Ahmed Mohamed has been in the news constantly this past week, and for good reason. After the whole clock incident there's of course been a lot of outrage. And now various important people have been coming out to show their support for him -- Obama invited him to the White House, and today Microsoft gave him a bunch of goodies. This is fine. I'm happy for him!
BUT...
I feel like this is just all a big distraction from the actual issue at hand here. By focusing so much on Ahmed and how people are fixing Ahmed's situation, we're ignoring everyone else that racism affects. I don't know, I just feel like people will be satisfied by seeing Ahmed happy and whatever that they'll forget about the systemic problems and nothing will change.
And all of these big companies/people coming out and giving him grand gestures just feels like phony self-promotion. ("Look at us! We're not racist, we gave that brown kid a computer! Apple didn't do that!") The whole thing has sort of left a bad taste in my mouth and I feel like everyone is going to forget about the issue until the next time this inevitably happens.
Hubski, what do you think about this whole situation?
So how do you feel about Aylan Kurdi?
I'll bet you didn't know that as of April, there were 310,000 dead because of the Syrian civil war. Did you know that 20,000 refugees flow into Germany every day? 'member this?
That was 18 months ago. But the right photo, at the right time, and suddenly:
Angela Merkel announced that Germany would take 3m refugees per year, indefinitely, and that didn't happen until Aylan Kurdi. We've been treating muslims like shit since the first time Khalid Sheikh Mohammed tried to blow up the WTC (1993 - I'll bet you'd forgotten) and if we've maybe finally gotten to the point where we feel bad about it, I'm glad we could do it over a kid that's still alive.
EDIT: I knew that number was wrong. It's 500k refugees per year, which if were equivalent in the US, would be 2m.