Toronto Star: 2008 May 17
The Toronto District School Board has removed a recent book about human atrocities from the curriculum of a new high school course after a committee was asked to look into public concerns over the book's treatment of the Armenian genocide.
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.
Coloroso, the bestselling author of parenting books, draws similarities between behaviour exhibited in childhood bullying and that exhibited in a genocide.
In addition to dealing with the mass murder of more than a million Armenians, the book also examines the Holocaust that killed six million Jews during World War II and the Rwanda genocide of almost a million Tutsis in 1994.
The course's inclusion of the Armenian genocide has been controversial since its initial announcement and was met by a petition with more than 1,200 signatures opposed to the book and the course.
"To pick Armenia as a genocide when it is so controversial - especially when there are atrocities by other countries that could have been chosen - is just wrong," Lale Eskicioglu, executive director of the Council of Turkish Canadians, said prior to delivering the petition.
Officially, the Turkish government views the slaughter of the Armenians as wartime casualties of World War I, with both sides guilty of some provocation.
Board representatives declined to comment on the matter last night because members of the community can still appeal the decision.
