One step forward, two steps back for Brits trying to come to grips with the pernicious boutique multiculturalism the left intelligensia has insinuated into the European social fabric like so much razor wire. Now, amazingly, horrifically, and—worst of all—dangerously, the Brits, in order to appease the “sensibilities” of Muslims, are willing to treat history itself as if it is a seminar in “tolerance”. From the UK Daily Mail:
Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government backed study has revealed.
It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.
— Which idea of pedagogy could come in handy, I guess, for those who don’t want their kids exposed to, say, Darwinian evolution or sex ed—though in those particular cases, at least the inevitable end game isn’t a repeat of Genesis or the return of chastity belts. Whereas the inevitable end game for a country willing to scrub the history of one minority in order to assuage the ahistorical fantasies of a potentially more violent minority is a purge of Jews from the UK, and probably most of Europe.
There is also resistance to tackling the 11th century Crusades – where Christians fought Muslim armies for control of Jerusalem – because lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques.
The findings have prompted claims that some schools are using history ‘as a vehicle for promoting political correctness’.
The study, funded by the Department for Education and Skills, looked into ‘emotive and controversial’ history teaching in primary and secondary schools.
It found some teachers are dropping courses covering the Holocaust at the earliest opportunity over fears Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic and anti-Israel reactions in class.
The researchers gave the example of a secondary school in an unnamed northern city, which dropped the Holocaust as a subject for GCSE coursework.
The report said teachers feared confronting ‘anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils’.
Jesus. Where is Sidney Poitier when you need him? The self-esteem movement, multiculturalism, and Western guilt and weakness have finally come together in a perfect storm of philosophical surrender.
I have been writing on this for what seems like ages, but at base, identity politics—which manifests itself in political correctness and a perverse, inverted, Orwellian idea of “tolerance”—is an irreconcilable enemy of liberalism. And, when the ascendant minority also happens to be an opponent of pluralism, the more the majority cedes to that aggressive and demanding minority, the more illiberal the social ethos inexorably becomes.
I asked a week or so ago if an itinerant theocracy can live peaceably inside a liberal democracy. I believe the answer is yes—the US is proof of that, at least for the time being—but the proviso is always that the liberal democracy in question promotes assimilation and eschews balkanizing multiculturalism. This is especially important in areas of law and public policy, where all groups must be held to a single standard of law; because identity politics tends to grow stronger in the aggregate—and it is in fact founded on a philosophy of incremental gain (which is why its purveyors are so careful to maintain aggrieved status despite gains or successes).
Classically liberal opponents of, say, race-based affirmative action—though they are often accused of racism—are in fact simply trying to beat back the “fixes” by social engineers that invariably lay the groundwork for incremental abuses and an expansion of inequity. Which is precisely what one can expect in a legal system that works on precedent. Pragmatism belongs to politics; when it moves into law as a “remedy” in the service of a “living Constitution,” chances are it will do more longterm harm than short-term good.
For a country to survive, it must vigorously defend its principles, not surrender them for the sake of avoiding confrontation—even if doing so means that the country might cease to exist.
Here, though— if history is indeed written by the victors, then this particular moment of postmodern surrender should chill the West to the bone.
(h/t Allahpundit)
Meanwhile, the Western Left goes frothy about global-warming “deniers.”
Perfectly apt here is a quote from another thread.
Ooh, do they mean the bits about Jerusalem always being Muslim, since the days of the Patriarchs (who were Muslim, not Jewish, natch)? And that the fucking Dome of the Rock has existed since Abraham himself built it (or the angel Gabriel, or whatever other Judeo-Christian figure they’ve cribbed)? Or that Solomon’s Temple never existed, or that Herod the Great DID NOT build the Temple Mount, despite contemporary (non-Jewish, non-Christian) Roman accounts?
On both sides of the Pond, it seems, public education is no longer about learning, but all about feeling.
Then they aren’t teachers, they are terrorist enabling baby-sitters.
Ain’t outcome-based education great? Unburdened by facts, free-thinking ignorama are liberated to blunder about an interpreted universe populated by the projections and biases of teachers. Teachers, on the other hand, with salaries and retirements intact, can lead lives dependent upon the taxes paid by the ignorama, who are grateful to be able to feel so unquestionably good about themselves.
How ironic that this post sits on the same page as the “ZOO” post. It seems to me that the UK multicultis are inviting Islam to do to it what those equophilic gentlemen are inviting those stallions to do to them.
History is edited by the appeaseniks.
It’s interesting how often the quoted report uses the word “fear” to describe the reasons for the teachers actions. The teachers “feared” upsetting their pupils; they “feared” confrontation . . .
I suppose, given the new RightSpeak laws in Britain and the EU, that the teachers also “feared” being brought up on charges of racism if such a confrontation were to occur.
It’s all right. There’s always the option of hedge schools.
Did you see this in the same day’s paper?
Police send four police officers to tackle boy, 11, who called schoolmate ‘gay’
Why don’t they just declare complete surrender and be done with it? I thought England would be the last of the European nations to fall. What with this sort of thing and the Iranian issue, it looks as though they may be the first.
Neverland generation criminalizes childhood:
I’d say a better comparison is to the Lancet study deniers, McGehee.
Anyone who disagrees with a ginned-up pack of cooked numbers is now, in alphie’s book, a “denier” akin to a Holocaust denier.
Definitely a Buchanan type, though he often shades over into a MoveOn moron.
BTW—other than to make fun of the ‘tard, no one take his bait. He’s just trying to avoid the subject, which is the abject surrender to the Islamists of teaching some of the basic facts of history.
Personally, I wish I could say I’m stunned by the double standards, but I’m not anymore. I think a parent who wishes their child exempted from reasonable sex education or biology classes is misguided; I think a parent who gets upset when their child is taught about the Holocaust is a dangerous lunatic.
I absolutely maintain that the Lancet study did happen, in case anyone’s interested.
Actually, Robert,
While I always enjoy the fumbling attempts you guys make to select the correct picture-button to use to ring me up on your ideological McDonald’s cash register,
I was just pointing out that our recent debate over the number of civilians killed during the Iraq War is a better comparison to Holocaust deniers than the current debate over climate change.
This is the wrong way for this to happen–and Jeff is right, I guess, but I’m not an old-timey liberal/libertarian, so for me there’s no ideal I can regard as being lost in these power-plays (it was all lies anyway)–but, and I’m completely serious about this, I welcome the absenting of the Holocaust from any Western school curricula it can get thrown out of, because here it’s presented as a victim-identity fable–worse, as originary to that identity–which it wasn’t at all, and if there’s one thing Jews don’t need, it’s to be lied about. At least the Muslims’ crazy Jew-hating bullshit grants us the moral agency to conspire and kill. Anglo-American Holocaust mythology is worse than antisemitic.
I couldn’t read it like this when it happened, but I do remember the change that happened at school after our WWII lessons. None of the kids ever regarded Jews as an Other–we were like Catholics or Italians to them–until they were taught to view us through the dehumanizing, even subhuman, images of camp-liberation and mass-grave photos–and The Diary of Anne Frank, which…I’ll save that rant.
But those lessons were the beginning, and, as far as I can tell, the source, of all the (mostly lighthearted, though some gradually darkened) antisemitism I experienced before I got to college. All of it.
A certain kind of forgetting is better.
I think that the educational system is in fine shape. After all, it produced Alphie, didn’t it?
Never mind. we’re doomed.
Non sequitur.
The Holocaust was not a statistically-flawed estimation of deaths. The numbers of dead were not larded with “main street bias” which inflated fatality figures by failing to include areas less affected by the invasion and occupation. In other words, the Lancet study was debatable, but the Holocaust is not.
To draw a comparison between the two betrays a failed sense of proportion. The attempt is either trying to diminish the truth of the Holocaust by reducing its horror to the level of mere flawed statistictical methods, or to elevate a flawed study to the level of historical fact.
Why would one to do either?
Dan – You are most certainly correct there. Unlike anthropogenic global warming, there is no controlling historical consensus about the Holocaust. People in the Middle East, in fact, are still holding conferences to determine what happened. Unlike global warming, the debate is not over.
The estimate of the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust was established by Historians and demographers in the very late 1940s. While 6 million is a shorthand for the estimate (I have seen academic estimates from 4.8 million to 7.5 million), the estimation methodologies used back then have held valid all this time. There have been several subsequent studies all of which have produced findings within the same order of magnitude.
http://www.holocaust-history.org/questions/numbers.shtml
I think the Brits and the rest of the western European’s should all go ahead and turn in their
balls for whatever rebate they can get. They certainly have no other use for them.
Brilliant.
Alphie, who cares about the methodology? The subject of the thread was educational systems abandoning teaching the Holocaust rather than possibly offending people who deny that it ever occurred. And guess who the possible offendees are? The ROP!!
The pathetic study published in the Lancet referred to a conflict that did exist. Telling students that Operation Iraqi Freedom didn’t occur would be wrong, since it can be demonstrated that it did.
Omitting the Holocaust from a lesson plan so as to avoid raising the ire of someone who refuses to believe that it happened is also wrong, for the same reason.
Teaching that the Lancet study was the definitive word on casualties there would also be wrong. But for a different reason. But again, that ain’t the topic of this thread. Nice try Alph.
The sad thing is that every story like this brings another 10,000 votes to the British National Party, a bunch of fascist, collectivist racists who, were they ever to get power, would not even segregate the Jews and the Muslims in the concentration camps.
The state of politics in the UK is so bad that this outcome becomes more plausible every day.
NuLabour, the Tories and the LibDems are incapable of handling anything except with sound-bites and are busily out-bidding each other on the Green agenda, the National Health Service and Welfare, while the proles are seeing their nation slip into third world status, and this time round there’s no Churchill waiting in the wings to come to the rescue at the eleventh hour.
These are fearful times we live in. Once people begin to let slip the taboos against Holocaust denial, the next logical step is to bring on the blood libels.
I understand your point, BoZ (I have written on the Jewish identity being tied to “remembering” the Holocaust—and even queried a major scholar on this point, whose name I can’t recall, with an allusion to the “Seinfeld” episode where Jerry is making out during Schindler’s List).
However, there is definitely a difference between what and how the Holocaust is taught and THAT it is taught at all.
Because it happened. So bracketing it from history seems fairly severe an overreaction.
And follow the link at the bottom of the article:
“A teenage schoolgirl was arrested by police for racism”
Think about that sentence for a bit. To top it off, it wasn’t even racism.
Wow. Just, Wow.
“I can’t understand what they’re saying, so we can’t get the assigned work done” is now “racism”?
G’bye, England. I wanted to visit, but until you gather your wits, there’s no way I’ll support you. The only cash I’ll spend in England until then will be with Jon Tuffley.
Any bets on how long until Stonehenge is declared offensive to Muslims?
While your writing is always above par, once in a while you write a perfect sentence. That is one of those sentences.
And it wasn’t even run-on! Good show.
Is there anyone in the world is NOT allowed to be offended?
TW: girl46
No, no, I’m sure that’s not such a group, Dr. Turing.
This appears to be a distortion of what has really happened in the UK, where a single school has “avoided selecting the Holocaust as a topic for GCSE coursework”.
A [UK government] spokesman added: “Teaching of the Holocaust is already compulsory in schools at Key Stage 3 [ages 11 to 14].
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6563429.stm