Our silence empowers the status quo, which in this case means upholding Canada’s complicity in the continued massacre of Palestinians
Like many journalists, I have a love-hate relationship with my profession. After graduating from J-school in 2003, I moved halfway across the country to take my first job as a newspaper reporter, only to leave months later feeling unfulfilled and wondering if journalism was for me.
Eventually, I returned to school and dabbled in the social sciences at Memorial University, hoping a more informed outlook on society and the world might bring me closer to finding purpose in news reporting.
As part of my education I also joined advocacy groups, where I found others who, like me, recognized deep injustice in various issues, and in the general state of the world.
In high school we were taught about the Holocaust, and how after World War II the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention, an unprecedented international treaty that gave a name and definition to the horrific act of genocide as specific crimes “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
With the global consensus that genocide is a violation of international law came the promise of “never again”. Yet, in 1994, while All-4-One’s song I Swear was topping the Billboard charts and grunge bands like Soundgarden, Nirvana and Pearl Jam were taking the rock world by storm, more than half a million human beings in Rwanda were slaughtered over a three-month period.
“Never again” was a broken promise. Among the reasons for the international community’s collective failure to stop the systematic slaughter of Tutsis was the fact that the victims were Black, and African — less than human in much of the world’s eyes.
It was just a year or so after the Rwanda genocide when I learned what had happened. Fifteen-year-old me couldn’t believe this was possible. That human beings are still capable of such atrocious acts. That it just happened. And that thousands of people were being murdered with guns and machetes every day at the exact same time I was getting up, eating cereal, going to school, and coming home to play video games. Most frighteningly? The genocide happened while the world watched. (more...)
Why I pressed Trudeau on genocide
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