Thursday, October 10, 2013

When things matter

Around 300 people died in the Lampedusa migrant tragedy. The death toll is not that far removed from the number gassed by Bashar al-Assad in the Ghouta suburb of Damascus. Yet Lampedusa has attracted nothing like the attention of the al-Assad chemical attack, for one simple reason: there's no prospect that the USA would attack anyone over Lampedusa, and therefore nothing to people to pose and strut in arguing against. And of course, the EU is doing such a great job of admitting those Syrians that it doesn't want to intervene directly to protect, so who could doubt their commitment to Eritrean migrants?