I routinely get emails or hear people use quotes that they have not taken the time to fact check. Here is the latest.
When I was a kid, Ike was president, I couldn’t ever imagine why he was so popular. Maybe this has something to do with it:
General Eisenhower Warned Us
It is a matter of history that when the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower,found the victims of the death camps he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead.
He did this because he said in words to this effect:
‘Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses – because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened’.
This week, the UK debated whether to remove The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it ‘offends’ the Muslim population which claims it never occurred. It is not removed as yet. However, this is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it.
It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended. This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the 6 million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians, and 1,900 Catholic priests Who were ‘murdered, raped, burned, starved, beat, experimented on and humiliated’ while the German people looked the other way!
Now, more than ever, with Iran, among others, claiming the Holocaust to be ‘a myth’, it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets.
This e-mail is intended to reach 400 million people! Be a link in the memorial chain and help distribute this around the world.
How many years will it be before the attack on the World Trade Center
‘NEVER HAPPENED’,?
because it offends some Muslim in the U.S. ???
Do not just delete this message; it will take only a minute to pass this along.?
FREEDOM ISN’T FREE…SOMEONE HAD TO PAY FOR IT
Whenever I get an email like this, I fact check it. Frankly, I was a bit surprised and at first puzzled by the results. Most said emphatically that there is no problem.
- There is a ReligiousTolerance.org that calls it a hoax, Hoax: UK Holocaust education ban.
- Snopes.com calls it a hoax, Holocaust Teaching Ban
- The Huffington Post jumped on it in Alleged Muslim Power over Holocaust Curriculum: Please Don’t Forward! and declared it a hoax.
Nonetheless, there are few indications of trouble from sources across the ocean.
- In the No lessons on the Holocaust, the Telegraph states some schools are dropping controversial materials.
- Similarly, in Does it is truth the british schools banned teaching the history of the Holocaust? , Yahoo answer (UK and Ireland) suggested the answer is yes and no.
What is the answer? I think we should consider how our own public school system deals with controversial subjects. What the law says and what people do are two different things. Look what a persistent special interest group can accomplish in the United States. In the interest of “religious tolerance,” we have secularized our public school system. In fact, just the prospect of teaching American History has gotten a bit weird. For example, consider this excerpt from an article in a UK paper on the Texas School Board.
In a move that has sparked controversy from coast to coast, together with a slew of headlines about the “Texas schoolbook massacre”, the Lone Star state has just narrowly approved a series of conservative-minded alterations to its social studies curriculum.
The school board’s decrees range from the surreal to the faintly sinister. One dictates that the Republican former House speaker Newt Gingrich should be studied. Another says that the speeches of Jefferson Davis, the slave-owning president of the Confederacy, should be taught alongside those of Abraham Lincoln. And the National Rifle Association should be praised for upholding the Constitution. (from here)
Government is ill-equipped to make most decisions. Even when politicians do make a good decision (How likely is that?), school administrators may still not understand what they are suppose to do. Moreover, with respect to such a touchy-feely matter, enforcement – the key to making any law work – can easily become nightmarish.
Our nations traditions place the responsibility for the education of children on parents. We need a return to that tradition. From the perspective of our society, there is an important advantage in letting parents take charge; parental authority would remove the majority of political considerations. Instead of worrying about the nitnoid details of writing a textbook, our government would then just have to worry about the relatively few parents who abuse their children. Isn’t that task alone difficult enough for our government?
On a similar note:
Schools told to dump Churchill and Hitler from history lessons
13.07.07
Wartime hero: Winston Churchill – Secondary schools will strip back the traditional curriculum in favour of lessons on debt management, the environment and healthy eating, ministers revealed.
Even Winston Churchill no longer merits a mention after a drastic slimming-down of the syllabus to create more space for “modern” issues.
Along with Hitler, Gandhi, Stalin and Martin Luther King, the former prime minister has been dropped from a list of key figures to be mentioned in history teaching.
This means pupils may no longer hear about his stirring speeches during the Second World War, when he told Parliament that defeating Hitler would be Britain’s “finest hour”.
The only individuals now named in guidance accompanying the curriculum are anti-slavery campaigners Olaudah Equiano and William Wilberforce.
The omission of Churchill added to a growing row over Labour reforms to secondary education – the most radical since the national curriculum was introduced in 1988.
Critics warned traditional subject disciplines were being stripped of key content and used to promote fashionable causes and poorly-defined “life skills”.
They said that while the two World Wars remain on the curriculum as broad topics the failure to specify teaching on Churchill – while naming other individuals – downgraded his importance.
a12iggymom's Blog 