The Ramsey Case vs. Hezbollah and the Israelis
Wolfram Donat
August 18, 2006
For the past two days when I turn on the news, I have been inundated with reports about John Karr’s reputed confession concerning the beating and murder of JonBenet Ramsey. It was on CNN in the morning, both Thursday and Friday. It pre-empted Anderson Cooper. Dateline was scooped. If there was a news program on the air, the anchor was discussing the confession.
What is beginning to surface as the story progresses is that the confession may be suspect. Some of what John Karr says does not match what authorities know about the case and the crime scene. Indeed, if some witnesses and relatives are to be believed, Mr. Karr may not even have been in the state when the crime was committed almost a decade ago.
These are all things that must be investigated, and my hat goes off to the DA in Colorado. The Boulder police detectives caught a lot of flak for their inability to find a suspect during the initial investigation, and it speaks for their professionalism, if not stubbornness, that they have continued to chase leads until they came up with a name – John Karr.
None of this is what bothers me. What bothers me is this:
Remember the Israeli/Hezbollah conflict? Remember the Iraq war? Remember all of the people in the Darfur region of the Sudan?
In other words, remember all of the people around the world dying every day in armed conflicts?
Please don’t get me wrong. The Ramsey killing was horrific. My heart goes out to her father, and I grieve that her mother died without knowing who killed her daughter. I cannot imagine what I would be going through if something like that were to happen to my son. I am also glad that there was a break in the case, and that the media is reporting it. What I do take issue with is that I have seen more coverage of this one case than I have seen of any of the aforementioned conflicts in the past week. Perhaps it is a facet of American media that it concentrates more on the murder of one six-year old beauty queen than on the murder of hundreds of foreigners – men, women and children – who are not beauty queens.
What does that say about us? Are we unable to stomach killing in large doses? America fell in love, it seems, with that little blonde girl, and connected with her in a way it seems unable to connect with the nameless, faceless thousands that die needlessly in other parts of the world. And though I understand it, as a parent, I don’t have to be happy about it.
We need to find a way to put names to the thousands of Sudanese refugees who have lost their mothers and fathers and brothers. We need to put faces to the Iraqi civilians that die in the crossfire in the streets of Baghdad. We need to identify somehow with the Israeli orphans and the Palestinian widows and widowers. Perhaps then those deaths will receive the same amount of press, and we’ll find a way to stop the violence and punish those responsible.
What is beginning to surface as the story progresses is that the confession may be suspect. Some of what John Karr says does not match what authorities know about the case and the crime scene. Indeed, if some witnesses and relatives are to be believed, Mr. Karr may not even have been in the state when the crime was committed almost a decade ago.
These are all things that must be investigated, and my hat goes off to the DA in Colorado. The Boulder police detectives caught a lot of flak for their inability to find a suspect during the initial investigation, and it speaks for their professionalism, if not stubbornness, that they have continued to chase leads until they came up with a name – John Karr.
None of this is what bothers me. What bothers me is this:
Remember the Israeli/Hezbollah conflict? Remember the Iraq war? Remember all of the people in the Darfur region of the Sudan?
In other words, remember all of the people around the world dying every day in armed conflicts?
Please don’t get me wrong. The Ramsey killing was horrific. My heart goes out to her father, and I grieve that her mother died without knowing who killed her daughter. I cannot imagine what I would be going through if something like that were to happen to my son. I am also glad that there was a break in the case, and that the media is reporting it. What I do take issue with is that I have seen more coverage of this one case than I have seen of any of the aforementioned conflicts in the past week. Perhaps it is a facet of American media that it concentrates more on the murder of one six-year old beauty queen than on the murder of hundreds of foreigners – men, women and children – who are not beauty queens.
What does that say about us? Are we unable to stomach killing in large doses? America fell in love, it seems, with that little blonde girl, and connected with her in a way it seems unable to connect with the nameless, faceless thousands that die needlessly in other parts of the world. And though I understand it, as a parent, I don’t have to be happy about it.
We need to find a way to put names to the thousands of Sudanese refugees who have lost their mothers and fathers and brothers. We need to put faces to the Iraqi civilians that die in the crossfire in the streets of Baghdad. We need to identify somehow with the Israeli orphans and the Palestinian widows and widowers. Perhaps then those deaths will receive the same amount of press, and we’ll find a way to stop the violence and punish those responsible.
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