QUILLBLOG

Three Wishes, many voices

Globe and Mail columnist Rick Salutin is the latest to comment on the controversy over Deborah Ellis’s Three Wishes, the children’s non-fiction book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has been barred either partially or completely by some Ontario school boards after a complaint about the book’s age appropriateness from a Jewish group. Salutin, who In Other Media noticed at Monday’s Groundwood Books news conference, says the kids are inundated with stories and images of war, so they can handle it. “They are war babies — in the sense that they were barely coming to awareness on 9/11. Maybe their parents turned the sound down and tried to shield them from those collapsing towers, but they saw the visuals, endlessly. They are more war babies than I was — born in 1942 but not subjected to the media barrage of war images and news they saw, while they were learning to walk and talk. I know a seven-year-old who often says, Will I still be alive when the war in Iraq ends? He can’t recall it not being there.”

Related links:
Click here for Salutin’s article
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