple of days – from the Tory MP for Plymouth to Labour’s temporary Opposition leader Harriet Harman, from the Chief Rabbi on the BBC Radio 4 Today this morning to pretty much all the people you know on Facebook and Twitter.
Fairly typical is these inevitable contributions from Jack Monroe, a political activist…
There are at least two problems with this kind of emotional fascism.
The first is that it stinks of the witch-hunt bully mob. A similar climate prevailed in Britain in the weeks following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales: if you weren’t one of the good, caring people who rushed to Kensington Palace to place a teddy bear/bunch of flowers/mawkish hand-coloured tribute to the martyred saint who was apparently ‘Queen of All our Hearts’, then basically you were probably the kind of person who would have volunteered to become camp commandant at Auschwitz.
So it is with poor little Aylan Kurdi, with whose name and family circumstances we are all now painfully familiar.
No one who has seen that piteous photograph could fail to be moved: the tenderness and sorrow with which the Turkish policeman is cradling the dead child in his arms; Aylan’s bare legs, the flesh not yet pallid, as though he could yet be alive; the battered trainers with their velcro fastenings, such as we’ve all seen small children – including perhaps our own – toddling cheerfully around on beaches like that one in Bodrum all this summer.
But, of course, an inward shudder of “there but for the grace of God go all our children” is never enough for these commissars of emotional correctness. You have to tweet about it. You have to bully other people into feeling that they have to tweet about it. You have to feel so overwhelmingly strongly about it that it becomes inexcusable not to demand immediate action, because if you don’t then that’s proof positive that really you just don’t give a damn…
Which brings me to my second objection: the politically driven manipulation towards a particular outcome.
The people demanding action now on the basis of the Aylan Kurdi photograph may not all be aware of what they’re doing here. Indeed, most of them probably aren’t: this, after all, is about the circumvention of the rational process with raw emotion, about the heart not the head.
That though is precisely why it’s so dangerous and so counterproductive. In asking us to focus on a particular private tragedy, it demands that we ignore the bigger picture. This is a game that the progressive movement, left-wing radicals and social justice warriors have long been adept at playing in order to advance their dubious agenda and to make their more sober-minded conservative opponents look heartless. But a recipe for sensible policy it is not.
I notice the last time I made this point was just over a year ago, in a piece written at the height of the Israeli incursion into Gaza.
A photograph began circulating of the mutilated corpse of a Palestinian child, allegedly killed by Israeli shelling. I say “allegedly” because, as with all photographs circulated for propaganda purposes by Hamas and its sympathisers, you can never be sure of the circumstances or indeed the location in which they were taken. (From Syria to Iraq there is no current shortage of Middle Eastern dead baby photos). This was “Pallywood productions” in excelsis. It was released with a very specific, cynical and sinister purpose: to focus international outrage against Israel and create a mood of heightened emotion which made it much harder to consider the wider implications of the conflict (eg that Hamas had provoked it by firing the first rockets). In this climate, there was little appetite for stories pointing out Hamas’s brutal attitude towards its own citizens, for example deliberately firing rockets from schools and hospitals and residential apartments in full knowledge that this would invite retaliatory strikes resulting in civilian casualties. Dead baby = Israel evil was the message. It worked.
So, again, it is with poor little Aylan Kurdi.