REST IN PEACE LITTLE ONE
Don't look too close at the picture, this beautiful baby is not sleeping, the baby is dead.
Maybe it will evoke feelings within those of you who don't care.
Maybe it will evoke feelings within those of you who don't care.
This photograph of a drowned migrant baby (see above) in the arms of a German rescuer was distributed on Monday by a humanitarian organization aiming to persuade European authorities to ensure safe passage to migrants, after hundreds are feared to have drowned in the Mediterranean last week.
The baby, who appears to be no more than a year old, was pulled from the sea on Friday after the capsizing of a wooden boat. Forty-five bodies arrived in the southern Italian port of Reggio Calabria on Sunday aboard an Italian navy ship, which picked up 135 survivors from the same incident.
German humanitarian organization Sea Watch, operating a rescue boat in the sea between Libya and Italy, distributed the picture taken by a media production company on board and which showed a rescuer cradling the child like a sleeping baby.
In an email, the rescuer, who gave his name as Martin but did not want his family name published, said he had spotted the baby in the water “like a doll, arms outstretched”.
“I took hold of the forearm of the baby and pulled the light body protectively into my arms at once, as if it were still alive ... It held out its arms with tiny fingers into the air, the sun shone into its bright, friendly but motionless eyes.”
The rescuer, a father of three and by profession a music therapist, added: “I began to sing to comfort myself and to give some kind of expression to this incomprehensible, heart-rending moment. Just six hours ago this child was alive.”
I wrote a previous Blog about a three year old boy Syrian Aylan lying lifeless on a Turkish beach last year, the image also puts a human face on the more than 8,000 people who have died in the Mediterranean since the start of 2014.
At least 700 migrants may have died at sea this past week in the busiest week of migrant crossings from Libya towards Italy this year, the UN Refugee agency said on Sunday.
The boat carrying the baby left the shores of Libya near Sabratha late on Thursday, and then began to take on water, according to accounts by survivors collected by Save the Children on Sunday. Hundreds were on board when it capsized, the survivors said.
I am certain very few people are aware of the horrific picture of this dead baby and the continued loss of lives of innocent human victims.
Instead, inexplicably, bizarrely, the world is focused on the killing of a Gorilla in Cincinnati.
The killing of an endangered gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo to rescue a boy who fell into a dangerous enclosure unleashed an outpouring of grief over the holiday weekend.
Within hours, that grief had turned to fury as critics questioned the zoo’s decision to kill the endangered 17-year-old gorilla, named Harambe, and called for the boy’s parents to be punished for not adequately supervising their child.
A Facebook page called “Justice for Harambe-Rest In Peace” received more than 84,000 “likes” within hours of its creation. The page’s description says it was created to “raise awareness of Harambe’s murder” and includes YouTube tributes and memes celebrating the western lowland gorilla and admonishing zoo officials.
Two online petitions demanding justice for the gorilla have been created with thousands of signatures already signed.
Two online petitions demanding justice for the gorilla have been created with thousands of signatures already signed.
“Shooting an endangered animal is worse than murder,” a commenter from Denmark named Per Serensen wrote on the page. “Soooo angry.”
Where is the outrage, grief, compassion, protests, the "soooo angry" about this dead baby, where are the petitions for an end to the silence of killing babies, children, adults, human beings who are dying every day because the world does not care.
Victims of injustice all over the world, whether they are here in America or in the middle of an ocean are treated in the same indifferent manner, no-one cares about them, deadly silence that is now the sicko norm of our endangered human society.
The Gorilla gets the outrage and the dead baby gets nothing, not even a Face Book Page.
We truly live in a fucked up world .
