Liberalism chases its tail into oblivion

This is from the Daily Mail:

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Governmentbacked study has revealed.

It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.

How have things come to this pass? It happened like this.

The Nazi genocide of European Jewry was the ultimate crime of history. The nature of this crime was that it consisted of intolerance of a minority. Therefore intolerance of minorities is the ultimate crime. Therefore we must eliminate our own intolerance of minorities—the more different from us they are, and thus the more intolerant of them we naturally tend to be, the more we must eliminate our intolerance of them. Therefore we must admit into Europe an unending mass immigration of non-Western peoples, especially Muslims, because they are the most different from us, and once they are here we must accept and accommodate ourselves to their customs and beliefs, even when their customs and beliefs include exterminationist anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, because to fail to accommodate ourselves to their exterminationist anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial would be … the ultimate crime.

- end of initial entry -

Ken Hechtman, a Canadian leftist who likes to keep VFR honest, writes:

Here’s the original primary source document (a pdf file) for the Daily Mail’s story. Nothing in it justifies the Daily Mail’s use of the plural “schools.” It refers to one (unnamed) school in one (unnamed) city that stopped teaching the Holocaust. It’s not a trend. It’s one school doing a stupid thing, but it’s just one school.

The report says very clearly that “emotive and controversial” history should be taught, not avoided. It divides teachers into “avoiders,” “containers” and “risk-takers” and clearly comes down on the side of the risk-takers.

It says students’ anti-Semitic customs and beliefs should not be accommodated. They should be met head-on with guest lectures by Holocaust survivors, material from various Holocaust memorial museums and whatever else it takes.

When the report points out that immigration, especially Muslim immigration, makes certain topics “emotive and controversial” when they never were before—that’s just recognizing a fact. Teachers don’t make immigration policy but immigration policy makes the classrooms they have to teach in. If half the class thinks Richard the Lion-Heart is a national hero and the other half thinks he was a genocidal maniac, the teacher is better off knowing what to expect.

LA replies:

Thanks to Mr. Hechtman for looking into this. It seems the Mail may have overstated the study’s findings. But does Mr. Hechtman deny that the presence of Muslims in large numbers pushes and/or forces a society to change itself to accommodate them—the greater the number of Muslims, the greater the degree of societal change?

And does he deny the main theme of my entry, that tolerance and anti-discrimination have become the ruling ideology of the West and make it impossible for the West to defend itself from mass non-Western immigraton and the resulting social transformations?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 03, 2007 03:11 AM | Send