Delingpole: The Left’s Tragedy Porn Vultures Are Wheeling Over Another Drowned Migrant ‘Boy’

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ARIF ALI/AFP via Getty Images
James Delingpole

The tragedy porn vultures of the left are wheeling above their latest piece of carrion: a 16-year-old Sudanese migrant — actually 28, according to new reports — drowned while attempting to cross the Channel from France.

Of course, they’ll make all the right noises about how tragic and cruel and unnecessary the poor man’s death was. But really he’s just grist to their mill: a handy dead poster boy for their political propaganda campaigns:

If you think it’s bad now, wait till they discover he was a promising footballer, loved by all who knew him, with ambitions to become a doctor or a lawyer.

Forgive my cynicism. I’m sure he was a delightful chap. (I spent a month in the Sudan once, and I’ve rarely encountered such generous, welcoming, friendly people). But I fear that this story has all the makings of another ‘Aylan Kurdi’.

Aylan Kurdi — actually he was called Alan Shenu — was the name given by the media to the little boy in the red t-shirt and blue shorts whose body was pictured washed up on a beach in Turkey. He had drowned while trying to make the crossing from Turkey to Greece.

It was sad and pitiful. You can see — sort of — why all the mainstream media made it their dominant story for several days, with that dead child’s photo on all the front pages.

But as more details emerged it became clear what the mainstream media had really done is given a massive — and hugely damaging — propaganda coup to the open borders lobby.

‘Kurdi’ wasn’t technically a refugee. (His Dad was allegedly himself a people-smuggler). It may well have been the case that his body was rearranged to make it look more photogenic. As I reported at the time, the official version reported in the MSM just didn’t stack up. But while the lies got multiple-page spreads, the uglier details got less coverage, partly because the MSM prefers tragedy porn to honest reporting, partly because the MSM’s sympathies are increasingly liberal-left. A bit like the Death of Princess Diana, ‘Aylan Kurdi’ was one of those watershed moments when you realise that your civilisation has surrendered the pass to the forces of cheap sentiment and cultural dissolution.

Similarly, revelations that the 16-year-old boy who drowned in the English Channel was actually a 28-year-old-man who, according to relatives, had already had an asylum application rejected by France — which has tried to blame us for the tragedy — has received much less coverage than the initial, inaccurate reports.

Clearly it’s sad that a 28-year-old man has died. But for anyone to try to make political capital out of it is cynical and disgusting. If his death has a moral, it’s “even in summer, crossing the English Channel in a rubber dinghy when you can’t swim is fraught with peril.”

Or maybe: “People-smugglers are scum and we should clamp down on them harder.”

What it doesn’t tell us is anything whatsoever about the injustice or otherwise of Britain’s immigration policy.

Hundreds of millions of people in the Third World want to live in Britain because it’s safe, friendly, with an OK economy and generous benefits. But they can’t all come, clearly, because there isn’t room and it would change the character of Britain to the point where it was even more unrecognisable than it is already.

Pointing a finger at a dead body and weeping crocodile tears on Twitter alters none of these facts one jot.

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