Reading, Writing, and Hate
...In that particular post I sarcastically suggested that the NAACP’s next move should be to push for the destruction of all history books that have images of the Confederate flag so that we can rewrite history and provide a new, kinder and gentler past. After all, the reasoning should be that any history books with images of the Confederate flag could easily be viewed as promoting racism.
...What I didn’t realize was that some schools in England have already got the ball rolling down the road of revisionist history. Their attempts to change the past aren’t based on racism, however; theirs is an attempt to avoid offending Muslim students who might be anti-Semitic and Holocaust deniers.
...The Guardian’s Jeevan Vasagar reports:
Schools have avoided teaching the Holocaust and the Crusades in history lessons because they are concerned about causing offence to Muslim pupils or challenging “charged” versions of history which children have been taught at home, government research has found.
A report for the Department for Education and Skills found that a history department in a northern city had avoided selecting the Holocaust as a GCSE topic for fear of confronting “anti-semitic [sic] sentiment and Holocaust denial” among some Muslim pupils.
Another school decided to teach the Holocaust despite anti-semitic [sic] sentiment among students, but avoided the Crusades as “their balanced treatment of the topic would have directly challenged what was taught in some local mosques.”
The report, Teaching Emotive and Controversial History, also revealed that one school was challenged by Christian parents for teachers’ treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
A DfES spokesman said: “It’s up to schools to make a judgment on non-compulsory parts of the national curriculum. It is a broad framework and there is scope for schools to make their own decisions.”
Teaching of the Holocaust is expected to become compulsory under the new national curriculum from next year.
...The very notion of pretending that a significant historical occurrence never happened is frightening. Knowing that such a move is being done in a school setting in an effort to appease an extremist segment of the population that chooses to not live in the real world is even worse.
...Simply because many Muslims choose to be propagators of bigotry and ignorance doesn’t change history; it doesn’t mean that millions of innocent Jews weren’t executed from the early-1930s to the mid-1940s in Europe.
...It has become common to hear criticism of the United States’ education system for various reasons, but at least the U.S. system doesn’t cater to an anti-Semitic movement that would make Adolf Hitler proud.
References
▪ The Guardian
▪ BBC News
