A Kansas hate group targeting gays and Jews picketed in the San Francisco Bay Area last week. “The community decided not to give this group publicity, but young people at Lowell High School did not want to remain silent,” reads the opening text at the beginning of a short video on the high school students’ response. The clip shows a small number of picketers from the hate group on one side, and a mass of students laughing and dancing, holding signs of tolerance, on the other. Lowell High School Principal Andrew Ishibashi said, “I met with students . . . and our main message was to turn something hateful, or something negative, into a positive. And we did that with love and acceptance.” As Rabbi Sydney Mintz said “I can’t even feel the hate because there’s so much love going on behind me.” The film is from the group Not In Our Town and is part of their Not In Our School project—“a peer-to-peer learning program that uses film and storytelling to encourage safety and inclusion.”
Membership in Society
Facing Today helps educators connect the study of history to issues in our world today. We select current websites, articles, films and blogs that reflect universal themes, such as identity, membership and participation, represented in our scope and sequence. Each media resource is linked to related Facing History materials, including study guides, videos and lessons.
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February 10, 2010
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February 10, 2010
A Kansas hate group targeting gays and Jews picketed in the San Francisco Bay Area last week. “The community decided not to give this group publicity, but young people at Lowell High School did not want to remain silent,” reads the opening text at the beginning of a short video on the high school students’ response. The clip shows a small number of picketers from the hate group on one side, and a mass of students laughing and dancing, holding signs of tolerance, on the other. Lowell High School Principal Andrew Ishibashi said, “I met with students . . . and our main message was to turn something hateful, or something negative, into a positive. And we did that with love and acceptance.” As Rabbi Sydney Mintz said “I can’t even feel the hate because there’s so much love going on behind me.” The film is from the group Not In Our Town and is part of their Not In Our School project—“a peer-to-peer learning program that uses film and storytelling to encourage safety and inclusion.”
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February 3, 2010
Just over two months ago, Switzerland banned the building of new minarets. “A poster was widely cited as having galvanized votes for the Swiss measure but was also blamed for exacerbating hostility toward immigrants and instigating a media and legal circus,” Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times reports. The poster depicted minarets rising like missiles from a Swiss flag with a woman wearing a niqab glaring next to it, and the word “stop” written below. Kimmelman states “the obvious message: Minarets lead to Sharia law.” Alexander Segert, who designed the Swiss minaret poster, told Kimmelman “ ‘if what we do stirs up controversy, then we’ve already won the election.’ ” Political scientist Marc Bühlmann agreed, explaining that “ ‘the aim in making the posters is to be as racist as possible, so then when critics complain, the populists can say elites don’t want ordinary people to know the truth. And the media fall for it every time.’ ” Designers like Segert are successful because, as Segert put it, “ ‘we know how to reduce information to the lowest level, so people respond without thinking.’ ”
