The New York Times took at look at the #stopkony twitter viral story…about 48 hours after you read about it first here on Twitchy!
With more than 180,000 followers, the Twitter account for the 2012 Vans Warped Tour was one of the first accounts with large followings to share the link.
Soon, celebrities from the film and music worlds, including Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Diddy, Alec Baldwin and Olivia Wilde were joining in and posting links to the film on Facebook and Twitter. Many did so at the urging of their fans. And the hashtags #kony2012 #stopkony began to trend worldwide on Twitter.
On Tuesday, the group got a huge boost when Ms. Winfrey began talking about the film by thanking her followers for alerting her to it and noting that she had been involved with Invisible Children and the issue for years.
https://twitter.com/#!/Oprah/status/177045645511761920
https://twitter.com/#!/RyanSeacrest/status/177487314472275968
Now I don’t doubt the sincerity of these celebrities in wanting to stop Kony. I simply wonder where they have been when the Taliban were using children as suicide bombers ?
From Human Rights Watch
The Taliban’s use of children as suicide bombers in Afghanistan is an egregious affront to humanity that should cease immediately, Human Rights Watch said today. In the latest incident, on August, 27, 2011, residents of Baharak district in northeastern Badakhshan province captured a 16-year-old wearing a suicide vest as he was on his way to blow up a local mosque.
There has been an alarming increase in recent months of suicide bombings, and attempted suicide bombings, by children, Human Rights Watch said. Younger and younger children have been involved. Children as young as 7 have reported that they were deployed as suicide bombers. Surviving children who trained as suicide bombers describe having been given amulets containing verses from the Quran that they were told would protect them from the explosion. They said they were told that when the bomb they carried detonated, everyone around them would die but they would survive.
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From Leadership Post
Blindfolded and rigged with his explosive payload, the boy, who was about 13, was driven to his target in the Afghan city of Kandahar, after being plucked from the streets of Quetta in neighbouring Pakistan. Minutes before he was due to execute the attack, however, Abdul realized the lies of his recruiters seeking to turn him into a human bomb.
“When I opened my eyes, I saw it was a very black thing they wanted me to do,” he later recalled on Afghan television.
“I began to cry and shout. People came out of their houses and asked what was wrong. I showed them I had something in my vest. Then they were scared too and called the police who took the bombs off me.”
From Washington Times
Pakistan’s top Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, is buying children as young as 7 to serve as suicide bombers in the growing spate of attacks against Pakistani, Afghan and U.S. targets, U.S. Defense Department and Pakistani officials say.
A Pakistani official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said the going price for child bombers was $7,000 to $14,000 – huge sums in Pakistan, where per-capita income is about $2,600 a year.
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