Excerpt
MARGARET WARNER (Newshour): The 30-minute video was posted on YouTube Monday and quickly went viral. The work of the non-profit group Invisible Children, it purports to document atrocities committed by militant Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda and Central Africa beginning in the 1980s.
NARRATOR: For 26 years, Kony has been kidnapping children into his rebel group, the LRA, turning the girls into sex slaves and the boys into child soldiers.
He makes them mutilate people's faces and he forces them to kill their own parents. And this is not just a few children. It's been over 30,000 of them.
MARGARET WARNER: Over the course of the week, the number of views on YouTube alone skyrocketed from a few thousand on Monday to more than 38 million today. It was most popular with young people ages 13 to 24.
The video features Invisible Children co-founder Jason Russell explaining Kony's actions to his son, Gavin.
JASON RUSSELL, co-founder, Invisible Children: Joseph Kony, he has an army, okay? And what he does is, he takes children from their parents and he gives them a gun to shoot, and he makes them shoot and kill other people.
BOY: But they're not going to do what he says because they're nice guys, right?
JASON RUSSELL: Yeah, they don't want do what he says, but he forces them to do bad things. What do you think about that?
BOY: Sad.
NOTE: The 'boy' is Jason Russell's son.
IMHO: All this video by Jason Russell and Invisible Children is doing, is putting the spotlight on just ONE of the players in this Uganda and Central Africa, which is a good thing. Is obviously NOT intended to address all those responsible.
It worries me that the blogosphear is so focused on other issues, rather than join the focus on Joseph Kony, on just this one criminal. Also, using the term "famous" is a mistake, Joseph Kony is infamous.
This is a very small step (one step at a time) for the problems in Africa or elsewhere, and it does NOT detract from the other problems.
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