The New York Times reports that on Friday, April 23, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law “the nation’s toughest bill on illegal immigration,” formally titled the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.” The law “would make the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and give the police broad power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally.” Before this law, CNN explains, “officers could check someone’s immigration status only if that person was suspected in another crime.” Governor Brewer emphasized in her statement that “ ‘my signature today represents my steadfast support for enforcing the law—both AGAINST illegal immigration AND against racial profiling. . . . I will NOT tolerate racial discrimination or racial profiling in Arizona.’ ” Opponents are not convinced. Alessandra Soler Meetze, director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Arizona, is quoted by the New York Daily News as saying that “ ‘this is a mandate to harass anyone who looks or sounds foreign.’ ” And though it is rare for presidents to “weigh in” on state legislation, Obama responded to the Arizona law, stating that it “threatened ‘to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and our communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe,’ ” the New York Times writes.
Stereotyping
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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April 29, 2010
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March 15, 2010
Homosexuality is illegal in Uganda. If the proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009 gets passed, some Ugandan homosexuals could receive the death penalty. ABC News reports that “the bill creates a new category of crime called ‘Aggravated Homosexuality,’ which calls for death by hanging for gays or lesbians who have sex with anyone under 18 and for so-called ‘serial offenders.’ ” Additionally, the bill “calls for seven years in prison for ‘attempt to commit homosexuality,’ five years for landlords who knowingly house gays, three years for anyone, including parents, who fail to hand gay children over to the police within 24 hours and the extradition of gay Ugandans living abroad.” The bill has incited international outrage, with some countries threatening to withdraw aid from Uganda if the bill is passed into law. Within Uganda, activists reject the bill, saying it would force health and social workers to spy on and report their clients, Reuters Africa reports. Additionally, as AIDS activist Rtd Maj Rubaramira Ruranga told The Independent, “ ‘We’ll lose what we’ve achieved in the AIDS fight. . . . Gay infected patients will fear to go for treatment since the law requires the doctors to report the patient within 24 hours.’ ” According to The Monitor, a Ugandan newspaper, activists petitioning against the bill said it “ ‘goes against the Ugandan Constitution which promises freedom from discrimination on the grounds of sex, race, colour, ethnic origin, tribe, creed, birth or religion, social or economic standing, political opinion or disability. . . . We need laws to protect people, not ones that will humiliate, ridicule, prosecute and kill them en masse.’ ” The bill’s sponsor, David Bahati, defended the bill by saying that “in Uganda, 95 percent of our population does not support homosexuality.” As one gay Ugandan told Times Online, “ ‘they want to legislate us out of existence.’ ”
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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.”
