“They don’t have great TV out there.”
George Clooney, the actor and activist in fashionable liberal http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3287 in 2006. The incident apparently happened when he was in the area making “A Journey to Darfur,” his documentary film about the war torn Sudanese province.
“It was in southern Sudan and as we were going through checkpoints, there were all these young kids with AK47’s,” Clooney said. “They went through the car and just took what they wanted. We hid all the tapes and stuff, but they pointed guns at us and stole what they could. It happens all the time. They obviously didn’t know who we were. They don’t have great TV out there.”
Clooney, who has been named a United Nations Messenger of Peace, is outspoken about the “genocide” in Sudan’s Darfur region, which has recently become a cause celebre because of Sudan’s hardline Islamic government, largely untapped oil wealth, and regional importance. Many celebs, who are simultaneously opposed to the Iraq War, have called for Western “intervention” to aid Darfur’s refugees. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has vowed to http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1067 policy, which, it is claimed, is using the Darfur issue to weaken Sudan. This kind of “liberal” interventionism is seen by locals simply as old fashioned colonialism shorn of its honesty and benefits. Bernard Kouchner, the French minister of Foreign and European Affairs, is the founder of Doctors Without Borders, the international “aid group” and NGO, who is using his “humanitarian” background to call for an invasion identical to earlier colonial campaigns.
Sudan, Darfur, Chad and France were all recently in the news over a practice common among Clooney’s Hollywood colleagues: adopting trophy children from Africa. In October (2007), members of a shady French “aid group” were arrested, charged and convicted for http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2235 in Chad.
George Clooney was not the first or the last Westerner who ran into problems attempting to help the Sudanese. In November (2006), an http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2525 named Gillian Gibbons, 54, was jailed and threatened with a court ordered lashing as a mob bayed for her blood after a child in the class she was teaching named a teddy bear Muhammad.