Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteWords have a power.
Whether out of Kenya or the Gaza Strip, there's a "root cause" for violence motivated by political rhetoric and propaganda.
It is irresponsible, mendacious, and vindictive language.
In Kenya, opposition leader Raila Odinga chose willfully to launch three days of "protests" knowing each day would spark and see violence distilled out of an atmosphere bent on producing just such grief.
While the less articulate got into the business of hacking strangers apart with machete [3], Odinga seems to have been borrowing a page from Martin Luther King, a champion of nonviolent civil disobedience, to mouth the "judged by the content of their character" clause.
Where one cannot "play the race card", the tribal one will do, I guess.
Out of Gaza: children using their chests as placards to entreat Israel's mercy in its latest siege of the Hamas-controlled strip in response to unrelenting rocket attacks against its people, Jews and Arabs (20 percent of Israel's population) alike.
Are the children not told about the rockets launched against Israel?
Are they unaware of the peace brewing by Fatah's hand in the West Bank?
One may wonder too whether any child (or adult) in Gaza has sufficient freedom from intimidation to protest the protest, to refrain from the support of Hamas, to argue for the more secular position held by Fatah, which seems lately to have engaged in talks with Israel and the United States without apology, just across the rocky and sandy way, .
If disease, illiteracy, and war travel together, I'm sure language keeps them so.
In several of the world's conflict zones, whether children, functionally literate adults, or adults whose information menu has been intimidated or narrowed or both, language that passes blame to The Other Tribe or The Great Satan (and, always, The Jewish Lobby) finds little countermeasure in the established press.
Head-on collissions lead to courts as alluded to here on reading Brooke Goldstein's summary of Islamic community actions taken against investigative journalists [2].
Sideways (my ways) comments feel "iffy", but what can, may, should one do when others lie outright or through omission (and at great, cumbersome lengths as well)?
The live and reporting press may presume not to judge: it only purports to illustrate in words or through photography what it has witnessed.
Fair enough.
However one may ask any number of public interest groups, pundits, scholars: where are you?
Why do you let so much lethal rhetoric fly through the air without comment?
Worse, and back to Kenya's Raila Odinga who seems to want some kind of affirmative action justice to rise out of the pools of blood that may be associated with identification with his political stance: what do you think you're doing other than getting your people killed by sewing the seeds that encourage violence and producing the circumstances that let it breath like fire?
While one may understand Kenya's drift into division, one also may have expected the country's top politicians to have hammered out course corrections off the streets long before social issues had cooked themselves into the perfect tinder for war.
Of democracy, it has been said that "people get the leadership they deserve."
People, wherever you are, and this especially if your neighborhood has become host to violent conflict, you deserve much, much better.
# # #
3. Tweedie, Penny. "More die in Kenya violence." Video. Reuters, January 20, 2008.
4. Tweedie, Penny. "Gaza children's protest." Video. Reuters, January 20, 2008.
Comments