Little Amal masks a big problem

LAST week I finally saw the peculiar giant puppet Little Amal, which has been paraded across Europe, supposedly to draw attention to the plight of refugees from Syria. The glowering thing came to Oxford, my home town, where it was paired with a rather po-faced mega-doll of Alice in Wonderland, our local heroine.

Alice had an eye for human folly and spent a lot of time being the wrong size. But what she would have made of this political carnival, I do not know. It is very odd. It strikes me that most Syrian refugees are not little girls but strapping young men. I wonder how a huge puppet of such a person would be greeted.

It strikes me also that Little Amal, actually 11ft 5in, does not look at all like a small girl but like a rather snappish and cross Left-wing TV presenter, perhaps on BBC’s Newsnight. And finally it strikes me that if Left-wing persons in this country had not been so keen to stoke up a civil war in Syria, and to intervene in Libya too, there might not be so many refugees, whether they were little girls or grown men.

How many who turn out to show obeisance to the Little Amal puppet even know of the vast billion-dollar CIA programme called Timber Sycamore by which the nice West fanned the flames of war in Syria, and in some cases even ended up helping groups linked to Al Qaeda? What good did this do? The Syrian regime was and is terrible, but do you make that better by turning people into corpses and refugees, and by backing fanatics?

I have nothing but praise for those who personally welcome such refugees into their own homes. But I am less keen on those who think other people should shoulder the burden. If Little Amal was a real little girl, she might wonder if she was being used.