Going against the Obama administration, “a U.S. congressional committee approved a resolution condemning the 1915 slaughter of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide,” The Wall Street Journal reports. Turkey’s foreign minister warned that such a vote would “damage ties with the Obama administration and set back reconciliation efforts between Turkey and Armenia,” The New York Times writes, and Turkey quickly recalled its ambassador to Washington. As stated in The New York Times article, “historians say that as many as 1.5 million Armenians died amid the chaos and unrest surrounding World War I and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey denies, however, that this was a planned genocide, and mounted a vigorous lobbying campaign against the resolution.” Though President Obama made a campaign pledge in January 2008 that “ ‘as president I will recognize the Armenian Genocide,’ ” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman before the vote and “ ‘indicated that further congressional action could impede progress on normalization of relations’ between Turkey and Armenia.” According to The New York Times, “the Obama administration had urged the committee to forgo a vote altogether,” for, as The BBC states, the Obama administration was well aware that “the non-binding resolution would harm talks between Turkey and Armenia,” and, as The Wall Street Journal writes, it could also “damage U.S. relations with Turkey, a vital ally in the Middle East and Central Asia.” The resolution was approved on a 23-22 vote.
Genocide
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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March 5, 2010
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March 3, 2010
German film director Veit Harlan wrote and directed “Jew Süss,” a 1940 box office success in Nazi Germany that, according to a New York Times article by Larry Rohter, is “perhaps the most notoriously anti-Semitic movie ever made.” New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis writes that the film, which opens in 1733, “tells the story of a Jewish money lender from the ghetto, Joseph Süss Oppenheimer (Ferdinand Marian), who rises to power in Wurttemberg (in what is southwestern Germany), where he gains control of the court, taxes the population, rapes a young married woman (who then drowns herself) and is finally executed.” Rohter notes that the film was “so effective that it was made required viewing for all members of the SS,” and to this day its “commercial exhibition or sale as a DVD is still prohibited in Germany and several other European countries.” German film director Felix Moeller has released a documentary titled “Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss.” According to Dargis, the film is “an exploration of the filmmaker, his career under National Socialism and the children and other relatives who bear his name and, with varying difficulty, his legacy.”
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February 26, 2010
Aki Ra is a former child soldier. When he was just a toddler, he was forced to serve in Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. Gimundo reports that Ra was taught to plant deadly land mines at the age of five, and continued doing so until Cambodia was liberated from the Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese army when he was a teenager. In 2006, Ra told the Common Language Project, “ ‘I remember we would have bags on our backs, we could carry sometimes 50, sometimes 100 mines, and we would throw them behind us. . . . Sometimes the soldiers were so close we couldn’t even bury the mines, we would just put leaves on top and keep going, if we were too slow we would, you know, be shot.’ ” After Cambodia was liberated, Gimundo writes that “thousands of active landmines still littered the ground, killing and maiming hundreds of people every year.” Ra, regretting his actions under the Khmer Rouge, has vowed to spend the rest of his life giving back to Cambodia. He remembers where he buried many of the landmines, and, “armed only with a metal detector, a small pocketknife, and several other small tools,” has spent over 20 years disarming thousands of active landmines by hand.
