Hi there
I know you have all been very busy with your video projects but please try and keep up with your diaries, it is fundamental for assessment and will be a great help to you in your final reports!
Thanks
Francesca
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Hi Mates!
RispondiEliminaI totally forgot about the diary..
Last session was really really Hot!
Few greetings to introduce ourselves, then the storm.
Topic: Iraq and Afghanistan. Not an easy discourse with some arabs and some americans guys.
Facilitators did the introduction, then arabs started but Phil, a really quiet boy from U.S.A., stopped them.
Why USA had attack those countries? 9/11 was the answer!
Speech grew up between two parties..I was in silence.
Then Richard asked me one participation; I said that both sides were to emotional and that it's difficult to analyze if you have strong emotions about those issues.
I said that it's clear: I can't understand their feelings: We (europeans) didn't have a terrorist attack and we are not under threats for our culture (at least with missilies and I said that anyway USA had strongly wrong the method, also if you have a point of view Realpolitik.
Then fighting restart: Pro Israelians, pro palestinians, you can't generalyze, 9/11, terrorists, imperialists, ...
Once facilitators rebuilt peace common places returned: Yes, we are building peace; it's important to do what we are doing; we are the people, we are the world...
Heidi (the other facilitator) asked to ourselves:
how we can stop violence in the world?
I felt like kindergarten, simple answers, too much simple.
<>
<< YES! I agree! we can do as you say!>>
2 or 3 comments like these, I was thinking <> and I was really dissapointed.
Heidi understood me (I think)and asked me: what are you thinking about Davide?
I said: Yes maybe I can explain to my classmates: they are smart, open to different points of view, they have an education...But how I can explain to my uncle? It's fiftyfive years old and he is racist (and he doesn't know that he's racist).
Violence? you can't stop it! violence is a part of human being.
Maybe you can reduce it by international law, by cooperation, by NU reform, by other methods but you can stop it...
They seemed a bit stunned until Heidi said: that's true!
Maybe she's the one that can understand me cause she has a degree in international affairs; other are mathematicians, engineers, translators...but you have not to be a genius to try to analyze problems...
Next week: Holiday!
I don't understand at all what they celebrate.. but no arabs will be connected..
We'll read in two weeks!
Hi Davide
RispondiEliminaI'm glad you finally had a discussion that satisfied you in your group!! But at the end of your message you say that Heidi (one of the facilitators?) is the only one that can understand your view - why do you think that the others have difficulty understanding your point of view? Can you describe the others' points of view and where they originate? Do you think you can take the discussion and analysis any further on this topic?
Francesca
Hi everyone,
RispondiEliminathe first part of the meeting was a little bit slow, maybe because all of us were thinking about the videos.
The first activity was about the media and we had to recognize the provenience of 5 different headlines, nobody did right.
In the second part we discuss about our video project and we were very talkative because everyone did the work and it took us a lot of time and a lot of energy but we were very interesting in that topic.
Maram, as the same, started to talk so much. I don’t like this behavior because the others don’t have the possibility to talk or to reply to her, but we try to have a conversation.
Amy, Sean and I tried to be unbiased in our video, and Sabreen said we did a good work because she was think all of western people are pro-Israel and after have watched our video she realized that isn’t like that. All the video from the Muslims were very emotional, but I didn’t like the Ayman one because he didn’t explained what is happened in the Gaza strip but he put only imagine of death and wounded people. The 4 girls videos were emotional too, but they tried to explain the history and the problems, obviously not in an unbiased way.
After have talked about the videos we started to talk about the situation in Israeli and our feeling about that. I was shocked when Amy said that she knew just a few think about the conflict and this project have helped her to do some research and to know, a little bit, the situation in the middle east.
We were 8 people and we had 8 different thought about the situation and it was interesting to have an exchange about that. I would like to talk also with an Israeli and a Palestinian for have more information.
We have to wait 2 weeks to finish our discussion because next week the session will be not because all Muslims have religious holiday.
This time we began to discuss about our video projects (i.e. the experience of making a video about such a topic, the difficulties we ran to and our choice of a point of view) and to compare the other’s projects in order to criticize and find out the different perspectives we adopted. Almost for all of us (Hala, Dania, Allison and I) it wasn’t so easy to choose and to put together the right video clips trying to be unbiased and to focus on every event which concerned the escalation of violence in Gaza in January 2009. We understood that our different choices of images (sometimes the same) was due to the goal we set ourselves, consciously or unwittingly. Some of us decided to target the population’s suffering, in particular Palestinians; others focused on the reactions of the international community; others again tried to cover everything making the video as comprehensive as possible, but taking the risk to trivialize (it was my problem!). Luckily, there was Hamza, who hadn’t done the project, but watched all of our videos and gave us his personal and very precious opinion. Even though we had different perspectives, we agreed about the fact that we now are more aware of the hard present situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Personally, I discovered a lot about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that I didn’t know before. Secondly, we touched on problematic topics, which were the objectiveness in the media; the bias in the news media; the problem of media communication and disinformation (what else was on the tape that they aren’t showing us?). It emerges the problem of violent images on TV news; the trade of news: their purpose to entertain the public opinion and not to inform it in a critical way; the media responsibility and the audience’s responsibility. We tried also to focus on possible solutions, because few of us (included me) don’t trust the media at all: Hamza suggested that probably we have to read and compare few news sources and then to make a better understanding of the whole situation. Another topic we went into, which we couldn’t do without, was the free press and the free speech, naturally applied to our countries. In the middle of this discussion entered Alex, who had a bad morning due to the sad loss of his aunt: unfortunately, we couldn’t make anything apart from giving our condolences. At last, I realized that not everyone had been honest: in particular, talking about TV channels, neutrality and governments’ intrusion in the media, the two Jordanian girl didn’t talk a lot and one even was too diplomatic saying that there’s no problem of censor in their country! I don’t know if they aren’t so interested in politics and then they don’t see things that otherwise other people suspect. If they are, why don’t they try to explain openly their reasons?
RispondiElimina