It sounds odd/interesting to me and given that the rest of the article is well written, this puzzles me quite a bit. I normally associate such uses of 'make' with native speakers of Arabic, which obviously doesn't apply.
* "Video games could make violence on the whole seem more 'okay.'"
* "Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has promised to make violence on the basis of sexual orientation a priority for her office."
The only google result that seems similar to the original article is from asianoutlook.com:
"You can make violence on weeds, ideas, and terror, but not war."
In that sense, it's closer to the phrase "make war on", which is much more common. Without knowing any asian languages, I would assume that they use war and violence somewhat interchangeably, which would explain the odd phrasing.