Could not one of those dead children among the five hundred souls on the sinking Mediterranean boat become a ‘superstar’?
By Robert Fisk, The Independent
April 24, 2016
Has something gone adrift within the moral compass of our ‘news’ reporting? In the past week, 64 Afghans have been killed in the largest bomb to have exploded in Kabul in 15 years. At least 340 were wounded. The Taliban set off their explosives at the very wall of the ‘elite’ security force – watch out for that word ‘elite’ – which was supposed to protect the capital. Whole families were annihilated. No autopsies for them. Local television showed an entire family – a mother and father and three children blown to pieces in a millisecond – while the city’s ambulance service reported that its entire fleet (a miserable 15 vehicles) were mobilised for the rescue effort. One ambulance was so packed with wounded that the back doors came off their hinges.
Now Afghanistan is the country to which we and our EU partners are happily returning refugees on the grounds that Kabul and its surrounding provinces are “safe”. It is, of course, a lie – as flagrant and potentially as bloody as the infamous weapons of mass destruction we claimed were in Iraq in 2003. By then, we had already promised the Afghans – in 2001 – that we wouldn’t let them down. We wouldn’t forget them as we did after the Soviet war. A Blair promise, of course, and thus worthless.[...]
Read the full article:
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/when-we-mourn-the-passing-of-prince-but-not-500-migrants-we-have-to-ask-have-we-lost-all-sense-of-a6997581.html
By Robert Fisk, The Independent
April 24, 2016
Has something gone adrift within the moral compass of our ‘news’ reporting? In the past week, 64 Afghans have been killed in the largest bomb to have exploded in Kabul in 15 years. At least 340 were wounded. The Taliban set off their explosives at the very wall of the ‘elite’ security force – watch out for that word ‘elite’ – which was supposed to protect the capital. Whole families were annihilated. No autopsies for them. Local television showed an entire family – a mother and father and three children blown to pieces in a millisecond – while the city’s ambulance service reported that its entire fleet (a miserable 15 vehicles) were mobilised for the rescue effort. One ambulance was so packed with wounded that the back doors came off their hinges.
Now Afghanistan is the country to which we and our EU partners are happily returning refugees on the grounds that Kabul and its surrounding provinces are “safe”. It is, of course, a lie – as flagrant and potentially as bloody as the infamous weapons of mass destruction we claimed were in Iraq in 2003. By then, we had already promised the Afghans – in 2001 – that we wouldn’t let them down. We wouldn’t forget them as we did after the Soviet war. A Blair promise, of course, and thus worthless.[...]
Read the full article:
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/when-we-mourn-the-passing-of-prince-but-not-500-migrants-we-have-to-ask-have-we-lost-all-sense-of-a6997581.html