Craven Slander

"I wanted to move [to Canada] with my family and with my brother who is currently in Germany. But they denied us permission and I don't know why."
"Yes, [I blame for the deaths of my wife and two boys] the authorities in Canada, which rejected my application for asylum, even though there were five families who were willing to support us financially."
"I brought them to Turkey and that is where my tragedy began."
Abdullah Kurdi, Kurdish Syrian

Channel Ten reported Zainab Abbas, who lost two children in the tragedy, claims Abdullah Kurdi was at the helm of the boat when it sunk off the Turkish coast.
"He was a smuggler, yes. He was the one that was driving the boat," the woman told Ten over Skype from Iraq through a translator.

Abdullah Kurdi, 40, father of Syrian boys Aylan and Galip who washed up drowned on a beach near Turkish resort of Bodrum. Photo: AP

Mr. Kurdi lost his three and five-year old boys, Alan and Ghalib who drowned along with their mother when the inflatable motorized dinghy they were on trying to cross from Turkey to Greece capsized last week. The photograph of three-year-old Alan Kurdi lying face down, dead on a beach in Kos, captured the outraged compassion of a world struggling with a response to the millions of Syrian refugees flooding out of their war-torn country.

The plight of these refugees and the many photographs of distraught children torn from their homes and suffering privation in their parents' efforts to reach haven and a future anywhere but in Syria would break the hardest of hearts. Which is to say Western hearts, since there doesn't appear to be much evidence that their Middle Eastern co-religionists much care about their plight with some notable exceptions; embattled Lebanon and unwealthy Jordan.

Egypt has offered haven and solace to some Syrian refugees, but none of the Gulf States awash in oil riches has made the least effort to offer support, neither through much in the way of charitable donations nor in opening their borders to the fleeing Syrians. As for Mr. Kurdi, at least the Kurds have militias fighting against the Islamic State, though the Syrian military has been of little help, too busy doing the bidding of the tyrant Bashar al-Assad who is invested in slaughtering his Sunni civilians.

Mr. Kurdi decided, after the attacks on the Kurdish border town of Kobani by Islamic State, that he would prefer to live and take his chances elsewhere. He fled to Turkey and from there arranged to buy passage for his family on an unstable boat for his family and himself, to risk the sea passage to a Greek island. There were three attempts; the first two unsuccessful and they had to turn back to Kos.

The third proved the disaster that took the three lives. Mr, Kurdi's wife expressed her fear to venture onto the seas yet again. Discounted by her husband, evidently. Against whom charges of his having himself been involved as a smuggler have more recently arisen. A woman who was a passenger on the overturned dinghy insists that Mr. Kurdi was speeding too fast, and caused the vessel to overturn.

The Government of Canada did not refuse entry to the Kurdi family based on rejection of a refugee application for no such application had been received for them. His sister, resident in Vancouver, had written a letter to the Minister of Immigration, not a formal application for refugee status. The claim that Canada is responsible for the loss of those unfortunate wasted lives is speciously inane and ingenuous to the point of slander.

It is the man's grief and his sense of having failed his family by directing them to undertake a perilous journey that his wife feared and his children knew nothing of, that has caused him to shift blame from himself and circumstances beyond his control, to that of a far-off government which is attempting through its cooperation in fighting the extremes of Islamist jihad, in training Kurdish forces, in providing humanitarian relief, to do what it can to aid in a dreadful disaster a world away from Canada.