James North (Mondoweiss)
I am experienced and world weary, and it takes a lot to leave me
speechless. But once Jodi Rudoren's Orientalist pop anthropology had
flabbergasted me, her New York Times colleague in east Africa finished the job.
Jeffrey Gettleman missed the actual breaking news in eastern Congo two
days ago, when several thousand armed predators calling themselves the
M23 Movement seized Goma, a major regional city. Once he did show up,
he opens his article
with a favorable portrait of the M23, describing them as "lean, young
rebels in pressed fatigues." Only right at the end, almost as an
afterthought, does he note that those pesky scolds at Human Rights Watch
have found M23 guilty of "ethnic massacres, recruitment of children,
mass rape, killings, abductions and torture."
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