Nicholas Kristof

Khader Adnan, a Globally Trending Topic on Twitter

Yesterday, I published a piece in Al-Akhbar English about the twitter campaign to get more people to learn about and support khader Adnan’s hunger strike. Last night, hashtag #HungerStrikingfor65days was the strongest hashtag yet, thousands tweeted using that hashtag and it remained #1 globally trending topic for over an hour. Twitter has got millions of people to pay attention to Khader Adnan’s case online.  Read my piece below for more on this virtual protest. 

Two Kinds of Non-Violence

Violence has always been a useful term for governments and their allied establishment figures in media and punditry. Key to that utility is a very specialized use of the term as a descriptor for actions that don’t originate with the establishment or authorities. Police, armies, presidents and city administrators do not engage in violence. They use strategies, protocols, plans of action, deployments, operations and strikes. The people that are injured and die in those acts are not actively killed by violence. Rather, they suffer only in the passive voice.