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George scolds the media after Ocean’s two awarded peace prize
George Clooney scolded the media for lavishing attention on a white British teacher who faced a whipping and prison in Sudan while largely ignoring the suffering of millions of refugees in the western Sudanese region of Darfur.
Clooney (46) said it’s essential that politicians and the press focus on Darfur and not abandon the war-ravaged region’s people to rape, starvation and murder.
He made the appeal at a news conference yesterday in Rome, where he and fellow actor Don Cheadle (43) were presented with the Peace Summit Award given annually by the Nobel Peace Prize laureates.
The media should give Darfur’s refugees “the same attention that the Western white woman received,” Clooney said, referring to Gillian Gibbons, who was spared 40 lashes and six months behind bars for insulting Islam by allowing her six- and seven-year-old students to name a class teddy bear Muhammad.
“I’d suggest that every citizen in Darfur would happily take 40 lashes and six months in prison over what they undergo right now,” he said.
Clooney and Cheadle, co-stars in the film ‘Ocean’s Thirteen,’ were honoured by the laureates as “men of peace” for raising awareness about the plight of Darfur’s refugees. Clooney, Cheadle, actors Brad Pitt and Matt Damon and film producer Jerry Weintraub are co-founders of Not on Our Watch, a group whose mission is to prevent mass atrocities.
Fighting in Darfur, the scene of a four-and-a-half-year civil war, has driven 270,000 people from their homes this year, joining more than two million who already fled to camps for internally displaced people, according to the United Nations.