Hi everyone
Just to say, keep up with the diaries, excellent work!
This week you should have finished your video projects, you might want to reflect on that experience, if you haven't already done so, on the question of objectivity, is it possible to attain or not? How do you expect your videos to be different from those of students in other parts of the world, from those who may be directly influenced by the conflict.
Has your experience of the video editing made you view the news you see every day on TV in a different light? Does it make you wonder what news you do not see? ANy other views or thoughts?
Keep up the good work!
Francesca
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I started this session completely sure that the main topic of the discussion of this week should been the video project. It wasn’t. The two co-facilitators said us that we are going to discuss about the video project maybe in the seventh week. The timeline of 7th of April was only for our teachers and for soliya’s website. So as usual we started with the description of our week just to test the microphone and to break the glace. Aline, one of the facilitators, asked us about our favorite food and three of us said an Italian dish!!! Then Jason asked us about our feedbacks on the video project, just to know if someone had got any kind of problem.
RispondiEliminaSo we recommenced from the last argument of last week, the religion. As usual the starting point was one of the text and in particular the question of Sumyia was “why in the text the author compare Alabamians and Iranians?”. The topics of this long discussion were different. The relationship between religion and politics, the balance of this two powers in the society and if it is right that religion influence the process of political decisions. If the moral values of a person come only from his religion or from the society, the family and so on. The honor killings in some societies, and also the betrayal among men and women. The different punishment that the Islamic right prescribe in these cases. The arranged married, the relationship between this custom and the Islamic society. To finish we discussed about the meaning of love and generally the relationship between a man and a woman and how the society or the religion could influence the way of thinking and also actions.
All this discussion was really very interesting and in this case the positions were far. Really for the first time I saw how different is my way of thinking. And how much society and religion could influence a particular style of life. Even tough these difficulties I understood lots of new information. Thanks soliya!
Giacomo
Hello everybody!
RispondiEliminaAs usual, my session started by making a play which led us to reflect about interesting topics. Our co-facilitators asked us to reflect about three events in our lives that have influenced the way we think of relationship between Muslim societes and Western societes. My three events were: September 11, the French riots in 2005 and the Iraq war.
Obviously, reasons about my first choice were almost clear: that has been the most meaningful and signiticant event occurred between Western and Muslim societes. When Tween Tours attak occurred, I was only 15 years old and before that event I knew only about European Crisis like the Yugoslavia war and the Kosovo crisis. Before September 11 I never thought about a more large international situation. After September 11 I begun to search more informations about Western and Muslim relatioship, I read a lot of book and newspapes articles about that topic to understand the reasons why Osama Bin Laden organized such a suicide bombing. Lots of informatations texts I read talked about the strong relationship between bin Laden’s family and Bush’s family during 80’s. This made me to reflect deeply about that relatioship: at first sight our television news said that suicide bombing was caused by the hatred feelings from Muslim societes against U.S.. Referring to this event I have to make it clear first that I can’t justify such a violence act, but at the same time our journalists can’t superficially talk about such a complex event beacuse they showed not to have deeply analyzed previous history.
My second event was the French riots in 2005. Most people in my group dind’t know about this event and I just cited those riots beacuse I know that few people in the world know about that event. But I think that is a very important event occurred in a such democratic continent like Europe is. I have to say that only the girl coming from Morocco knew about those riots because the great majority living in french pheriperies coming from Maghreb. During October 2005 those riots shocked me because I had never saw such an anger explosion in Europe. This made me to reflect about relatioship between people living in pheriperies and people living in the city centre. By studying this phenomenon I learnt that France is living a strong discrimination against Muslim society (I’ve already talked about it in my previous diary).
My third event was the Iraq war. I explained that event under an economic view because every military action made by U.S. had underlying economic reasons during latest years. Even if I have to note that since first postwar period every military or politics action was made by U.S. only for economic reason: for example we can mention the Dawes plan or the Marshall plan. We can also think about Iraq recontruction: there are involved a lot of U.S. economic interest. Most of investments in the Iraq reconstruction have been made by U.S. capitals. Referring to this assertion every people in my group weren’t agreeing with me: they think only about the clash of civilization occurring between Western and Muslim societies. I think that this clash of civilization is less important beacuse it’s only a pretext made by every governments to justify military action and to gloss over economic interests...
...On the other side, the girl coming from U.S. said that Iraq war was made only for U.S. security and Tala (the girl coming from Jordan) said her that we can’t invade a whole country only beacuse we feel in danger. I’ve to say that I’m agreeing with Tala also because I think that such a military action needed to be justified by United Nations Security Council and it wasn’t.
RispondiEliminaAnother aspects that surprised me was the absolutely lack of information that girls from Morocco and Jordan had about the European countries opposition in this Iraq war. I told them the most important European countries like German, France and Spain (only after Zapatero’s election) were against this war.
Now I would like to talk about my video project experience. First of all I’ve to say that it was really amusing and interesting at the same time. This didn’t change my opinion about video news manipulation because I learnt about it during these latest years. I saw this situation occuring in Italy where we are living censorship concerning our television and our newspaper. At the interntional level we learnt about media manipulation when U.S. government lied about secret weapons that Iraq government was thought to hold.
On the other side, I’ve to admit that, maybe, my video project was not objective because I’m looking on the Israeli-Palestinian situation by supporting the palestinian cause. But I hope to have done my project as much objective as possible.
Elvira.
Hello everybody,
RispondiEliminamy 5th soliya session was extremely interesting; this time I was connected from my home, because there was the “Easter Week” and I was not in Padua; so last time I did my session in nightwear! :)
All kidding aside, we started this session talking about topical subjects and I talked about the “Abruzzi Earthquake” because the day of my session (6th of April) was the first anniversary of the Earthquake.
After this preliminary discussion about topical subjects, we played a game thinking three events that changed our lives, one of which necessarily political. I chose: moving another town away from my parents; playing music; the 9/11.
The first choice was chosen because it represented for me a new experience of life, the first “independent” experience of my life, “cutting the umbilical cord” with my parents.
The second choice was selected because music is an important part of my life; I play drums from the 2001 and I spend the most part of my life “listening & playing music”.
The third choice was chosen because it represents obviously a radical change in the international relationship; it provoke the beginning of the “new USA foreign policy” based on the “Rogue States Doctrine” explained by George W. Bush; it presented to the world a new kind of terrorism that represented an unconventional response to an inequal distribution of military strength.
This part of the session was very interesting because we had many different experiences: for example Janice talked about her parent’s divorce, Novel talked about “Indonesian corruption” in government and society, Mousa talked about a bombing during a wedding; so we had experiences extremely diverse & some of them absolutely poignant.
We spent the final part of the session reflecting about this experiences with our own particular point of view about them; for example, discussing about public corruption, Novel said that he found more information about the corruption on the web, for example using Yahoo & Google; Muhammad, concerning this research, said that it’s not important to know the problem but how to solve it; I disagreed with his opinion because for me knowing the problem is an important step to solve it & substantially all the guys agreed with me. However I noted a certain “general pessimism” about the possibility to solve this serious problems, so I said to all that, concerning the “corruption in government”, we have an important weapon to fight it, and this weapon are the “ballots”. “Ballots”, in this case, can wound more than “bullets”.
I wish conclude this weekly diary remembering that the next session will be very important, because we will discuss about our video projects. I finished my video project on last Tuesday and I’m highly satisfied. I’m looking forward to the 6th session!
See you next time,
Emanuele