Rage against the machine: Alexandre’s war against kids and the police

Honourable Ashinzwuwera Dumas Alexandre is a man misunderstood. All he wanted to do was mete out some good old fashioned discipline to his 12-year old brother for some unspecified transgression. We can only assume that things went out of hand during this routine disciplining. Maybe little brother talked back [how dare he!] or maybe he even resisted [the insolence of young people these days!]. There was no reporting on what exactly happened chez Alexandre. What was reported was that the Honourable MP beat his brother into a coma. Considering that some of these journalists went on to report that the kid was discharged from the hospital within the day and was good for school the next day, the MP must have felt hard done by the use of the prejudicial word ‘coma’ instead of the harmless sounding ‘unconscious’. A bit of a knock-out really. Having been exposed by the press as a man with serious rage issues was the least of Ashinzwuwera’s travails. His very own colleagues [the traitors!] voted to have his constitutionally given immunity lifted and now the police were all over him with their investigations. Why could they not see that kid bro deserved what he got and that it wasn’t a big deal anyway? It’s not like he’d killed the kid. At this point, the good MP decided that he would not stand around and take this humiliation lying down. On the 30th day of March, Honourable Ashinzwuwera put his foot down and took on the meddling policemen mano a mano. Of course it was a battle foolishly joined. Last week the Parliament kicked him out for ‘improper conduct’, which had a nice ring of understatement about it citing his Mike Tyson moment with his younger brother as well as his attempts at Jet Li with the policemen. In a phone conversation with local reporters the MP was quoted as saying, “I heard I was given hours to leave the chambers. So I have to go there and clarify more about it”. That last sentence sounded like an angry man with an angry mission, let’s hope that our lawmakers escaped the wrath of their very own colleague. He may be misunderstood but let’s just say that he has some anger and impulse control issues as well. This last weekend began with a bang and not in the happy way. Norway came face to face with domestic terrorism in the form of Mr. Anders Behring Breivik and his extreme rightwing crusade against Islam and immigration. Ninety-Three Norwegians lost their lives when a bomb exploded in front of the government houses in Oslo killing seven before Breivik went on a shooting rampage at a labour party youth camp island killing 85. The idea of killing unsuspecting Norwegians for the sake of pursuing a war against Islam has a deadly sense of the farce about it. Extreme rightwing nationalism struck over the weekend and the terrorist wasn’t some guy from the Middle East with a death wish pursuing some utopian global caliphate or punishing the infidels. He was a blonde blue-eyed man who was killing his own compatriots in the name of a racially pure Norway. What’s worse is that Breivik is currently using his upcoming trial as a platform for his extreme ideas. It would appear that when it comes to terrorism, the cause doesn’t matter. It’s simply an act to create fear and a desperate attempt by the extremists to gain attention. The best we can do, whether in Norway or in Rwanda with the grenade terrorist is to refuse to be scared and refuse to be drawn into a discussion on the politics of hate. okabatende@gmail.com