Welcome back to another history blogpost. This one deals with a very prevalent issue in this day and age: Terrorism.
Let me backtrack a bit. So about halfway through the term, our teachers changed up our remaining assignments. Instead of continuing with the baseline, honours, and challenge assignments for every topic, we would now have just three assignments for the rest of the year; a discussion we would have to lead, and two research blogposts. This made me very happy as these new assignments played to my strengths. I enjoy leading discussions as well as researching and gathering information, so I was rejuvenated by the way the term would play out. This post will focus on the class discussion, or facilitation Friday as it is known.
The Preparation:
To start off the process, we all signed up for a decade (from the 50’s to the 90’s), and a specific topic within that decade. Then every week from Monday to Thursday we had lectures and also watched the CNN series about different decades in American history. I found this very engaging as the documentaries are extremely informative and interesting, and gave us a good insight into our topics.
So where does the facilitation come in? Every Friday, everyone who had signed up for a certain decade would present. So for example on the first Friday, all the 50’s people presented. Well I guess presented is the wrong word. Basically what we had to do was first provide some insight into our topic (with some visuals to reinforce our message) and then lead a class discussion. The facilitator would pose a question and then other people would take turns answering it.
My topic ended up being terrorism in the 1970’s, something that I didn’t know too much about. When I think of the 1970’s I think of music or Watergate, but I definitely don’t think about terrorism. However, after watching the CNN documentary and doing extensive research on the subject, I found out that there was a lot more terrorism in the 70’s than I initially thought.
First there was the constant IRA bombings in the UK. I actually already knew about these bombings because of my Irish heritage. Interestingly enough my grandma was from Ireland, and my grandpa was Northern Ireland so I guess they would disagree about the legitimacy of these bombings. But anyways I also knew a fair bit about this topic from a movie I saw last year, In the Name of the Father.
There were also major terrorist attacks in Germany, as well as a spree of hostage takings on airplanes.
At first I contemplated presenting about all three of these topics but I realized that if I did that I would only be able to skim the surface and I wanted to delve deeper into a topic. Since I already knew a bit about the IRA, I decided to focus on something that I knew very little about: the Munch Massacre.
The Facts:
The Munich Massacre was a hostage taking that occurred at the 1972 olympics in Germany. Palestinian terrorists took 11 Israeli athletes and coaches hostage. The hostages were eventually killed.
A few days prior to the olympics, a Palestinian terror group known as Black September infiltrated the Israeli athletes’ quarters and took 11 hostages. Shortly after the crisis began, the group demanded that 234 Palestinian prisoners be released immediately. The group was helped by Neo Nazi supporters in Germany. Israeli police trained in dealing with terrorism quickly offered to step in but German forces quickly dismissed their offer for help. However many German authorities claim that this is a rumour. 2 hostages were quickly killed after one tried to escape, and a bullethole riddled corpse was placed by the bound hostages to serve as a warning.
German forces offered the hostage takers an unlimited amount of money but they refused. German police then attempted to infiltrate the quarters, but quickly retreated. Finally as the hostages were being transported to an airstrip, German police attempted a rescue. These were regular police officers with no training in dealing with such matters and this quickly became apparent. After a standoff on the airstrip the 9 remaining hostages were eventually killed along with 5 of the Black September members.
This event was terrifying. It left civilians shocked and rattled. Interestingly enough the only Arab leader to publicly denounce the attack was King Hussein of Jordan who stated that the attack was “a savage crime against civilization”. Part of what caused the widespread fear was the fact that the event was televised globally.
The Presentation:
These are the slides that I presented throughout my facilitation:
Throughout my presentation I asked a few key discussion questions all leading up to the final question: Is fear the greatest weapon of all?
I thought that the discussion went very well as everyone had great ideas and weren’t afraid to share them. People also weren’t afraid to disagree with each other and they seemed genuinely interested in the topic.
Most people agreed that fear is the greatest weapon as it is very crippling. I brought up the point that people who live in fear cannot experience true freedom and I think that most people agreed with that.
In all, I really enjoyed learning more about one of the most infamous events of the twentieth century and I also enjoyed leading the discussion. I look forward to more engaging debates next Friday.