As the Toronto Star reports, the Toronto District School Board has removed a Barbara Coloroso book from its high school curriculum.
Barbara Coloroso’s Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide had been selected as a resource for a new Grade 11 history course about genocide and crimes against humanity, but the book and the course came under review after they were challenged by members of the Canadian Turkish community.
While the board’s review committee decided to remove Coloroso’s book from the curriculum, deeming it “far from a scrupulous text,” the Armenian genocide will still be taught in the course.
The move comes two years after the same school board limited access to Deborah Ellis’s Three Wishes (Groundwood Books), a book about the Israel-Palestine conflict, to students in Grade 7 or older. There’s been no comment or statement on the Extraordinary Evil situation from the book’s publisher, Penguin Canada, which had not returned messages from Q&Q at the time of this post. But Groundwood publisher Patsy Aldana has released an open letter to the board; it appears in full below.
Dear Trustees and staff of the TDSB,
As the publisher of Groundwood Books I am suffering from déjà vu. Once again you are succumbing to pressure and pulling a book. This is the THREE WISHES controversy all over again.
I am also the publisher of a different book on genocide currently listed for your course. In light of this decision I have to wonder for how long. Our book GENOCIDE: a Groundwork Guide by Jane Springer presents a different definition of genocide from Coloroso’s though our book also describes the events in Armenia as genocide. As in the case of THREE WISHES it would seem that Coloroso’s book among others was originally selected by knowledgeable people for a reason. Now all of a sudden it’s “inappropriate.”
What is offensive in your decision is that it reflects what seems to have become the TDSB’s habitual response to pressure – get rid of books that are “problematic.” This is a Grade 11 course – thus obviating the weasel words “age inappropriate” used in the THREE WISHES case. Is Barbara Coloroso’s argument unworthy of being considered, discussed, debated? Bernard Lewis is a noted Islamophobe and yet you seem to have included him in your course. Why not – isn’t the point of education to stimulate critical thinking? Or have you already decided what kids should think about this difficult topic in advance?
As a citizen of Canada, as a resident of Toronto, as a book publisher, as a human being I find the TDSB’s reflexive instinct to censor problematic, contentious, or (in the view of one group or another) incorrect books and their points of view deeply disturbing. Have you learned nothing? Our children need, urgently, to be educated to be critical thinkers capable of drawing their own conclusions based on a range of ideas. TDSB does not seem to embrace this principle, quite the contrary. You are once again doing the children you have been charged with educating a terrible injustice.
I condemn your withdrawal of this book. It is deplorable. It is inexcusable. And I wonder what book will you be afraid to give to our children next?
Patricia Aldana
Groundwood Books
Every word that Patricia Aldana writes is the truth.
Human Rights activist, bibliophile, and yes, Armenian,
Jerry Tutunjian
author and editor
[...] goings on in classrooms. From the Toronto Star (via Quill & Quire): “[Toronto District School] Board removes book on genocide.” Barbara Colorosos [...]
[...] decision to pull Barbara Coloroso’s Extraordinary Evil from a Grade 11 course (see Quillblog past). The Board was bowing to pressure from the local Turkish community over references to the Armenian [...]
How many signatures would it take for the TDSB to deny the Holocaust? Well, it only took about 1200 turkish
signatures to deny the facts of the Armenian Genocide. Apparently someone forgot to tell the TDSB that the Armenian
Genocide is a fact and is also officially ackowledged by the Canadian Government as such. Not to mention all genocide historians
There is no room for denial and why the TDSB caves in to turks who are “uncomfortable” with the truth of thier own past
is beyond imagination.
“Not to mention all genocide historians”
That should read genocide scholars I suppose? Historians, you know, those who actually studied to become historians, don’t “agree” on this topic at all. It’s quite 50/50 actually, with some reknown historians saying that it was not genocide, such as Bernard Lewis.
“How many signatures would it take for the TDSB to deny the Holocaust? Well, it only took about 1200 turkish
signatures to deny the facts of the Armenian Genocide.”
Funny that you would compare the two events with each other. Especially because Armenians were all too happy to kill innocent Jews living in the region, when they were not killing Muslims during and before World War I.
Of course, the two events aren’t even remotely comparable to each other; firstly Ottoman archives show that the Ottomans didn’t order the murder of thousands of Armenians. Instead, they ordered the army to protect the Armenians. Secondly, Jews were innocent scapegoats whereas your happy ancestors started rebelling way before world war I, and thus before the deportations (relocations actually). They killed many innocent Turkish Muslims, raped the women, if they were pregnant cut open the bellies and took the babies out, killed entire groups of wounded and ill Ottoman soldiers during world war I, occupied banks, occupied cities after which they slaughtered the Muslim population (in Van, for instance, they killed approximately 20,000 Muslims), locked Muslims up in Mosques and then proceeded to burn down the building with the Muslims in it, and so on and so further.
Mchael says “especially because Armenians were all too happy to kill innocent Jews living in the region, when they were not killing Muslims during and before World War I.”
This is a typical case of an individual acting like “more Catholic than the Pope”.
This is a new push by the Turkish government, and their denialist cronies to desperately find supposed co-victims to show the world how bad the Armenians were and therefore deserved what they got. It is truly sad that this kind of vicious lies and downright anti-Armenian racism finds a place in any conversation.
How desperate can Michael be to fall for this sort of skulduggery.
One would think that Jewish historians, Jewish historical organizations and, no less, the State of Israel would have issued condemnation for what the Turks have now started alleging a long long time ago. How secretly could have Armenians killed so many Jews that would have evaded the attention of scholars of a nation which has experienced Holocaust.
Moreover, the most ardent defenders of Armenian Genocide are prominent Jews, including Deborah Lipstadt, a powerhouse defender of Jewish rights and issues pertaining Jewish past. I think she would know something about Armenians killing Jews en masse had it happened outside Michael’s overheated figment of imagination.