What Holocaust?
Let’s Hear Both Sides
In Texas, they’ve abolished most abortions, even for rape and incest; they’ve sabotaged voters rights laws to cut down on voting by African Americans; the governor has told schools that they cannot require students to have COVID-19 vaccinations; and the state has done all it can to overturn the 2020 election in favor of trump, so what’s surprising about a school administrator who has told teachers to give equal time to Holocaust education and Holocaust deniers.
Yes, it’s true. During a training session on what books teachers can have in their classroom libraries, Gina Peddy, the executive director of curriculum and instruction for the Carroll Independent School District, said that Texas law requires educators to present multiple perspectives when discussing “widely debated and currently controversial” issues.
NBC News reported that Peddy told teachers, “And make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives.”
Damage control quickly kicked in and the district superintendent, Lane Ledbetter, apologized on Thursday. But the floodgates were already open and you can’t shut the barn door after the cows get out and you can’t put the toothpaste back in.
“During the conversations with teachers, comments made were in no way to convey the Holocaust was anything less than a terrible event in history,” Ledbetter said in a statement posted to Facebook. “Additionally, we recognize there are not two sides of the Holocaust.”
The reference to offering equal time for Holocaust denial is a direct result of a law signed by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott on Sept. 1, that bars teachers from discussing “a particular current event or widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs.” And if a teacher does broach discussion of a controversial issue in the classroom, the educator is required to “explore such issues from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective.”
The Texas law was a response by opposition to those who would teach LGBTQ issues and critical race theory, a framework for examining how laws and policies perpetuate racism and the push by progressives has angered conservative officials and conservative media who are outraged over providing information about the nation’s racist history and current policies.
The idea of censuring or negating Holocaust studies is not surprising in a state where far right attitudes are abundant and officials regularly spew out lies about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and a place where trump still has Republican lawmakers in his back pocket and they know that if they stray from Trumpian line they will face opposition and likely destruction in future primary races and let’s not forget trump’s reaction to the white supremacist rally in .
Let’s not forget that in August 2017, trump praised a group of white nationalists and neo-Nazis who marched in the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottsville, Va.; that he later referred to the anti-Semitic marchers as “my people”; that trump has refused to criticize the mob of trumpers who stormed the capitol on Jan. 6, including one man who was seen wearing a shirt emblazoned with “Camp Auschwitz,” a reference to the Nazi concentration camp; and that trump famously told the Proud Boys, a white supremacist and anti-Semitic group, “stand back and stand by.” And then there’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who compared the coronavirus masking measures to the Holocaust.
Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League reported that white supremacist propaganda in the U.S., including racist, anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQ messages, nearly doubled in 2020 to a record level. The group’s data showed 5,125 cases reported in 2020, compared to 2,724 in 2019.
Holocaust denial is hardly a new phenomenon as it proponents claim that the Holocaust was a myth or a fabrication. Typically, deniers claim falsely that the Holocaust was aimed only at deporting Jews and did not include their extermination; that Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas chambers for the genocidal mass murder of Jews; that the actual number of Jews murdered is significantly lower than the accepted figure of 5 million to 6 million, typically around a tenth of that figure; and that the Holocaust is a hoax perpetrated by the Allies, a Jewish conspiracy, or the Soviet Union.
Holocaust denial was a key part of the Nazi plan and when the Nazi defeat was clear, its leaders tried to destroy all evidence of mass extermination. In the 1930s, the Nazi government claimed allegations of concentration camps were lies put forward by the British government.
French journalist Maurice Bardèche was the first to write openly that he doubted the reality of the Holocaust and he is viewed by many as the father-figure of Holocaust denial.
Harry Elmer Barnes, at one time a mainstream American historian, claimed denial of the Holocaust in his later years and after World War II, Barnes became convinced that allegations made against Germany and Japan, including the Holocaust, were wartime propaganda that had been used to justify the United States’ involvement in World War II.
In 1978 the American far-right activist Willis Carto founded the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), an organization dedicated to publicly challenging the commonly accepted history of the Holocaust.
In 1987, Bradley R. Smith, a former media director of the Institute for Historical Review, founded the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), which has repeatedly attempted to place advertisements questioning whether the Holocaust happened, especially in college campus newspapers.
And the denials have been constant from enemies of Israel around the world, including the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. A press release by Hamas in April 2000 decried “the so-called Holocaust, which is an alleged and invented story with no basis.”
Mahmoud Abbas, a co-founder of Fatah and president of the Palestinian National Authority, wrote in his 1982 doctoral dissertation of “The Secret Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement.” In his book, “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism,” Abbas denied that six million Jews had died in the Holocaust, dismissing it as a “myth” and a “fantastic lie.”
A survey by the Anti-Defamation League in 2019, found that anti-Semitism is rejected by most Americans, with 79 percent lauding Jews’ cultural contributions to the nation, but 19 percent of Americans support the antisemitic canard that Jews co-control Wall Street and 31 percent said that “Jewish employers go out of their way to hire other Jews.”
Holocaust denial is prevalent among a minority of Americans as shown by the a 2020 survey of adult Millennials and Generation Z members, included 24 percent who said the Holocaust might be a myth or had been exaggerated. And lest we forget, anti-Semitic and white supremacist organizations still attract members in the U.S., including Christian Identity Churches, White Aryan Resistance, the Ku Klux Klan, and the American Nazi Party.
The largest neo-Nazi organizations in the United States are the National Nazi Party and the National Socialist Movement. Many members of these antisemitic groups shave their heads and tattoo themselves with Nazi symbols such as swastikas, SS, and “Heil Hitler.” Scary.