Moroccan Rayan took us to his timing. His story haunted our days. We stuck to our television screens and phones. He stole the spotlight from everything else. His fate seemed like a test of our humanity. From faraway places, people became involved in his father’s pain and his mother’s sorrows. Rarely has a single individual attracted so much sympathy and attention. Huge numbers of people were occupied with the image of the wellhead. The networks were unable to broadcast another topic, as Rayan’s fate turned out to be a test for them as well, to win the lead and attract viewers.
The intense coverage contributed to igniting hopes that the child would come out alive, despite the seriousness of the accident he was exposed to. But the disappointment was as big as the expectations, and sadness overwhelmed the screens and the feelings of the viewers.
It was natural to recall the world’s preoccupation in September 2015 with the image of the corpse of the Syrian Kurdish child, Alan, lying on the shore of the Mediterranean after the “death boat” betrayed its passengers… “Death boats” are known to betray.
On that day, the image of the child invaded world screens and impacted some countries’ decision to open doors for Syrians fleeing the hell of war.
Rayan’s tragedy confirmed the enormous influence of the media, with its screens, websites, and newspapers, as the breaking news raced as if we were in the midst of a major battle. It also emphasized the ability of the media to mobilize broad public opinion behind a cause and demonstrated its capacity to inflame sentiments and bring about rapid change in people’s priorities.
Such a role is useful and noble in a human story of this kind. But let us examine its danger if the media is used to fuel ethnic or national hatreds or promote misleading scenarios. The media forest currently offers golden opportunities for poisoned emotions, misinformation, and intentional disinformation campaigns.
Rayan’s story had a sad ending. But a conclusion must be drawn for the benefit of children and humanity. The truth is that a child falls into a well when he is born in extreme poverty. He also falls when he is unable to go to school or is forced to drop out.
A child is exposed to a kind of downfall when his/her abilities are lost due to backward educational programs that do not keep pace with the era, just as the lives of young men and women, who spend their years in the well of unemployment, are gone astray.
More dangerous than all of that is the fall of boys and adolescents into the well of anxieties, and seeing them train with machine guns in the custody of the promoters of dark ideas and clans that divide countries and double the rates of poverty and death.
It is no exaggeration to say that the wells for any child born in the terrible Middle East are very deep and extremely dangerous.
The curtain fell on the story of the child and the well. Great waves of human sympathy are known to recede as quickly as they have erupted. The truth is that this outpouring of sympathy does not change much in the course of humanity.
The future is shaped by economies, arsenals, schemes, maneuvers, and power relations that do not reflect long when small states fall into wells, from which they cannot get out without resorting to the powerful, compromising their sovereignty and their right to draw their future.
As we were preoccupied with Rayan’s story, the world was witnessing an exceptional date for which both sides chose an exceptional occasion, the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing. Leave the athletes and medals aside. The big event was the summit held in the Chinese capital between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
What made the summit more crucial is the fire of the Ukrainian crisis, which worries America and disturbs the Europeans, who have been led by the past decades to believe that the Old Continent has escaped the rumble of arms and the obsession with invasions and changing features by force.
The Russian-Chinese summit laid a solid foundation for what looks like an axis directed against the United States, which threatens to revive the winds of the old Cold War. China supported Putin’s position, opposing not only the expansion of NATO near the Russian borders but also its behavior when it moved its new European pawns after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Russian-Chinese statement demanded that NATO retract what it described Cold War approaches. It also criticized the negative US influence in the Asia-Pacific region, referring to the OCOs alliance, which includes the United States, Britain, and Australia. It was expected that the visiting “friend” would adopt Beijing’s stance on the Taiwan file.
There is no doubt that Putin succeeded in provoking a major crisis that is part of his attempt to organize a large-scale coup against the role assumed by the United States, which had contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union without firing a bullet.
The Chinese station in Putin’s attack is very important, especially since it emphasized that the “strategic choice of China and Russia in the international arena is unshakable.” The visit also saw long-term agreements to supply China with oil and gas from Russia.
As in the tragedy of Moroccan Rayan, the media assumes a major role in the Ukrainian crisis. Putin’s media plays an old and sensitive melody with his people, according to which the West is seizing every opportunity to encircle Russia, weaken its position and reduce its role.
Putin has put his country in the position of a concerned state that is trying to counter a NATO blockade project.
The Kremlin resident, who considers the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest geostrategic catastrophe of the twentieth century, is leading a counterattack and a major retaliation.
Clearly, what worried Putin was not the NATO getting near his country’s borders, but rather the color revolutions, which he believed were being run from US embassies in violation of the sovereignty of countries and the interests of others.
On the other side, the media played a major role in exaggerating the talk about the approaching Russian attack and the thousands of dead and millions displaced in the event of a total invasion by Putin.
What is certain is that the Ukrainian crisis is a very dangerous well. Has Putin lured the United States into a well that it is difficult to get involved in? Has Putin become a prisoner of the well that he tried to lure others into?
