followArchives for the ‘Palestine’ tag
November 3rd, 2009 Posted by Liriel
Friending the Way to Peace
Facebook has a new portal at peace.facebook.com, which tracks the friend connections made each day by people of different countries, religions and political affiliations. TechCrunch has a write up here:
“Peace.facebook.com is fairly simple at this point, with a handful of graphs and a widget that lets Facebook users share what they think of the site. The most compelling portion offers a series of graphs depicting ‘Friendships of Facebook’, which shows how many members of historically hostile groups are becoming friends on Facebook. . . . There’s also a graph that shows the results of a daily poll conducted by Facebook on whether or not World Peace is possible in the next 50 years (over 35% of Columbians think so, but only 7% of users in the US are optimistic).”
October 30th, 2009 Posted by Liriel
Interview with Joseph Assi, Palestinian Refugee
Joseph Assi was born in a Christian refugee camp in Lebanon and spent his entire life there until he was chosen to be a cast member of the second season of “On the Road in America,” a documentary-reality TV series about four young Middle Easterners traveling across the U.S. by RV. (On the Road in America, Season II, will air next year.)
October 5th, 2009 Posted by Liriel
Sesame Street Diplomacy
Sesame Street refutes the stereotype of diplomacy being the sole provenance of men in suits strategizing over how to win the hearts and minds of a foreign adult populace. Anyone who has watched the wildly popular 40 year old show knows that its target audience is under four feet tall and the most memorable characters are puppets and an eight foot tall yellow bird.
It’s easy to say that Sesame Street has universal appeal when you consider that it is aired in over 120 countries. But in fact, it’s tailored to take into account different geography and culture, with nearly 30 international co-productions. Sesame Workshop, the non-profit producer of the show, also counts as its sponsors, corporations such as McDonalds and governmental agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development, the Education Department and the Defense Department. It also receives international funding from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
