Not sure how you feel about KONY 2012?

A cross post from Facebook...
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If you have Facebook or Twitter and have been online in the past two days, then chances are you know about KONY 2012. Most probably you saw a few friends sharing the Invisible Children video, and perhaps you even shared it yourself after watching it. This isn't wrong. It was a moving video and it's very, very easy to hit share and feel like you've done a bit of good.

After that, you probably started to see people posting criticisms of the video, particularly of the charity, as well as others criticising the general 'slacktivist' approach of re-posting or retweeting something and feeling like you'd contributed to a cause. Others would have countered this with the fact that at least people are raising awareness, better than nothing, etc etc. And in the end, you, like me, may be a bit confused about whether, in the end, this is a good or bad thing.

What I've realised by reading debates on various friends' walls is that it doesn't really matter. The discussions that need to be had aren't about whether the video is a good or bad, but have to do with why it was so effective, why people have reacted the way they have, and where we can go from there. Here are some thoughts:

What do you know about the ICC?
If you've been spreading the word that Kony is the ICC's most wanted man, have you delved any further? Do you know, for example, that the US (along with Israel and Sudan) have effectively backed out of the ICC and are no longer considered a state party to it? This means that if Kony turned up on US soil, the US wouldn't be obligated to arrest him. If you're American, are you comfortable with this?

Do you know any of the other people or cases that are being investigated by the ICC? Do you know why Sudanese President Omar al Bashir has been indicted, or that Saif Gaddafi is supposed to be transfered there? Do you know that they're about to announce their first verdict next week, in a case related to atrocities in the DRC? Do you need someone to make a video about Thomas Lubanga's crimes to be bothered to find out?

Why is this the first you've heard of it?
The whole point of the video is to raise awareness of Kony's existence to the vast majority of the population who don't know he exists. If you're one of those people, think about why that is. This has been happening for the better part of 20 years. The vast majority of my FB friends are around my age, which means six years ago, when we were 19 or so, you should have become aware of the nightwalkers phenomenon when it featured briefly but prominently in international press. Nightwalkers was the name given to Ugandan kids who walked miles every night to sleep in protected buildings in big cities so that they wouldn't be abducted or killed by Kony and the LRA.

If you missed that then, think of what you're missing now. Do you live in a bubble populated mostly by celeb news and Twitter updates, where the only way anything like this can turn up is if a video goes viral? Now you're aware of Kony, but are you aware of exactly what's going on in Syria? A lot of people jumped on the Egypt bandwagon the day Mubarak stepped down. Do you know or care that Egypt's so called revolutionary democracy is actually still controlled by the military?

When you were in college or university, how many of you took classes where you would learn about situations like this? How many people instead took "History of Alcohol" or some other joke class because they didn't really want to be challenged? Now that you're out of university, what can you do to educate yourself more, or to help younger generations steer themselves toward choices that might mean that they don't hear about atrocities 20 years after they begin, and can take action because they have researched it and want to, not because a video or a wristband told them to?

If you're a teacher...
I know a lot of you are. I don't know what grades you teach or subjects or anything. But if they're of an appropriate age, can you use this to teach your kids about what's happening? About how to think critically when they're confronted with something like this, or about how to make sure that if they want to give to charity they know what they're contributing to? Can you teach them about something else that's happening right now in the world? If you can't, because it doesn't fit in the curriculum, then maybe we need to have a look at why that is.

I don't have any answers, really. All I know is that people seem to want to talk about this right now, and we should capitalise on that to foster broader discussions beyond KONY 2012. Talking about Joseph Kony will not get him arrested; but it can help to educate ourselves and other people about so many other issues, if we're willing to look at why this has exploded the way it has and to seriously look at ourselves and see whether we want to do anything about it or whether we really just wanted to be the first of our friends to hit share.

The Acceptable Face of Dictatorships

Back from the Frontline Club - really, really enjoyed tonight's discussion. The panel was fantastic - LSE Professor David Held, Al Jazeera reporter Marwan Bishara, former UK ambassador to Libya Richard Dalton and former Libyan jihadist/current Quilliam analyst Noman Benotman, chaired by BBC presenter Mishal Husein.

The discussion was focused on Libya but fairly wide-ranging and really fast-paced; a lot of time with Q&A type events, audience members can be a bit...long-winded with their questions, spending a lot of time setting them up by outlining their own opinion/experiences. Tonight, though, the questions were very quick, sharp and interesting - none of the soft touch stuff about the role of Twitter.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter has probably already been subjected to my live-tweeting of the event (sorry, work), so I won't re-cap it. But I was very interested in the stuff that came up about Muammar Gaddafi's son, Saif al Islam Gaddafi. I think Saif represents everything that is uncomfortable about Libya for western countries. He was a well-educated, charitable and relatively liberal man who seemed genuinely interested in reform in his country. He was, on the surface, a respectable person to do business with, to accept money from, to partner with. Except, then he wasn't.

This has been the narrative of our political class as well. After Libya dismantled its nuclear programme in 2003/2004, it became acceptable to do business with Muammar Gadaffi again, to pointedly ignore the lack of democracy and the human rights abuses in the country. Sure, Gaddafi was seen as a bit of a nut, but he was endured. Libya was even elected to the UN Human Rights Council just last April. Libya was alright, all things considered, until, of course, it wasn't.

The panel tonight had some polarised views on Saif. David Held opened by explaining his relationship with Said; they had worked quite closely together in the partnerships LSE had with Saif's charitable foundation, and Held said he was appalled by Saif's February 20 speech and shocked by how little it turned out he knew of him. But he also said that Saif had been genuine about the reforms he was trying to implement - that, essentially, it had come down to choosing between his father and everyone else, and he had chosen his father. Richard Dalton said much the same thing - from a British foreign policy perspective, Saif was ideal to deal with and used his foundation to support real issues aimed at genuine change.

Benotman took a less kind but still fairly moderate view, which was a bit surprising for someone who was once actively involved in trying to bring down the Gaddafi regime. He, too, felt that the reforms Saif had been interested in were genuine, but pointed out that they were still meant to be implemented in the context of the Gaddafi regime. Improving democracy or human rights would not, in Saif's view, have in any way involved removing his father from power or giving up control. Benotman said Saif had a choice between the new and the old way, and that he had chosen - historically - to side not just with his father but with the entire old power structure and way of viewing the country, something much more significant than simple family loyalty.

Bishara, though, had the most scathing words for Saif Gaddafi and they really made me think about the way the media portrayed him. He said Saif was a playboy - cosmopolitan, well-traveled, well-educated, yes, but all this and 'charitable' with money that was not his. "He charmed the west at the expense of the Libyan people," Bishara said. There is nothing good or moral about a playboy, and Saif proved in the end that he is his father's son - nothing but the son of a dictator and a thug. Telling here is the fact that I've never in mainstream media heard Saif described this way (well, those exact words I wouldn't expect in an objective article anyway); he's always been seen as the acceptable public face of the Gaddafi regime, as a somewhat liberal, reform type - the way Held and Dalton described him. There's always been talk of his foundation, his charity, and never questions about where that money comes from. After all, what has Saif al Islam Gaddafi ever done to earn the millions he uses to fund projects and aid flotillas, to study at top universities? It was maybe always assumed as obvious that the money came from his father, but never pointed out that Muammar Gaddafi was not from a wealthy family, that the only access to wealth came from his access to the wealth of the state. Like the political class, the western media has now turned on Saif, but at some point it should examine why it was so easy to go along with the acceptable face he presented without question.

On a lighter note, Bishara did compare the Gaddafi family to the Kardashians, saying that he had seen their TV show and saw similarities between the sponging, drunken, playboy brother and Saif - meaning for years the Arab world had been "Keeping up with the Gaddafians".