by SONALI KOLHATKAR
A paramilitary police officer carries the lifeless body of Alan Kurdi, 3, after a number of refugees died when boats carrying them to the Greek island of Kos capsized near the Turkish resort of Bodrum. PHOTO/DHA/AP
The photo of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi’s serene little body lying face down on a Turkish beach haunts me. When it first began making the rounds of social media, I refused to look. It was too painful and too much like what my own 2½-year-old son looks like when he falls asleep.
There is suffering among children all over the world whose faces and bodies we don’t see, and because we don’t see them, their suffering has no impact on us.
In Sierra Leone, an infant born to that country’s first Ebola survivor died recently. Victoria Yillia had already lost a horrifying 21 members of her family to Ebola, but her child died apparently of an unrelated infection in a world where we are supposed to have medically conquered the ravages of such childhood maladies.
The image of a 3-year-old Rohingya toddler named Shahira Bibi lying malnourished on a hospital bed earlier this year should have elicited outrage similar to that caused by Alan Kurdi’s photo. But it didn’t, and when she died in Indonesia, there was little media coverage of the plight of the persecuted Rohingya minority.
The images of dead Palestinian babies during last year’s war on Gaza should have stirred enough consciences to stop enabling Israeli brutality against a defenseless and besieged population. The Palestinian-American writer Yousef Munayyer tweeted cynically:
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