Latest update April 25th, 2024 12:59 AM
Mar 26, 2017 Letters
Dear Editor,
I refer to the letter by Mr. Dave Roshundatt, “The Cultural Advisor should not behave like this” (KN, March 16). I applaud the one credible observation he has made, vis a vis my celebration of Phagwah. As I stated in a message on my Facebook profile “Phagwah, as we celebrate it, is the most important and quintessentially Guyanese holiday in my mind. Not only is it a symbol of the perseverance of goodness over malignant will, but the symbolism of the beauty of diverse colours, the consensus on public intimacy and transformation via the smearing of abir and dousing of water constitute a symbolic rehearsal of where we should be heading in our private lives as well. There should be no barriers in celebrating the beauty and power of our diversity and at least once a year we live up to that at a national level.”
With regard to the rest of his letter, Mr. Roshundatt has now joined – not surprisingly – such illustrious figures as Gail Teixeira, Anil Nandlall and the Guyana Times in coming up with spurious and disingenuous challenges to my employment. When I raised the issue on Facebook with regard to the assault on the men at Canal No. 1 via posting a video of their recollection in part of the events, Mr. Roshundatt rushed to claim that he did not see any evidence in the video of their claiming a racist element to the attacks.
Aware of his disingenuousness in previous encounters, I quickly posted the original online account in which that component of the incident was reported upon. After increasingly skewed exchanges with Mr. Roshundatt in which he accused the media and yours truly of seeking to foment racial incitement by simply replicating and commenting upon uncontested first hand victim accounts of their unlawful assault, I challenged him to put his opinions in a medium of record.
As expected, his intellectual dishonesty as displayed on social media also made it into the mainstream via his letter. The key example is when he writes, “I looked at the story as aired on one television newscast, and there were video bites of the men that were assaulted. In those video bites no mention was made by those men of any racial slurs…”
By claiming he did not see it in the video, he ignores the fact that multiple accounts in credible media – both electronic and print – included information about the slurs, information he was immediately made aware of when he first sought to debate me on the issue.
Another example of his dishonesty is that he ignores the fact that, even as I have given credence to the first hand victim account of the incident, I also called in my post for full and due process into investigating the assault. Questioned about his supposed principled position on public officials making claims that are potentially disruptive to social cohesion in light of the PPP’s repeated mantra about ethnic cleansing without providing evidence of same, Mr. Roshundatt retreated at times into silence, at times into deflection into the claim that he doesn’t want to get ‘political’.
The most revealing aspect of his disingenuous behavior is when pressed for an opinion on what burden of evidence he needed beyond direct victim testimony, Mr. Roshundatt blurted out that we should “not condemn an entire village and an entire race” for the actions of a few people. Asked to provide evidence of where such condemnation was made, Mr. Roshundatt reposted my words “This shouldn’t have to be spelt out. No citizen of Guyana should be afraid of entering any community for fear of being attacked on the basis of their race. The people behind this need to be caught, charged, tried and imprisoned.”
That he should see specific condemnation in that statement has to be the result of one of three things. One, I cannot write and so I clearly communicated something other than the principle that every Guyanese citizen should feel free to enter any Guyanese community without fear of a race-based attack. Two, Mr. Roshundatt lacks basic comprehension skills. Or, three, he is so blinded by an insidious and partisan agenda that he ascribes absurd meanings to words that spell out the almost complete opposite of what he sees. In light of his deliberate blindness and evasion with respect to the pronouncements being made by Freedom House, I tend to believe it is the latter.
Ruel Johnson
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