Underneath the picture, his father has written: ‘That’s my boy!’ like a father might do if his son were holding a fish, caught on his own, small rod.
The boy is not Syrian. He is not from Iraq. He’s an Australian boy. He was raised under the warm, Sydney sun. Now he’s in Syria with his Dad, Khaled Sharrouf, who is fighting to establish an Islamic State – a place devoid of human rights and basic freedoms – across the Middle East.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott has described the image as hideous. It’s all that, and more: it’s barbaric. It’s grotesque. It’s a small boy, gleefully holding a human head. What more needs to be said?
The Australian newspaper, which published the image, has been dealing all day with critics who say it should not have been published and certainly not on the front page (the boy’s face is pixelated, as is the face of the man who has been beheaded) but hold on a minute: The Australian wasn’t the first to publish the image. (AWW has chosen not to publish the image)
The boy’s own father posted it on Twitter. He wanted the world to see it. Now the world has seen it, and people are appalled. The image is as awful as anything to come out of Vietnam; and of anything to come out of Holocaust; and just as those images made it impossible for people to look away, so too, will this image make impossible for the world to look away.
No longer can we in Australia say that we don’t know what is going on in Syria, or that it’s none of our business. We can see what’s going on. No longer can we say, it’s nothing to do with us. Australian children are on the ground there, playing amongst the severed heads.
