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The New York Times has urged European leaders not to adopt the heartless Australian model of denying desperate asylum seekers entry via the maritime route.
Well-intentioned as it no doubt was, its editorial has added to the already overflowing stock of moral outrage surrounding the humanitarian disaster of displaced persons, but has contributed nothing to the urgent question of what should be done about it.
As for the Australian lesson, the premise of the editorial advice is wrong anyway.
Describing turn-backs as "unconscionable", it said: "Prime Minister Tony Abbott has overseen a ruthlessly effective effort to stop boats packed with migrants, many of them refugees, from reaching Australia's shores. His policies have been inhumane, of dubious legality and strikingly at odds with the country's tradition of welcoming people fleeing persecution and war."
In reality, the intake of Syrian refugees has been increased since the civil war intensified with an additional 4400 settled here, according to Canberra. And Foreign Minister Julie Bishop says an increase on that number is now under active consideration. As it should be.
What was meant by the term "ruthlessly effective" is unclear, beyond its obviously menacing tone. In any event, the phrase concedes that the Abbott policy has in fact been effective in stopping deaths at sea.
Yes the Abbott government's policy has stopped asylum seekers from making it to Australia's shores, but the more important point is that it has stopped deaths at sea by preventing people from trying. Plus, it has decimated a cruel commerce in human souls - a cynical trade in which a fatality rate is simply deemed accepted. In the end, a country's "heart" or lack thereof, should be measured by how many people it helps and tries to help. Not by how many people it allows to die while expressing regret.
Another missing element from the broadsheet's argument was an acknowledgement that the terrible images which have personalised the human calamity unfolding in the Middle-East and Northern Africa - photographs revealing a drowned Syrian 3 year old - are precisely the class of tragedy Australia's "inhumane" policy has ended.
It is ironic then that such heart-rending images from the shores of the Mediterranean are being used by some to criticise Australia's maritime security policies, even though they have stopped such deaths.
Where The New York Times is correct, however, is in condemning the undemocratic secrecy associated with the incarceration of asylum seekers languishing in Nauru and PNG. Ditto for its reference to the moral ambiguities - first reported by Fairfax Media - of paying people smugglers to return to port.
Demonising Canberra over these aspects and for the divisive border rhetoric in which they are cloaked, is justified, but only if the most fundamental moral imperative of preventing deaths at sea is also recognised.
