Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Today, we finished watching The biography of Elie Wiesel. Students handed in their visual questions and their critique rubric of the documentary.
From here, we discussed what it means to discriminate (both the positive and negative definitions from the dictionary).
From this discussion, students were reminded that, when writing, it is important to make sure they define the key concepts or words in the question so that the reader isn't using their own interpretation but must use theirs.
We then went on to discuss the meaning of "Genocide" (see below)
Genocide' coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944
Greek word 'genos' (race)
Latin word 'cide' (killing).
United Nations in 1948 : any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, including:
(a) killing members of the group
(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
(d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
(e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
While I provided some examples, they were extremely general and need to be developed and "proven". The main message was that they need to understand that genocide (by definition) does occur everywhere and can occur at any time if people are not on guard for it.