A Teachable Moment for Ethiopian-Americans on July 4, 2015

Ethiopia: A Teachable Moment for Ethiopian-Americans on July 4, 2015

By Al Mariam

My topic for my Monday Commentary this week was not about a teachable moment for Ethiopian-Americans. I dropped my intended topic and wrote this piece because I was madder than a nest of hornets.

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) entitled, “Journalists Assaulted While Covering Protest in Western Kenya.” That report stated:

[Journalist Saka] Richards told CPJ that the protesters and the protest organizers fled the area after they were threatened by a mob of residents. Police helped take the protester organizers to safety, he said. The mob then turned on the journalists, who were left at the scene. Richards said the mob began to punch, kick, and beat Waswa with clubs. ‘We then tried to intervene to assist our colleague, only to be beaten ourselves.’” (Emphasis added.)

I shook my head in disgust and asked myself, “When will Africa ever have a free press that is free from harassment, intimidation, incarceration, violence and persecution?”

I reassured myself it was great to live in country where no journalist is beaten, harassed, threatened, intimidated, jailed or otherwise persecuted doing the work of the independent press. I even thought fleetingly about the despicable tabloids who publish trash about celebrities and other public figures in the name of press freedom with impunity.

I thanked my lucky stars for living in a country that constitutionally prohibits the making of any laws that interfere with the right of the individual to speak freely and of the press to report freely.

It was a great political achievement for the Framers of the American Constitution to amend their Constitution in 1791 and include language that imposed a sweeping ban on censorship. In the very first amendment to the Constitution, Congress did the unthinkable and even incomprehensible. It made a constitutional amendment against itself: “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of the press…”

The First Amendment was not only a stroke of wisdom, it was an act of genius.

The Framers gave the Government of the United States the power to make all sorts of laws. Congress has the power to pass a law and declare war on any country and raise armies to fight that war. Congress can tax and spend like a drunken sailor. (The U.S. Government is 13 trillion plus dollars in the red to date today.) Congress can coin money, regulate commerce and do much more.

However, the mighty U.S. Congress is powerless to censor the press. Even the most powerful man on the planet who carries the “nuclear football” and incinerate the world is completely powerless when it comes to abridging press freedom.

I make the foregoing observations not as some sort of patriotic declaration of faith on Independence Day but as an object lesson for Ethiopian Americans.

On July 3, 2015, I watched a Youtube video that appalled, shocked and outraged me beyond words can express.

What I saw in that video is the ultimate insult on one of the most fundamental of all American liberties, the right to freedom of the press.

What I saw in that video was the hypocrisy of those who want freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of assembly and freedom to petition government only for themselves and no one else.

What I saw in that video was the ultimate assault, an act of war, on the First Amendment itself.

The video speaks and shows for itself. A small group of irate Ethiopian protesters are assembled outside the White House shouting out their disapproval of
President Barack Obama’s visit to Ethiopia later this month. Henok Semaegzer, a reporter for the Voice of America, Amharic (Ethiopian) Service (VOA AS) arrived at the protest site to report on the event and speak to some of the protesters for shortwave broadcast to Ethiopia.

Henok’s appearance at the protest site triggered an angry and violent reaction by a dozen or so protesters in the crowd. Without any provocation, the protesters surrounded the VOA AS reporter like a pack of wolves closing on a wounded deer for the final kill. It was frightening to see an angry mob working itself into a frenzy to commit not only a crime against a journalist but the very foundation of all American liberties, the First Amendment.

I asked myself, “is this really happening? Is this happening on the western side of the White House or Western Kenya?

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