Where does Hollywood get its reputation for lefty Lucies? Neo conned artiste Ron Silver? Academy Award winner turned professional war party shill Jon Voight? Add Don Cheadle, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt to your list of war mongers and thieves.
Not On Our Watch focuses on mass atrocities and gross violations of international human rights. We work in areas where global attention is minimal and the response from the international community remains muted.
Since 2003, the crisis in Darfur has taken over 300,000 lives and forced over 2.5 million people from their homes. The United Nations has called the situation in Darfur the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. The international community has failed to act, and Darfur continues to deteriorate. An increase in violence, combined with governmental inaction, has critically endangered humanitarian life-support systems, peacekeeping efforts, and millions of civilians.
George Clooney whose credits include NBC series The Facts of Life and best known for hiring beards breaking hearts “engages in robust international advocacy designed to pressure governments and intergovernmental bodies to take immediate action to end the crisis in Darfur.”
Forget the role of the artist as teller of courageous truths. Forget the role of the press to employ cynicism in the face of foolish earnestness who have given this organization a pass even in the wake of what presumably must have of mandate for anti-interventionism. Buzzle.net notes, “Mr [John] Prendergast sees the surge of interest in Darfur as the result of three years of classic grassroots activism, of hard work mobilizing support in church groups, synagogues and universities. Others, less charitably, point to the US’s imperial misadventures as one of the causes of the swell of sympathy for Darfur and the Bush administration’s forthright comments. What better way to forget the disaster in Iraq than to seize the moral high ground in Darfur?”
