A Times of Israel article heded US school backtracks after asking if Holocaust was real tells that eighth-graders in the San Bernardino County district were assigned to do some research and write an essay explaining whether they believed the Holocaust was a real historical event or a political scheme to influence public emotion and gain.
The original assignment gave students three source materials to work off of, including one which called gassings a hoax. The other two resources were not provided in the article.
Most, albeit not all, of the commenters thought the school's project was abominable, atrocious. How dare anyone challenge the Holocaust, the Shoah?
No one said the students had to deny the Shoah occurred.
The problem is that so many people didn't want to even consider other opinions.
If you ignore other opinions and follow blindly that is popular, if your opinion ever is challenged, you won't know how to defend your position.
Granted, the assignment reeks of maliciousness. The assigning teacher's name is Syeda Jafri; her boss, the school superintendent is named Mohammad Z. Islam.
One commenter suggested that an 8th grader was too young to be exposed to such an assignment; eighth graders are too young to examine opinions and come to reasonable - that is to say, what adults want the children to believe - decisions. Eighth graders are, after all, typically between 13 and 15 years old.
For a Jewish boy, when he's 13 years and a day he automatically becomes of age for religious responsibility. (No one expects him to act like an adult, just as no one expects some adults to behave as children; none-the-less, the child IS expected to have, and use, some cognitive abilities.)
Children normally don't live in a vacuum; if parents or surrogate parents are not available, there are peers.
We expose our children to sundry medical maladies when we see that they are protected against a myriad of diseases. I, personally, fail to see the difference in protecting our children from medical maladies or from Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, or any other thoughts we deem offensive.
It is unfortunate that there are people who deny that the Holocaust occurred. It is unfortunate that people deny what Europeans did to the peoples they conquered (including the Indians of the Americas) or what the Muslims did to non-Muslims in countries they invaded and enslaved. But people DO deny history all the time, and those who suffered must challenged these denials.
The only way to challenge the denials, to debate and to convince, is to understand what the deniers are proclaiming and to respond with sound, factual, well considered arguments.
Hiding our collective head in the sand makes deniers of us - we deny the possibility that someone has a position that offends us, and in the process we lack the ability to respond to the claim.
Let the eighth graders study the Holocaust and learn what the deniers are claiming, then counter those claims with facts. In the case of the Holocaust, there is no absence of proof.
The Holocaust didn't happen, and the world is flat.
