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Attack on U.S. Embassy in Syria
September 12, 2006








CNN is reporting that Syrian forces pushed back an armed attack
agains the U.S. Embassy in Syria. The article begins:

"U.S. officials praised Syrian security forces for thwarting Tuesday's
attack on the U.S. Embassy in Damascus despite the usually tense
relationship with the Middle Eastern country."

According to the article no Americans were killed.
Read the article!!


Discussion Starters

  • Many younger students don't know what an embassy is.
    Explain the concept to them. The people who work in an
    embassy are the representatives of one country in another
    country. Ask students to develop skits in which they pretend to
    be embassy employees. Encourage students to consider what
    kinds of messages countries might pass through their
    embassies to other countries.

  • Ask students if they can think of any useful metaphors for an
    embassy. Have a contest between different groups of students
    in which they work to develop metaphors for embassies. (This
    would even be more interesting if classes challenged other
    classes via blogs and wikis.)

  • The terrorists who attacked the U.S. Embassy yelled "Allah
    Akbar" "God is Great." Ask students how they think that a
    fundamentalist belief in God might prompt people to try and kill
    others. Encourage them to write a thought piece on this
    question, perhaps a blog entry.

  • Tell students to pretend that they are the newly appointed leader
    of an educational system in a country that had previously been
    fundamentalist. For years and years people in the country have
    been taught that God is great and God needs to be revered and
    part of revering God means killing people who don't accept
    God and in the opinion of local citizens work against God.
    They have been asked to develop a plan for re-educating people
    so that they come to believe that murder is never an acceptable
    course of action. Ask students to develop the plan with at least
    five key ideas as to how they should do this.
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