Newspaper columns

Not with a bang but a whimper

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BERLIN – So Hitler was called to lurk among us. And never showed. Not even in Germany.

This regarding Kony 2012, the strange and shrinking campaign that in its posters — now hung virtually nowhere — features Hitler idling behind warlord Joseph Kony and Osama bin Laden.

The square-moustached megalomaniac has made a bigger splash online. On YouTube, an impersonator of the führer is enraged over the world’s apparent inaction against Kony. “Get my laptop,” he tells his generals, with English subtitles, in this satirical video with a million views.

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Waiting and watching on the Arab Spring

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KAMPALA, UGANDA – The times, they are a changin.’ Maybe. Sort of. Well, we live in hope, anyway.

I think of it while on Skype with Walid al Saqaf. We’re talking to catch up, about Yemen and censorship and technology and other things.

Walid is a Yemeni journalist who has been noted in this space in the past. We were colleagues in Sana’a while Walid was publisher and editor-in-chief of the Yemen Times. I worked at his side.

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Konymania: this is not Uganda’s reality

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LONDON — The world is getting faster. And stranger. Have you noticed?

This is what I know. I think. I mean, sometimes it’s hard to know what we know. Take Joseph Kony. He’s someone who, thanks to social media, you likely know.

I’m betting you know Kony is that Ugandan warlord with a strangely genteel face, that he’s abducted thousands of Ugandan boys and stole their souls when he made them into so-called soldiers.

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And lo! A child is saved from a brutal death

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(Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, December 24, 2011)

KAMPALA, UGANDA — It’s late at night at the Ugandan-Kenyan border and a little Ugandan boy is about to disappear forever.

Moses Kaloulou, all of seven years old, is crying hysterically. Not that he knows what’s going to happen, that he’ll likely soon die at the hands, and knife blade, of a witch doctor. All he knows is that it’s late — about midnight now — and very dark, and that some hours ago he was taken by strange men.

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