Jason Russell Breakdown

Jason Russell Breakdown, Celebrities such as Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Cory Monteith, Kim Kardashian and Kristen Bell played a pivotal role in galvanizing online support for Kony 2012, the viral video created by Jason Russell and his Invisible Children foundation aiming to stop the abuse and killing of children at the hands of Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony.

But after the director ended up hospitalized Friday after an apparent freakout, many of those same folks have gone radio silent…except for a few.

So what did these celebs have to say?

“Thank you @BenKeesey your tireless eloquence never ceases to amaze me,” tweeted actress Kristen Bell, linking to a video Invisible Children posted updating people on Jason’s condition under the “global media spotlight.”

The Forgetting Sarah Marshall star, who’s been a steadfast Kony 2012 supporter ever since the video went live, further defended Russell.

Bell replied to one follower with a link to an Atlantic article about what people can learn from the helmer’s very public breakdown: “@Bpd116 ur misinformed & r judging based on salacious headlines. Be Human. Drop the stones.”

Jason Russell Kony 2012

Jason Russell Kony 2012, Hosting more than 100 students, the Cross-Cultural Leadership Center teamed up with Invisible Children to screen the viral “Kony 2012” video before spring break.

The film is a way for Invisible Children to raise awareness of the continuing 26-year conflict in Africa, said Hannah Fordham, Invisible Children’s Northern California team leader. It is also a way to make Joseph Kony a household name in hopes that he will be captured by the end of 2012.

Kony kidnapped more than 30,000 children into the Lord’s Resistance Army and forced them into conflict, Fordham said. Boys became soldiers and girls became sex slaves.

No other Invisible Children video has gone viral the way “Kony 2012” has, she said. In the past, screenings were the main way to raise awareness. Now, screenings help give people tangible ways of getting involved and put a face to the cause.

Each traveling Invisible Children team consists of five roadies, or full-time regional representative volunteers, Fordham said. Volunteers from Northern Uganda travel with each group to share their accounts of the conflict.

The face of the cause for the group that traveled to Chico was a Northern Ugandan woman by the name of Patricia Akello. She told her stories of conflict in Africa, having her home burned, her loved ones abducted and seeing fear every day.

“There are many close people to me who were abducted and who died in this conflict,” Akello said. “There were many, not just one or two or three. Many.”

Akello came to the U.S. with Invisible Children a month ago, after earning her college degree in Uganda with a scholarship from Invisible Children, she said. Only 1 percent of women in Uganda receive a university education.

The LRA moved to the Congo and Central Africa in 2006, Akello said. Ugandans experienced living without fear for the first time. Before that, people slept in the jungle to stay safe, and if the LRA found children with their family, they would be forced to kill their parents.

Joseph Kony 2012

Joseph Kony 2012, The 30-minute video, Kony2012, was produced by three American videographers campaigning for greater efforts to capture Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

But Kony and his diminishing troops, many of them kidnapped child soldiers, fled northern Uganda six years ago and are now spread across the jungles of neighbouring countries.

“What that video says is totally wrong, and it can cause us more problems than help us,” said Dr Beatrice Mpora, director of Kairos, a community health organisation in Gulu, a town that was once the centre of the rebels’ activities.

“There has not been a single soul from the LRA here since 2006. Now we have peace, people are back in their homes, they are planting their fields, they are starting their businesses. That is what people should help us with.”

Joseph Kony, a former church altarboy, has spread terror through eastern and central Africa for almost three decades, as he has pursued an aimless war that has killed thousands of people and at one point forced hundreds of thousands from their homes.

Invisible Children

Invisible Children, The viral film was created by Invisible Children, a charity that seeks to end the conflict in Uganda and raises awareness about the use of child soldiers and other human rights abuses by Kony and the LRA.

But some activists have raised concerns about the methods used by Invisible Children to raise awareness.

A request for comment from Invisible Children was not immediately returned.

#StopKony has been trending worldwide on Twitter since Tuesday, and as of this writing, the video “Kony2012” has almost two million views on YouTube.

Kony is undeniably brutal, and the World Bank estimates that under his leadership the LRA has abducted and forced around 66,000 children to fight with them during the past two decades. In October, President Obama committed 100 U.S. troops to help the Ugandan army remove Kony.

But in November, a Foreign Affairs article pointedly challenged the tactics used by Invisible Children and other nonprofits working in the region to raise awareness. “Such organizations have manipulated facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony — a brutal man, to be sure — as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil,” the magazine wrote.

One of Invisible Children’s partner organizations, Resolve, responded to the accusation at the time in a blog post, calling it a “serious charge … published with no accompanying substantiation.”

Charity Navigator, a U.S.-based charity evaluator, gives Invisible Children three out of four stars overall, four stars financially, and two stars for accountability and transparency.