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Holocaust Dropped From Some UK Schools
dteichman2 writes "It appears that some UK schools are ignoring the Holocaust. A government-backed study, funded by the Department for Education and Skills, found that some teachers are reluctant to teach history lessons on the Holocaust for fear of offending Muslim students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial. Additionally, similar problems are being encountered with lessons on the Crusades because these lessons contradict teachings from local mosques."
I guess if your "beliefs" include Holocaust denial, then you're excactly the person who needs a history lesson.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
We already have schools ignoring real science to avoid offending radical Christians.
Why does accommodating religion nearly always harm society?
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
So we don't want to talk about the killing for 6 million (mainly Jews but of course we have gypsies, POWs, political prisoners, etc) because we will offend some radical Muslims. So by NOT talking about it we have offended the Jewish people, the Jewish faith, and anyone who thinks not talking about the mass murder is a bad idea.
I am sure I can see the reasoning though (being serious now): If we piss of the Jews they will complain vs. if we piss off the Muslims the radicals will riot, burn things, etc.
The day we stop discussing facts/history because somebody may be offended is the day we are all screwed.
It was an April Fool's joke. And it was done in bad taste (what do you expect from the Mail).
It's a pretty notorious one. Cmon editors.
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
Prefer their equivalent of CNN then? http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2 048161,00.html
Or, if you like:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-2339118 8-details/Teachers+drop+the+Holocaust+to+avoid+off ending+Muslims/article.do
But really, let's cut straight to the point:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/holocaust. asp
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Corollary to Godwin's Law: As political correctness increases the chances of ignoring the holocaust approach one.
Not true. The example given is that allegedly one school didn't choose it as GCSE (Key Stage 4 - 14-16 year olds) coursework, for that reason. However it's still compulsory to teach the Holocaust in Key Stage 3 (11-14 year olds).
Did their clue bag get cut? Are they friends with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or David Duke or something? By avoiding teaching about one of the worst examples of intolerance and hatred in human history, they contribute to the problem. And let's face it, there are a lot of reports of Muslims in the UK becoming increasingly radicalized, because they are learning hatred and distorted history in the mosques. The Brits are cutting their own throats.
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
So it's being made compulsory:
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
This is one of the reasons why I changed my mind on the Danish cartoons that enraged the muslim world so much.
Fear cannot be allowed to dictate what we say or teach.
If you say what you think and someone threatens your life for saying it, they have broken the law in most civilized countries. Send them to jail.
In this case it's not even a matter of belief. It's a matter of fact. The Holocaust happened and denying it is in itself illegal in some countries. Rewriting history is a very serious thing, even though it's being done on a daily basis. History is there for us to learn from so we do not repeat it. We better learn our lessons or we're bound to make the same mistakes over and over.
Badgers, we don't need no stinking badgers! - UHF
I'm British. I'm guessing most of the readers here are not. PLEASE don't assume that the Daily Mail is representative of, or in touch with, any part of British culture. They are a populist tabloid who don't shy from publishing any old headline-grabbing bollocks without the slightest grain of truth. It was the Daily Mail, as I recall, who published a list of paedophiles, most of whom turned out to be paedotricians. Without even checking the source, I can reliably recommend that the Slashdot editors pull this story; there won't be an ounce of truth in it. Believe me, if there was, it would be all over the mainstream press, not just one particular tabloid.
If there were no schools in the UK, Roger Waters would have written every song about his mother.
The future isn't here until I can type "car keys" into Google and have it say "You left them in your pants last night."
> ...it's their right to believe what they choose.
No. Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, not their own reality. You get to to have your own ideas about what facts mean but you don't get your own facts. 2+2=4 no matter how hard you believe otherwise.
Reality is that which doesn't change no matter how hard you wish it otherwise. The Holocost is objective reality. The fact the whole Middle East was on the Axis side is also objective reality. The fact they LOST WWII is objective reality. And in the end that last fact is the heart of the matter. Because if all three of the facts I just stated are reality their own worldview can't exist, so they collectively went into denial. Because it all comes down to their objection of the Western powers setting up Israel. Here in Reality winning WWII gave the victors the right to remake the defeated enemies territories including, granting Israel to the surviving Jews, splitting up Germany, tearing apart Japanese society and remaking it in our own image, etc.
The difference is we didn't occupy the Middle East and force their backwards asses into the 20th Century, mostly because before oil was discovered nobody cared enough. That was a mistake, but hindsight is always better than foresight. What is happening now with appeasing the crazies is obviously stupid to anyone outside government and the far left. If we won't stand up and defend the teaching of objective REALITY how is the West supposed to muster the courage to defend it's BELIEFS?
Democrat delenda est
Well, I don't recall my own high school history being terribly accurate on the subject. It was presented in the context that 6 million Jews were killed in concentration camps for no reason other than being jewish. There was never any mention that the Nazis also killed 9 million non-jews (including Poles, Russian POWs, Gypsies, other christian sects like Jehovas Witnesses, etc), or that half of those 6 million jews were killed for being Polish as much as any other reason. I'm no scholar on the subject, and this post isn't meant to shed light on anything except that the typical high school education dumbs the whole complicated mess down to 2 things: Concentration camps and 6 million dead Jews. Except that the vast majority of the dead weren't actually killed in concentration camps. Again, let me repeat my point: high school history takes a complex event and dumbs it down to a couple of multiple choice questions. I'm inclined to think that a more accurate and detailed history lesson would draw fewer objections. The above paragraph takes a couple of stats haphazardly lifted from Wikipedia and contains no serious scholarship. No flames please.
Let's be real. The "history" we learn is nothing more than the history we like to learn. That's always been so, and UK teachers just adapt to new circumstances with new pupils that won't like the old history. There are many facts that are either ignored or twisted to fit the needs of the political whim of the moment.
The Nazis were defeated mainly by the USSR, not by the USA, even if that's not what you learn. The Japanese _were_ defeated by the USA, but the way of doing it, killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of civilians in an atomic inferno is presented as rather the right thing to do, or, at the very least, as a great technical achievement. The holocaust is much remembered, and special laws passed to forbid the denial of the fact, but other much bigger killings go as footnotes in history books. Japanese don't teach about "comfort" women. The paper of England in the slave trade is usually hushed in the classrooms. Spain is indignant when Ben-Laden speaks about it being part of Al-Andalus, because in its history books, it's defined as a re-conquering, even if the people that re-conquered it had nothing to do with the people that lost it in the first place. France prefers not to speak too much about torture in Alger. Israelis will tell you that it's all right if they took the land from Palestinian people after WW2, because it "belonged" to them, somehow. I doubt they would return the land to some previous inhabitants of it, if the situation ever came up.
And so on. There is not such thing as "objective" history, and those teachers are just recognizing it. After all, we must remember that George Orwell, who came up with the idea of automatic history rewriting, was British.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
To quote one article The Mail's founder, Lord Northcliffe said his winning formula was to give his readers "a daily hate" - and it does. It says a *lot* that the first thing that I thought of after reading the summary was to find out whether the story came from the Daily Mail... and that I wasn't remotely surprised when it did. The fact that the Mail's style and biases were obvious even via a secondhand interpretation of the story says a lot about it.
More here. Can't say whether they're as bad as Fox News or not, because I haven't seen a significant amount of its output (due to living in the UK). However, I personally wouldn't trust the Daily Mail as far as I could throw it.
Anyway, there is probably some truth in the story, but I expect it's been exaggerated, distorted and "enhanced" by selective reporting. For example, I remember reading a story about ecstasy in New Scientist a few years back. It was all about a study which claimed that there were serious effects of the drug on the brain. However, the story also included plausible-sounding criticism and rebuttal of the study by other equally reputable scientists.
I saw the same story in the Daily Mail later that day. It also included the details about the study and the possibly dangerous effects of the drug, and was written in a moderately "reputable" manner. However, unlike NS's report, they didn't hint that there was *any* scepticism about the findings, let alone print those views. Result was that the effect of the story was very different, more one-sided and scaremongering. Fact-by-fact, the Daily Mail story was correct, but it lied by omission.
Mind you, the Daily Mail is full of scaremongering health stories; that's a staple of the front page for them. Along with reports on how something the government has done is going to affect the value of your house, and right-wing political half-truths.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
And it won't be for years, and probably never will, because whether people want to openly admit it or not... Arabs are considered animals and there blood is not as valuable as Jewish or Western blood.
Actually, Hitler was quoted as saying that he was going to exterminate Jehovah's Witnesses, too.
Oddly enough, JW's were the only group given the opportunity to sign a paper denouncing their faith and walk away. Very few of them did it.
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
I'm not really sure how you can say that objectively, I'm a non-republican/non-democrat who regularly watches fox news just because I find the way that they present things somewhat genius, it's kind of like watching Goebbels in action. A good example of their 'slant' is in how they reported the story about the kid who planned on bringing bombs to Falwell's funeral. What I saw on Fox news was that a college student has been arrested after he was caught with bombs in his car, that he intended to bring to Falwell's funeral. With that and other coverage of Falwell's passing it implied that the guy was some left-wing nut who wanted to bomb his funeral, when in actuality the kid was a student of Falwell's university and intended to bring the bombs to 'keep protestors from disturbing the funeral', which makes him a right-wing nut who is obviously totally out of touch with reality. Stuff like that, which an omission of a couple words completely changes the story, puts an incredible slant and spin on the story and honestly borders on outright disinformation.
Honestly, I think if you paid a little closer attention to what they report, how they report it and what they don't report I think you would find their slant pretty incredible, and as I said, their tactics somewhat genius.
Ah yes gratious guests.
These are Palestenian REFUGEES. And where are they refugees from?
There own homes
50 years ago those people were kicked out of there homes and forced to leave. They have no identity, no home. They aren't citizens of Lebanon.
To put this in perspective how would you feel if someone kicked you out of your home with all of your neighbors and you had no place to go but a neighboring country. You and your neighbors and family members have no home no identity no citezenship and have to live in slum camps for 50 years.
You may not rob a bank, or blow up a building, but your grandson might.
I am Lebanese, and while I understand that you might not be as educated about these issues as I am, or for that matter even care, but I want you to realize that this is a SERIOUS problem, and it is only getting worse with ignorance and neglect. I'm not trying to start a flamewar, but I believe that ALL people deserve basic human rights.
There's nothing like a rabid racist lunatic trying to justify himself in this manner.
The mass murder of the large bulk of European Jewry, which happened during the lifetime of many people still living, is of tantamount importance if you take the teaching of history to be an exercise in educating us as to deeds done and how they can be avoided.
For instance, blaming everything on Zionists was precisely the kind of monstrous ideology that allowed the Nazis to kill so many Jews. By recreating a group of individuals into some sort of dark shadow cult out to take over the world, the Nazis were able to more easily demonize Jews. It's sad that there are still evil little monsters like yourself so happy to ape the discredited notions of Nazi anti-semitism. You do, through your hate, make it clear that teaching about the Holocaust is still of the utmost importance.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I know I'm making a mistake attempting to have a rational discussion of this on the internet, but here goes.
The most prominent primary target of the Nazi's killing spree was indeed the Jewish people, and their story of systematic, legitimized oppression, and how the general German populace went along with it by degrees is the most harrowing. It teaches us that when you start institutionally marginalizing a people or class of persons, even if only slightly at first, you go down a road which may lead to something truly horrific.
That having been said, the current state of holocaust education effectively denies the deaths of the millions of non-Jews by focusing exclusively on the deaths of the Jews. It invalidates their suffering. You yourself implicitly said it was unimportant. And thus, people grow up thinking that genocide is some kind of rare thing which confines itself to one people at a time, and not only is this not correct, but the message is injured. Think I'm wrong? Ask an average American high school kid about Darfur, or the Armenians, or the purges in the Soviet Union, or Cambodia.
I would rather teach kids that if they start letting intolerance into their hearts, not only is it going to be the people of x super-vilified minority who go against the wall, it's going to be your little sister with a bum leg, your evangelical uncle, the sad beggars in downtown, those two boys holding hands, anyone who voices a dissident opinion, and everyone you know who's not white, brown, yellow, or whatever the uber-race is supposed to be.
The retreat at the end of the war was accompanied by systematic recall/slaughter of prisoners, and was given more importance than millitary strategy.
Indeed. Some estimates calculate that one possible reason Germany lost the war in the east was due to none other than their "cleansing" campaign. It took away men and resources as well as solidified the populace in the east against them. Had they done the opposite, and behaved as the liberators from Russian oppression that there were first hailed as, the outcome could have been drastically different....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill