Sunday, August 20, 2006

I watch the BBC world news on PBS

For the past two days when I turn on the news, I have been inundated with reports about John Karr’s reputed confession concerning the beating and murder of JonBenet Ramsey.

Please don’t get me wrong. The Ramsey killing was horrific. My heart goes out to her father, and I grieve that her mother died without knowing who killed her daughter.

What bothers me is this:
Remember the Israeli/Hezbollah conflict? Remember the Iraq war? Remember all of the people in the Darfur region of the Sudan? What about the political unrest in Mexico?
Perhaps it is a facet of American media that it concentrates more on the murder of one six-year old beauty queen than on the murder of hundreds of foreigners – men, women and children – who are not beauty queens.

We need to find a way to put names to the thousands of Sudanese refugees who have lost their mothers and fathers and brothers. We need to put faces to the Iraqi civilians that die in the crossfire in the streets of Baghdad.

We need to identify somehow with the Israeli orphans and the Palestinian widows and widowers. Perhaps then those deaths will receive the same amount of press, and we’ll find a way to stop the violence and punish those responsible.

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