Schools Drop Holocaust Lessons

To be perfectly honest, some of the happenings in Great Britain are quite simply beyond the pale. When making one's way through this article in the al-Guardian, one gets the eerie impression that s/he has suddenly found her/himself in a first-glass loony bin for those irretrievably lost members of society.

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 sentiment and Holocaust denial" among some Muslim pupils.

I do not wish to come over as an out-of-touch numbskull, but education, I have always naively held, is all about providing students with accurate, scientifically sound information and taking the claptrap they have accumulated in their juvenile heads to task. The ultimate goal of education is to broaden students' horizons, drum at least a handful of knowledge into their heads and, among other things, aid our youth in the arduous quest to differentiate between arrant gibberish, pushed down our throats all the time, and more or less correct information. The importance of education cannot be overstated, as it undoubtedly constitutes the cornerstone of any civilized society.

Knowledge, as an added bonus, oftentimes serves to dispel hatred, anchored in ignorance and misinformation, and foster understanding between different peoples.

Muslims, the libertarian in me asserts, have the right to hate Jews with gusto and enthusiastically deny the Holocaust, yet schools, in my humble view, should on no account be in cahoots with them. Their mission runs contrary to the agenda of the Muslim community, and they have the obligation to stick to it against all odds.

Incidentally, if one of my unshakable beliefs is that the Earth is flat, will the Ministry of Education prefer to leave me in peace, for fear of shattering my precious world view, however insane my opinions may be?

Another school decided to teach the Holocaust despite anti-semitic 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".

G-d forbid some inconsequential schools challenge the knowledge disseminated by those temples of science, mosques! They, plainly, don't have the authority to issue such a bold, defiant challenge.

Teaching of the Holocaust is expected to become compulsory under the new national curriculum from next year.

I am afraid that Brits are in for a couple of bloody riots. It is, however, encouraging that the madness seems to be nearing its end at long last.

On a related note, such revealing articles inadvertently point in the direction of what is being taught in mosques. It has long been suspected that mosques spread anti-Semitism, hatred for all things infidel and even occasionally call on congregants to resort to violence, but evidently the amount of propaganda is staggering in the extreme.

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