GayandRight

My name is Fred and I am a gay conservative living in Ottawa. This blog supports limited government, the right of the State of Israel to live in peace and security, and tries to expose the threat to us all from cultural relativism, post-modernism, and radical Islam. I am also the founder of the Free Thinking Film Society in Ottawa (www.freethinkingfilms.com)

Friday, June 02, 2006

How's this for a school assignment?

This is a grade 8 geography assignment in Toronto.
A Toronto area teacher was "shocked and disturbed" to discover a geography assignment she handed out to her students on Monday contained messages she says are anti-Semitic.

The material includes a fictitious story that depicts Jews persecuting Christians, including the burning of a church. It is one of seven vignettes, and the only one that identifies an oppressor by ethnicity or religion.

"The implication that Jews are burning a church, given our own past, is really offensive," said Janis Rosen, who teaches Grade 8 geography at Donview Middle School in York Mills. "It just hit me in the stomach."

The material -- pulled from another Toronto area school board curriculum in 2002, according to the Canadian Jewish Congress -- comes from a group assignment in "Grade 8 Geography Resources" (2000), a binder that Ontario teachers photocopy looseleaf lessons from.

In a chapter about migration, students are asked to read the ficticious vignettes and identify push factors like war, death threats and natural disasters, before sending refugees to a new country.

In one such vignette, Jamal and his Christian family are forced to leave their hypothetical country, "Country F," after being tyrannized by Jews.

"Refugees from Jewish neighbourhoods slowly took over the apartment buildings," it reads."Great anger" grows between Christians and Jews, and all but one Christian family -- the speaker's -- are forced to leave.

"When someone burned the church down it seemed like a good time to move," it goes on. "My father cannot find a job because the Jewish people will not hire him. We have trouble even buying food because the shop keepers are afraid to sell to us. Gangs of youth will break their windows and wreck their stores if they did."

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mascot politics beget this kind of banal insidious bigotry. It is indeed fortunate for our post-modern generation that we have evolved from the level of our forebears who fell victim to the syndrome Hannah Arendt made famous. Otherwise, we might think that the same blight that befell us in 1939 is reoccurring.

12:15 PM  
Blogger trustonlymulder said...

Your article almost brought tears to my eyes. I went to Donview (Junior High back then). This is NOT the Georgraphy Mr. Waisglass or Mr. Jardine taught us.

I am sickened to think my old stomping grounds have digressed to this point.

Just another reason I beg my mom and sisters to sell the old house and get out of town.

12:29 AM  

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