‘GENOCIDE’ BOOK DROPPED FROM READING LIST IN CANADA

Today’s Zaman
May 19 2008
Turkey

A petition campaign launched by Turks living in Canada against a
recent decision in Toronto to include in school curricula the study
of an alleged genocide of Armenians in the final years of the Ottoman
Empire has eventually yielded a result, with the book being pulled from
the recommended reading list of a new Toronto public school course.

Some 11,000 petitions have been collected in the online petition
campaign. In January, the Unity Group, consisting of several Turkish
NGOs in Canada, said that the course would put at risk the lives
of Turkish and Muslim students in high schools. The group called on
authorities to reverse the decision to include the course, created
by one of the largest school boards in Canada, the Toronto District
School Board, in the 2008-2009 curriculum.

Barbara Coloroso’s "Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide"
was originally part of a resource list for the grade 11 history course,
"Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity," set to launch across the
Toronto District School Board district this fall. The book examines
the Holocaust, which exterminated 6 million Jews in World War II;
the Rwandan slaughter of nearly 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus
in 1994; and the killings of Anatolian Armenians at the beginning of
the last century.

"But a committee struck to review the course decided in late April
to remove the book because ‘a concern was raised regarding [its]
appropriateness. … The Committee determined this was far from a
scrupulous text and should not be on a History course although it
might be included in a course on the social psychology of genocide
because of her posited thesis that genocide is merely the extreme
extension of bullying,’ according to board documents," The Globe and
Mail, an English-language Canadian daily, reported on Friday.