11/26/2004: "Gender violence and Theo van Gogh"

The World Council of Churches is starting a campaign today called "On the Wings of a Dove: Overcoming Violence Against Women and Children," which is being supported by the National Council of Churches. A worthy and laudable goal, certainly, though I suspect it will just be more of the usual talk. Over the same time, Amnesty International, the human rights organization, is also running a campaign entitled "16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence" that runs through December 10. Again, no one can argue against trying to end vioence against women.

But this article by Bridget Johnson on the deafening silence in Hollywood in response to the brutal murder and near-beheading of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh got me thinking. An artist savagely killed on a European street for expressing on film (entitled Submission, it's 11 minutes long and can be seen at iFilm.com) the horrors of violence and oppression leveled at women in the Islamic world�this was a situation made to order for comment by the above organizations. But a check of their Web sites revealed not a single mention of Theo van Gogh, his film, or his murder. Did it pass under the radar at the WCC, NCC, and AI because it was just a single murder (albeit one that has an entire nation on edge and all of Europe in an uproar), or because it pointed fingers in a politically incorrect way?

Just wondering.