Starving Syrian Children Snub Bowie Tributes as World Mourns

by SoZ Satire’s foreign correspondent

As the world struggles to come to terms with the passing of pop legend and style icon, David Bowie, who died yesterday following an 18-month battle with cancer, a small group of children I spoke to yesterday in the besieged Syrian town of Madaya appeared largely unconcerned by the event, and rather shockingly, seemed more interested in finding something to eat.

Madaya, which has been surrounded and shelled on a daily basis by the government troops of Syrian despot leader, President Bashar al-Assad, over the past six months, has a population of 40,000, many of whom are reported to be slowly starving to death but none of whom have expressed a modicum of concern for the tragic death of the millionaire pop icon as far as I’m aware.

Through an interpreter, I spoke to an emaciated child of around 6 years of age, and put it to him that Bowie was a true innovator and that his seminal album ‘Changes’ altered many people’s conceptions of contemporary pop during that era.

The youngster, who claimed not to have eaten anything except grass soup for 4 days, and whose parents were both killed in a government air strike in December, appeared completely unmoved and even lay down in the dust at one point and appeared to fall asleep.

Meanwhile, the West continues to mourn Bowie’s passing; with one man from Birmingham in the United Kingdom spending over ten minutes sorting through his old record collection in the attic looking for a copy of Space Oddity, while a woman in Austin, Texas, painted a lightning bolt across her face and altered her Facebook avatar to one depicting the dead musical legend.

This apparent apathy towards the loss of a major figure in the world of rock and pop comes just two weeks after a young girl of 10, who had been gang raped by militia men in the Islamic State-controlled town of Mosul in Iraq, failed to express an ounce of remorse for the death of Lemmy out of Motorhead when told of his passing by a journalist at her hospital bedside.