The last week has been awash with Internet-sympathy and much online shedding of crocodile tears. A little Syrian boy drowned while he and his parents were trying to reach Turkey from Syria. The boy, Aylan Kurdi, was an ethnic Kurd from Syria, and his death has occasioned much hypocrisy from the Western media.

Syria’s Kurds are, like their more famous Turkish kinsmen, a nation without a state. The Kurds are divided up into various states — Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran — and in none of these states are they a majority. The massive oil wealth beneath Kurdish lands has led those states to ensure that the Kurds never gain independence, and the group is loathed and persecuted in virtually every state where they live.

In Turkey, they aren’t even allowed to address public gatherings in their own language. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein tried his best to exterminate them with poison gas attacks in the 1980s. In Syria, the Sunni Arab terrorist group ISIS has taken Kurdish massacres to new levels, levelling entire villages of Kurds and declaring that Kurds are apostates — despite Kurds also being Sunni muslims.

The tragic demise of Aylan Kurdi, however, is not quite what it appears. For while it is true that Kurds have been attacked mercilessly by ISIS, it is also the case that they had put together a competent militia, which rapidly received Western training and was beginning to turn the tide against ISIS in July and August of this year. Then Turkey stepped in.

Syria crisis

The Turks have always worried that a union of Syrian, Iranian and Iraqi Kurds would draw Turkish Kurds into their fold and launch a decisive push for an independent country to be carved out of Turkey’s Kurdish regions and those of the other states.

And so when Turkey saw that Kurdish forces in the Syrian town of Kobane had routed ISIS and were well on the way to assisting their Iraqi kinsmen in resisting ISIS, Ankara panicked and unleashed a massive bombardment of Kobane.

This attack from NATO’s second-largest military was so devastating that Kobane’s Kurdish civilians fled the city, and ended up boarding rickety boats to get as far away from Syria as possible. Most headed for the many Greek islands in the Mediterranean, hoping for asylum in the European Union. Among the Kurdish families that fled Kobane was the family of the little boy - Aylan Kurdi.

The West reacted as it always does, with hypocritical groaning. The image of a little white boy, dead from drowning, broke hearts in European media — never mind that African kids have been washing up drowned on European shores for the past one year.

In the same week that Aylan tragically died, 150 Africans drowned off the coast of Italy — there was zero coverage in the European media.

Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan continue to generate the largest numbers of African refugees — Kenya hosts millions from these countries combined. But this attracts scarcely a mention. Two years ago, clashes in Burundi led to millions trekking into Tanzania and Congo and Uganda. The story garnered barely a mention in Western news cycles, relegated as it was to the “Africa” section buried deep in the “not important” sections of European newspapers.

Unwanted African, Arab refugees

Germany, Austria, Britain and Italy — all of which delight in turning African refugees back to their countries to be tortured or killed by despotic leaders and rebels — swiftly opened their borders to allow thousands of Syrian refugees in. Could the message Europe is sending across the world be that they are not ready for black African refugees?

It’s unfortunate that African and Arab men are considered undesirable, undeserving of asylum. In fact, they are considered idlers, potential criminals, parasites or ‘encroaching upon local women’. This hostility is experienced across European. Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Czech Republic declared their unwillingness to accept Muslim refugees.