Oct 16th 2011 at 4:50 am in Africa, Featured Story, Foreign Policy, History, Homeland Security, Humanitarian, Islam, Islamic extremism, Justice/Legal, Middle East, Obama, Politics, Soldiers, Strategy, Terrorism, human rights Joseph Kony, the monstrous leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda, a group possibly more despicable than Hitler’s nazis, has apparently been targeted by the Obama administration. News broke on October 14th that 100 US troops were being sent to track Kony down. The meme that is being floated in the liberal media is that Kony is a radical Christian protestant. Obama’s apparatchiks might attempt to advance that meme as much as possible for political advantage against the Christian right.
There’s a small problem with it. It’s a lie.
Late last month, a movie – Machine Gun Preacher – was released about a man named Sam Childers, whose character is played by Hollywood A-lister Gerard Butler. Childers, a former heroin addict and bad guy himself, converted to Christianity; he was inspired to help the children of southern Sudan and northern Uganda after hearing a guest speaker at his church.
Childers knows the truth about Kony; he’s witnessed the evil from a front row seat. The Machine Gun preacher built an orphanage for Sudanese children, replete with a playground, in a war zone and has defended it against Kony’s LRA by fighting alongside Sudanese freedom fighters with guns. Childers has put his life at risk countless times while protecting children from capture, torture, rape, and perhaps the most despicable fate enslaved boys can endure – being ordered to kill their own brethren by fighting as soldiers in Kony’s LRA.
In 2007, I had the opportuntiy to interview Childers on my radio show. The subject of Kony came up multiple times. Here is a portion of what Childers told me:
“Our area is almost all Christian people and the LRA is financed by the Arabs of the north… so the Arabs are the Muslims so it’s basically a holy war inside of our area. This man (Kony) is just out to kill every Christian he can kill in south Sudan and also in Northern Uganda… He’s being financed… it’s been proved for many, many years that the Arabs of the northern Sudan ok, which is Muslims, they have been financing this man for many, many years.”Kony is a very, very bad guy who needs to go. That point is granted. What cannot and should not be allowed to happen is the politization of his motives to push a narrative that says he is a Christian. The truth is that he is an insane madman whose evil is sanctioned by northern Sudan’s Arab Muslims. Childers went on to explain that Kony claims to have added an eleventh Commandment to the Judeo-Christian ten. It says, “Thou shalt not ride a bicycle.” Childers also said Kony reportedly had “160 some spirits that speak to him.” These are NOT Christian tenets, nor is killing children. Islamists, however, do believe in killing non-Muslim children; Kony does that for them while being paid to do so.
In some respects, this comes back to the Islamic problem the west simply refuses to identify. Kony is evil, for sure, but Childers indicated to me in 2007 that the root of the problem is Arab Muslim money:
“The north gives truckloads after truckloads of guns and ammunition and money and food so if somebody’s not financing a war, no, I don’t believe it would be going on.”The reality is that if Kony isn’t a Muslim, he’s certainly doing the will of the Arab Islamists while taking their money to do it. If he is removed, Islamist money will find a new proxy.
The Arab Spring meme has been serving Islamists well for months now. The Muslim Brotherhood waits in the wings for dictators to fall in places like Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria; it then fills the vacuum left behind after the Obama administration either runs interference or does its dirty work.
The situation in Uganda is similar in some ways with the potential for an added twist. Look for western media to paint the picture of a radical Christian named Joseph Kony who is slaughtering children in the name of
Christianity so it can convey moral equivalency between religions. If it is successful, know that the Obama adminstration will have approved such a portrayal.
Meanwhile, the Arabic Islamists will hide behind the Joseph-Kony-is-a-Christian narrative just like they are hiding behind the Arab Spring moniker.
Ben Barrack is a talk show host on KTEM 1400 in Texas and maintains a website at benbarrack.com
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