Trans activists are effectively experimenting on children

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/04/trans-activists-are-effectively-experimenting-on-children-could-there-be-anything-more-cruel/

8 April 2015 15:45
A boy who plays with dolls is not trans or dysphoric - he's just a boy who plays with dolls

A boy who plays with dolls is not trans or dysphoric – he’s just a boy who plays with dolls

Can you think of anything more cruel than telling a five-year-old boy who likes Lady Gaga that he might have gender dysphoria? Or telling a nine-year-old tomboy who hates Barbie and loves Beckham that she might really be male – in spirit – and therefore she should think about putting off puberty and possibly transitioning to her ‘correct gender’?

Saying such things to kids who are only doing what kids have done for generations – messing about, discovering their identity – turns playfulness into a pathology. It convinces boys who aren’t boyish and girls who aren’t girly that they must have some great gender problem, a profound inner turmoil that their tiny minds must address, when in truth they’re just having fun. What an awful trick to play on children.

It’s being played on them more and more. ‘Transgender kids’ – the quote marks are because I’m not convinced that toddlers are capable of thinking – are in the news. On Sunday, BBC 2 aired Louis Theroux’s documentary on trans kids in America. Like all of Theroux’s work, it was objective, observant and humane. It introduced us to Camille, a five-year-old, pink-loving, Gaga-admiring boy who daftly thinks he is a girl, and even more daftly is indulged by psychologists and his parents; Cole/Crystal, a boy who can’t decide whether he is male or female (Cole, buddy, you’re male) and whose confusion was heightened by the conflicting responses of the adults around him; and, saddest of all, Nikki, born Nick, a troubled 14-year-old boy who is taking drugs to put off puberty because, according to experts at least, he’s transgender.

The trend for diagnosing gender dysphoria or transgenderism in kids who a couple of decades ago would simply have been seen as camp (boys) or unladylike (girls) is spreading. This week the BBC reported that the number of British kids under the age of 10 who are being referred to the NHS because they have ‘transgender feelings’ has quadrupled in six years. Forty-seven of these kids were aged 5 or under. Your four-year-old boy loves dancing in leggings to old Madonna songs? Quick, get him to the doctor! It’s bizarre.

The NHS now prescribes puberty-blocking drugs to so-called trans kids when they turn 10 or 11. This seems especially cruel, to deny children that tough but essential transitionary period, that biological burst that turns girls into women and boys into gruff-voiced scallywags who might one day mature into men. We do not ask 10-year-olds to make major decisions in relation to their schooling, where they live, smoking or sex; and yet we now invite them to make the terrifying existential choice to offset adulthood itself, to keep their hormones locked in limbo, to determine what sex they are. What a terrible burden to put on a human being who probably isn’t allowed to walk to the shop on his own or to stay up past 9pm.

We all now recognise that it was wrong and wicked to have castrato singers, males who were castrated before puberty in order to preserve their pure and feminine dulcet tones. The last-ever castrato died in 1922. Yet are we not doing something similar today, using drugs to keep boys (and girls) in a puberty-avoiding state, a childish limbo, having convinced them with psychobabble that they are dysphoric?

The treatment of non-conforming or plain funny kids as ‘transgender’ strikes me as a stunning abdication of adult responsibility. It is the job of adults to correct childish confusions, to guide kids through weird or rough patches, and ensure, to the best of our abilities, that they come out the other end as rounded, hopefully happy adults. But now, the cult of relativism runs so deep that adults even balk from making that most basic of all judgements – that a child with a penis is a boy and a child with a vagina is a girl – and instead we accommodate to the child’s own fads and silliness.

What about children who want to be dogs, or dinosaurs, or racing car drivers? Should we indulge them? ‘Transgender kids’ aren’t at fault at all here – the problem is an adult society that has so profoundly lost the plot that it can no longer steer and socialise the next generation, and can’t even bring itself to say ‘boys will be boys and girls will be girls’ because to do so in our Queer Studies-saturated era is apparently to be discriminatory, judgemental, oppressive.

There’s one more, seriously dark element to the promotion of the ‘trans kids’ phenomenon: it’s being pushed by adult trans activists as a way of pursuing their own interests and agenda. More and more trans campaigners are using ‘trans kids’ effectively as a moral shield, hoping that if they can convince the world that transgenderism is something that emerges as early as three or four then it must be natural, good, healthy, and thus should be insulated from criticism.

That is, they’re effectively experimenting on children, both socially and medically, both through filling kids’ heads with nonsense about dysphoria and offering them drugs, in order to advance their own adult demands for greater recognition. This is repulsive, the creation of a new generation of castratos who are paraded and praised in public by self-serving trans activists who only want more political clout and respect. Stop it. Let kids be kids. A boy who plays with dolls is not trans or dysphoric – he’s just a boy who plays with dolls.

Comment: They took away my comments at the site. Talking about age of consent and FGM gets you into trouble…

50 Shades of Grey – Pedophilia Hiding In Plain Sight

The story of convicted child rapist Jerry Sandusky is well known.  So too is the 50 Shades of Grey phenomena, a book that has become so popular among women that some are referring to it as “Mommy Porn” for the masses.  That description is actually a lot more disturbing than a lot of folks are currently realizing.

Yes, 50 Shades is pornography. Like most pornography, the storyline is weak, the characters one-dimensional, while the sex itself graphic, detailed, but formulaic.  The underlying theme to 50 Shades is something far more sinister and appalling though than your mere run-of-the-mill porn.  It is pedophilia.  It is child porn.  Kiddie porn.

Now I know after saying that, many female fans of 50 Shades, many of them mothers, will naturally put up a defense against that kind of description.  These women, being mothers, are naturally wired to protect kids.  People like Jerry Sandusky are viewed with hatred, revulsion, and disgust.  Rightfully so.  What mother would want to condone anything having to do with the sexual abuse of children?  Of innocents?

But that is exactly what 50 Shades of Grey is really about.  It is a story of a girl being sexually molested, over and over again, by a male figure with all the power, all the control.  It is the classic abuse scenario.  And mothers are, in some cases, quite literally getting off on it, which takes the disgust of this phenomena to a whole other frightening level.

So having put that out there, and I hope I haven’t lost any of you just yet.  I owe you an explanation after having made that kind of accusation about a book some of you may be reading right now.  I’ll start with a bit of background first.

My professional experience centers around nearly 20 years with Child Protective Services.  Over that time, I’ve seen situations that do, literally, keep me up at night.  The amount of abuse that is going on in our society, that sexualization of our kids…well basically, what you hear about, what is reported in the news, that is only a small sample of just how large of a problem and the disgusting acts that are going on every day.  Kids are being raped.  Kids are being abused.  Every single day.  Over and over and over again.

I didn’t seek out 50 Shades of Grey.  It was brought to my attention by a longtime friend who is also a clinical psychologist at a university.  She’s a bit older than me.  She grew up in the counter culture era and did her fair share of experimentation of all kinds.  So she’s hardly a prude.  What she today though is a mother and grandmother.  And she’s smart.  One of the things that fascinates her is this age of cultural phenomena.  How due to technology things now spread so quickly throughout society and become the next big thing at an increasingly rapid pace.  She says sometimes this phenomena is pretty much harmless, and other times it can be very damaging to kids and or adults who begin to emulate something out of a need to belong to the “next big thing”.

Her reaction to 50 Shades of Grey though was much more aggressively negative than anything I could recall her talking about before.  It came up because I mentioned it to her offhand.  I had seen a couple mentions of it on the news and knowing her interest in cultural trends, asked her about it.  She stopped talking, looked right at me, and said the book was about pedophilia.   And it was her who then connected it to the Sandusky tragedy where so many young boys had been sexually abused. Sandusky committed his acts of crime under the cover of actually helping youth.  That is how he gained access.  My friend said 50 Shades was basically the same exact thing.  Its cover was a story of a young woman engaging is a very graphic sexual relationship with a somewhat older man.

The problem for her, and it was a BIG PROBLEM, was that the narrator in the story, was in fact, an underage girl.  My friend indicated, based on the use of language in the narration, that this girl was likely no more than 12 or 13 years of age.  I made mention that the girl in the story was actually getting ready to graduate college.  My friend, a woman with years of experience as a clinical psychologist, whose expertise I had personally witnessed a number of times over the years, shook her head and told me that she would not be able to convince me by simply talking about it.  She said I should read the book myself, but do so with the eyes of somebody whose job it had been for many years to try and protect children.  As someone who has seen over and over the signs of abuse, and the damages of abuse.   Because there are always warning signs.  I know that.  How many times have I heard people horrified in saying “I can’t believe I didn’t see that”  “How couldn’t I have known?”  Or even worse, “I knew something wasn’t right but I didn’t want to believe they were capable of doing something like that.”

I’ll try and summarize my friend’s words at this point as best I can.

“Sexual predators are cons.  They almost always have a cover.  It’s that cover which allows them access.  50 Shades of Grey is a con.  It now has access to millions of readers.  It is a story about abuse from beginning to end.  And it’s not just the abuse of a man and a woman – it’s the abuse of a man and a girl.

When you read it, look for the signs.  They are all there.

The female character has no sexual experience.  None.  She is given the age of 21, but that age is itself a cover.  Her true emotional age is much-much younger.  She has never even masturbated.  She has never even experienced an orgasm.  That alone is one of the greatest attractions to the pedophile.  That is the psychology of that kind of act.  You get off on taking purity.

But move from the fact the girl has no sexual experience whatsoever.  Now pay attention to her narrative dialogue.  Really listen to how she talks.  Again, she’s not talking like a young woman, she’s talking like a girl.  She talks about cartwheels, and skipping, over and over again it is the language and the imagery of a girl.

After that this girl has her innocence taken from her.  The abuser, the older man, makes her think its her choice.  Again, you and I both know that is one of the primary tools of the pedophile.  They create an environment where the child feels it’s their idea.  It’s what they want. But what happens after that innocence is taken away?  Then the abuser becomes more openly abusive. Controlling.  In this story he tells the little girl how to speak.  What to wear.  What to eat.  He is Daddy and she is daughter.  When you read it read it like a mother who is also a woman who is experienced with the real life tragedy of abuse.

And there is many more themes about that abuse in this book.  There is spanking and the use of Baby oil.  Why baby oil?  Think about it.  The girl wears pigtails.  She complains that he is treating her like a child.  He says she acts like a child.  There is even a scene where the abuser creates a situation to take her innocence from her again.  He rips out her tampon and engages in forceful sex yet again.  Her hymen is ripped, and the bloody remnants of it are again symbolized in an act of pedophile rape.”

She went on to say there are women now defending the book, and she understands that, but it concerns her.  A great deal, because she is absolutely convinced the book is purposely advocating the raping of a child and attempting to normalize that atrocity.

So, I left that conversation thinking maybe my friend was exaggerating.  I had a hard time believing something so popular could actually have such a sinister and revolting theme, and while I respected her expertise and experience, thought this time she had to be seeing something that just wasn’t there.

I got the book, I sat down, and I read it.

The first thing that struck me was how poor the writing was.  It wasn’t just bad.  It was horrible.  But horrible writing is no crime, (thank goodness or I would have been put away a long time ago) and it doesn’t make the content of the story evil.  But in my reading of it, just like my friend said, the theme of child abuse, of pedophilia, was right there in plain sight.  I remember being told a long time ago that sometimes the best way to hide something is in plain sight.  That is what 50 Shades of Grey is really doing.

The main character had no sexual experience.  None.  She was an innocent.  She was a kid who had just had her first drink of alcohol.  No way that was an accident by the author.  That author had to have purposely made her, despite her given age of 21, by any other measure, a little girl.  At that point, it struck me as odd.  In my business, we call that a warning signal. A sign we may have a problem.

From there, just like my friend had warned, it got worse.  Much worse.  And she was right, her telling me about it did not have the impact of me reading it myself with eyes open.  She had given me the signs to look for, and as I turned the pages, those signs confirmed it over and over again.

The narration, which is the voice of the girl talking to the reader, was the voice of a little girl.  It’s unmistakable.  There is very little emotional maturity and absolutely no sexual maturity.  She is seduced by this man in the very same way a pedophile seduces a child.  The male character is Gerry Sandusky.  He makes a show of his money, his power, the things he can buy for her, but while this is going on, we are reading the thoughts of a child.  We are reading the seduction of a little girl by a pedophile.  She is almost completely powerless.  She is naïve even for a teenager, and certainly much much more naïve than a college student.  She is incapable of even making the most simple of every day decisions and must be told what to do by her abuser, who in turn though spends a lot of time and effort convincing this child this is really what she wants.  I’ve seen this before.  Too often.  Too many times.  And it always leaves me sickened.

We are reading child pornography.  Remove the false age of the girl, which has no basis in reality, and what we are actually reading is the abuse of a little girl.

The main character is described in pigtails, given words like “Holy Cow”  “down there”, “jeez”  “double crap” she can’t operate a computer (but is supposedly a college graduate), describes skipping and doing cartwheels, repeatedly says she is made to feel like a child, has her imaginary friend (inner goddess) feels shame, is spanked and slathered in BABY OIL, told what to say, what to eat, what to do, until finally and sadly so predictably, is physically beaten.  (But she returns to him soon after, which is again, a very common theme of abuse, including pedophilia)

And beyond all of this evidence there is the fact that the male character is himself a product of sexual abuse at the hands of a pedophile.  The girl whose thoughts we listen in on as she is being abused, recognizes this aspect of the male abuser, but apparently, is too naïve or unwilling to realize she has continued this cycle of abuse herself. (Which again reinforces the idea that she is actually herself just a child)  There is no way the author did this by accident.  She puts out the theme of pedophilia openly, therefore hiding it in plain sight.

People who have had to deal with the real world of sexual abuse of children will understand this perhaps more easily than others.  How the pedophile is so often themselves victims of earlier abuse.  They enter society, they become fathers or mothers, but so often they too become abusive.  They seek out dominance, control, and the taking of innocence just as it was taken from them.  Those who were once abused, become the abuser.  It is the sad sick and tragic cycle of pedophilia.

With 50 Shades of Grey this abnormal condition is trying to be normalized.  Thanks to the insight of my friend, and my own experience,  I know it for what it truly is – a story of the sexual abuse of child, wrapped in the cliché cover story of a mysterious and troubled wealthy man.  That is another thing my clinical psychologist friend pointed out later.  Take away the aspect of money, and the character of the abuser becomes much less attractive and therefore it would have been much more difficult to pull of the deception.  Are women actually that shallow?  Yes, we can be.

But women, the vast majority of us, are not people who knowingly condone the sexual abuse of children.  We do not condone in any way, the horror that is pedophilia.

Sadly though, that is exactly what is happening with the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey.  It’s a pedophilia con.

It is one of the most horrible and sickening acts against the most powerless of our society, hiding in plain sight.

Maybe my friend put it best when we talked all of this over.  50 Shades of Grey didn’t excite her.  She didn’t find it interesting, sexy, or romantic.

50 Shades of Grey made her weep.  It made her sick.  It made her think of the abuses of all of those kids by a demented, warped monster like Jerry Sandusky, who, just like the pedophilia of 50 Shades of Grey, was hiding in plain sight.

Homosexual boys once castrated in Holland

Fifty years ago my brother, Mother and me helped a boy who had been castrated under spurious circumstances. For fifty years we tried to draw attention of the press for Henk Heithuis tragic case. But noone responded until beginning this year prize winning reporter Joep Dohmen researched the case and wrote a feature in his NRC newspaper. Also on the 17th of March 2012 the Dutch TV program ‘Nieuwsuur’ devoted time to the abuse. So did news programs in Germany and Russia.

Mexico doesn’t play ball with USA

http://www.examiner.com/article/mexico-is-now-the-world-s-no-1-distributor-of-child-pornography

Last week, Mexican Senator Gabriela Cuevas addressed a conference on child exploitation, “Combatting Child and Adolescent Pornography,” and announced that at least 85,000 Mexican children have been forced into child pornography.

Mexico has recently become the world’s largest distributor of child pornography, according to Mexican officials.

Jacobo Bello, coordinator for the federal police’s electronic crimes unit, also attended the conference and provided a very sobering fact…

While there were roughly 11,000 documented cases of child pornography in Mexico, during 2012, a mere 16 individuals were actually arrested in those cases.

Why so few arrests?

-Mexico’s current laws do not require internet service providers to hand over information to law enforcement on users who regularly distribute child pornographic images, making investigations very difficult.

There are also more than 1,300 Mexican websites devoted to the distribution of child pornography, according to La Jornada.

-Since the drug cartels branched out into the human smuggling business, thousands of young girls have disappeared throughout Mexico. Most of them are forced into prostitution in both Mexico as well as the United States, but many have undoubtedly also been used in the growing child pornography business.

In Sight Crime reported:

Mexican criminal organizations are known to be involved in human trafficking and have been linked to underage prostitution. With an estimated 800,000 adults and 20,000 children trafficked for sexual exploitation each year in the country, it is feasible that some trafficked children become part of Mexico’s large child pornography industry.

Another item which plays a part in this sickening trade, and rarely reported upon, is Mexico’s cultural attitude toward young girls.

You see, the age of sexual consent throughout the majority of Mexico is 12 years of age.

Article 261 of Mexico’s Federal Criminal Code states:

Whoever, without the purpose of reaching copulation, performs a sexual act on a person under 12 or on a person that has no capacity of understanding the meaning of the act or that for any reason cannot resist, or demands that the act is performed, will be punished with a term of 2 to 5 years in prison.

In addition to Mexico City, the age of consent is 12 in the following Mexican states:

-Aquascalientes

-Baja California Sur

-Campeche

-Chiapas

-Coahuila

-Guanajuato

-Guerrero

-Hidalgo

-Jalisco

-Michoacan

-Morelos

-Oaxaca

-Puebla

-Queretaro

-Qunitana Roo

-San Louis Potosi

-Sinaloa

-Sonora

-Tabasco

-Tamaulipas

The age of consent is 15 in Mexico state, 13 in Yucatan and Zacatecas, the age of consent is actually listed as “puberty” in Nayarit and 14 in the seven remaining Mexican states.

Until Mexican laws are drastically changed and then enforced, that nation’s children will continue to be exploited in the most sickening manner.

Comment: Who overruns whom? As long as Anglos think fertile females should be treated as toddlers, it isn’t surprising they lose the demographic war.

One Brave Mother’s Fight to Abolish the Sex Offender Registry

http://theantifeminist.com/one-brave-mothers-fight-to-abolish-the-sex-offender-registry/

I asked recently why there isn’t more Barbara Hewsons in this world, women with the integrity to speak out against the injustices of the Sexual Trade Union that nearly all women benefit from. I’m often told by female worshipping ‘hebephiles’ that there are actually millions of women just itching to campaign for their husbands and boyfriends to be allowed to choose nubile teenage girls over them. Where all these women are and why they appear to be silent, despite the much lower risks they face in speaking out, is a mystery. The only women who do raise their voices appear to be a handful of American mothers whose teenage sons have been caught up in the USA’s particularly insane sex offender laws. The following woman is one such mother, but her courage cannot be denied. Whilst so-called men’s human rights activists might occasionally point out the particular absurdity of putting 14 year old boys on a register supposedly designed to protect children, they refuse to speak out against the sex offender registry in general – the modern feminist equivalent of the Nazi Pink Triangle, happy to throw men shamed for life under feminist anti-male sex laws to the wolves, in order to avoid any sex hysteria ‘heat’ being directed at themselves, and also to avoid missing the opportunity to take a slice of the trillion dollar child abuse industry. However, this brave mother, whose 17 year old son was placed on the register after sleeping with a pre-teen girl at a party, puts MHRAs to shame by campaigning for the sex offenders register to be abolished altogether.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/my-son-sex-offender-one-mothers-mission-fight-law-n98876

How Nigerian police also detained women and children as weapon of war

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/06/how-nigerian-police-also-detained-women-and-children-as-weapon-of-war

Before Boko Haram started routinely kidnapping girls in northern Nigeria, more than 100 relatives of militants were held by authorities. Their leader vowed to retaliate

Elizabeth Pearson and Jacob Zenn

theguardian.com, Tuesday 6 May 2014 14.05 BST

Demonstrators opposite the Nigerian high commission in London calling for the government to step up efforts to rescue the schoolgirls.
Demonstrators opposite the Nigerian high commission in London call for the government to step up efforts to rescue the missing schoolgirls. Photograph: Ruth Whitworth/Demotix/Corbis

The gunmen seized Hajja while she was picking corn in a field near her home in a small village in north-eastern Nigeria in July 2013. The 19-year-old had no choice but to follow her captors, insurgents with the Islamist group Boko Haram. It was the beginning of a three-month ordeal in which she was forced to convert to Islam, to cook, clean, and march.

In the worst moments she was beaten and threatened with execution. She was also made to lure soldiers into positions where they could be targeted, and watch as her Boko Haram abductors attacked them.

We know what happened to Hajja only because she managed to escape. But we also know that her experience is not unique. The kidnapping of more than 270 girls from Chibok three weeks ago has captured the world’s attention, but Boko Haram, whose name means “western education is sinful”, has been systematically taking women from schools or villages across north-eastern Nigeria since May last year.

The town of Konduga in Borno State was all but razed to the ground in an attack in February – after which insurgents left with 20 girls. Two weeks later, at the Federal government college in Buni Yade in Yobe state, Boko Haram fighters murdered dozens of male students in their beds and captured at least 16 girls. More than a dozen young women are missing from Gwoza, where Hajja was taken, and families from across the region say they have lost their daughters.

Boko Haram’s move towards using the kidnapping of women as a tactic appears to have come hand-in-hand with a similar strategy deployed by the Nigerian authorities. From December 2011, the Nigerian police began to detain the wives and children of militants leaders – possibly to put pressure on the group, possibly to bring about negotiations.

Whatever the reasons, from 2011 to 2012 more than 100 Boko Haram family members were arrested, with no evidence to suggest they had any part in Boko Haram’s crimes. Among them were relatives of Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau.

A grab made on May 5, 2014 from a video by Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau
Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau in a video released by the group. Photograph: Ho/AFP/Getty Images

These detentions became a source of grievance for Shekau, and were repeatedly mentioned in a series of video messages in 2012. One Shekau film threatens: “Since you are now holding our women, just wait and see what will happen to your own women… to your own wives according to sharia law.”

In 2013 the kidnappings began. In May of that year a film released by Boko Haram shows the leader alongside a split-screen image of a group of captured women and children, silently huddled together. Shekau says, “We kidnapped some women and children… including teenage girls”. This was payback, he added. In another video message he promised to make female hostages his servants if certain conditions, including the release from prison of Boko Haram members and their wives, were not met. A tit-for-tat cycle of arrests and abductions was established, with Shekau explicitly threatening the kidnap of more girls.

Video messaging is a key tool in Boko Haram’s propaganda war and the medium chosen by Shekau to claim responsibility for the abduction of the Chibok girls, announcing that “God instructed me to sell them, they are his properties and I will carry out his instructions”. This message echoes a film released by Boko Haram in March, in which he talked of kidnapped girls as the “spoils of war”. At the same time, local sources report that Boko Haram told the Chibok schoolgirls they were “infidels” for attending schools where western education, including English, is taught. They were warned they would have to pay jizyah, a form of tax from non-Muslims, or be raped as compensation. Just weeks after these threats, the girls were taken.

The scale of this kidnapping, with some reports that as many as 300 girls were taken, makes it unlike anything seen so far in northern Nigeria, or anywhere else. It has woken up the world to what is happening in the region, with pledges of help from the US and UK. But still the girls are missing and families have little faith in the Nigerian military, or the government, to find them.

Nigeria's president Goodluck Jonathan on Monday 5 May.
Nigeria’s president Goodluck Jonathan on Monday 5 May. Photograph: Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters

On Sunday, in his first comments on the kidnapping, president Goodluck Jonathan said the government was doing all it could, but admitted the military did not know where the girls are. A leader of the widespread protest movement to bring back the girls has reportedly been arrested. All this has done little to reassure the community of Chibok, whose elders have publicly expressed a lack of confidence in the efforts taken so far. Others across Nigeria are critical too.

Near Chibok, a rescue becomes increasingly difficult as the girls are thought to have been separated and taken to several different locations. Parents have mounted their own search efforts in the Sambisa forest, without success. Boko Haram militants know the area better than both the military and locals.

Time is not on the Chibok families’ side. Nor is it on the side of the government. With more than 1,500 deaths so far this year, 2014 is the most violent yet in Boko Haram’s insurgency. The country is preparing for presidential elections in 2015, and there are no signs that the insurgents will be “crushed” as President Jonathan has promised, by then. Worse, the government strategy of pressuring Boko Haram through arresting family members has backfired.

Elizabeth Pearson is a freelance radio journalist who has recently completed an MA in International Conflict Studies at King’s College London. Jacob Zenn is an analyst of African and Eurasian Affairs for the Jamestown Foundation in Washington DC