Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks made a new report on Monday on the group promoting the Kony 2012 campaign: Invisible Children Funded By Anti-gay Christian Right? Kony 2012 Criticism 03/12/2012, highlighting the contributions they have received from fundamentalist Christian groups.
For what it's worth, in addition to my blog post yesterday, I e-mailed The Young Turks program and tweeted Bruce Wilson's article to Ana Kasparian. It doesn't hurt to call news outlets' attention to things they may have missed, especially ones like The Young Turks who are more in tune with the digital world.
Bruce Wilson has added an updated to his post:
Why does it matter, if Invisible Children was funded by controversial donors? Two reasons - one, we can assume those donors thought IC aligned with their agenda - which is antagonistic to LGBT rights. Two, it fits an emerging pattern in which Invisible Children appears selectively concerned about crimes committed by Joseph Kony but indifferent to crimes, perhaps on a bigger scale, committed by their provisional partner, the government of Uganda - whose president shot his way into power using child soldiers, before Joseph Kony began using child soldiers. Like Kony, the government of Uganda was also indicted by the International Criminal Court in 2005, for human rights abuses and looting in the DRC Congo (PDF file of ICC ruling against Uganda). Like Kony, the Ugandan army preys upon civilians and is currently accused, by Western human rights groups, with raping and looting in the DRC Congo, where it is hunting for Kony. In the late 1990s, Uganda helped spark a conflict in DRC Congo that, by the middle of the next decade it is estimated, had killed up to 5.4 million civilians, more than any conflict since World War Two. ... For a very different perspective on IC, Kony, and Northern Uganda, see this editorial by Milton Allimadi, of the NYC-based Blackstar news service[.] [my emphasis]
Invisible Children's goals initially may have been to publicize the plight of children caught in Uganda's decades-long conflicts; lately, IC has been acting as apologists for General Yoweri K. Museveni's dictatorship and the U.S. goal to impose AFRICOM (the U.S. Africa Military Command) on Africa.
And their criticism of Invisible Children's advocacy for the Ugandan regime is harsh:
If Invisible Children was in fact a serious organization that has not been co-opted by the Museveni regime and the U.S. foreign policy agenda, the organization would inform the world that General Museveni, who has now stolen three elections in a row in Uganda is the first person who deserves to be arrested.
This Ugandan and East African nightmare gets a blank check from Washington simply because he has deployed Ugandan soldiers to Somalia at the behest of the United States. So democracy, human rights abuses, and genocide, become minor nuisances as far as U.S. foreign policy goes and as far as Invisible Children cares. This is beyond hypocrisy. Those members of Invisible Children who may have supported this misguided project to send more U.S. troops to Africa because they were unwittingly deceived, should do some serious soul searching.
Museveni does not care for the plight of children in Uganda's Acholi region. How else would he have herded 2 million Acholis in concentration camps for 20 years where, according to the United Nations' World Health Organization (WHO), more than 1,000 children, women and men died of planned neglect--lack of medical facilities; lack of adequate food; dehydration, and; lack of sanitation and toilet facilities. Does this sound like a person who cares about children?
His colleagues have denounced Acholis as "backwards" and as "biological substances." General Museveni himself revealed an interesting pathology, as a first class racist African when he told Atlantic Monthly Magazine, in September 1994: "I have never blamed the whites for colonizing Africa: I have never blamed these whites for taking slaves. If you are stupid, you should be taken a slave." Ironically --or perhaps not-- the general was even more embraced by Washington after those remarks. Gen. Museveni has been a U.S. ally since the days of Ronald Reagan. [my emphasis]
