Australian Jewish News, Thursday, August 19,
2004
New South Wales
bid to make Holocaust education compulsory
by Mark Franklin
[no relation to Larry
Franklin] ALLOWING high-school teachers to
choose whether or not they teach Holocaust history
in high schools is
unacceptable,
NSW Jewish Board
of Deputies president
David Knoll said this week. David
Irving comments: I AM already inundated
with emails from innocent school children
in Australia, frantically asking me to do
their Holocaust homework for them. Do the Jews in
Australia have no insight into child
psychology whatever? If they were disliked
until now, this addition of Holocaust
propaganda indoctrination to their proper
school homework burden is one surest way
to make them hated throughout the length
and breadth of one of the most beautiful
countries on earth. And your average
Australiam school teacher is hardly going
to warm to his Jewish fellow citizens
after this either. My message to David
Knoll and the Jews of Australia: Get a
Life. Before you lose it all over again.
| "It leaves a dangerous gap in the immunisation of
the next generation from racial hatred generally
and from racial hatred against the Jews in
particular," Knoll told the board's AGM on Tuesday
night.The board is currently lobbying the NSW
[New South
Wales] Government and the Department of
Education to ensure that all high-school students
study Holocaust history, he said. An AJN
investigation earlier
this year revealed that many schools in NSW do not
include it in their syllabus. A similar survey of Victorian high schools found
that while Holocaust education is not mandatory,
the proportion of schools teaching about the Shoah
appeared to be higher than in NSW.
Australian
Twelfth-Grader Jenna submits her essay on
Holocaust deniers to Mr Irving, and he suggests
changes (pdf) |