By Jett Rucker-

Can students handle the truth of inconvenient history?

Revisionists may feel an overwhelming sense of irony in noting educational disturbances currently occurring in the conservative bastion in the state of Colorado centered around the city of Golden.

There, reports say, students at two high schools are calling in “sick” and otherwise playing hooky while many of their teachers are doing the same thing.

The students’ cause, it would seem, is proposed revisions to the history curriculum intended to portray public affairs in the American past as more “orderly” (my word – the source is here). The contention centers around recent revision (there’s that word) of the content of the US History Advanced Placement tests (this was done by the College Board, far outside Colorado) that the local school board feels portrays the United States in an unduly critical manner. While much revisionism centers on just such matters, the offending revisions do not touch upon the subject of the Holocaust, another popular subject of revisionism. Pity, that, but the contrary would be much bigger news if it were true, as demonstrated recently in Rialto, California.

Meantime, the teachers’ agenda, like that of other opponents of revisionism, would seem to have powerful ulterior elements – to wit, stormy negotiations between the local teachers’ union and the local school board.

Le plus ça change . . .

By Jett Rucker-

Jan Karski monument in Warsaw

On a bronze bench on the Georgetown University campus, looking toward White-Gravenor Hall, sits the bronze effigy of a slim gentleman holding a cane to the ground and gazing beatifically at a chessboard occupying the center of the bench. There’s plenty of room at the opposite end of the bench for would-be friends of (the gentleman represented by) the statue to sit and pose for photographs with an icon of western civilization who truly may be held instrumental in the violent and early deaths of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers along with even greater numbers of Europeans, citizens of his native Poland among them.

(Read more…)

by Jett Rucker-

Should diversity of thought be tolerated when teaching the Holocaust?

Eighth-graders in the public schools of Rialto, California were (almost) treated to a view of the Holocaust probably never before presented in any school, public or private, in America. As a highly structured activity designed to be conducted over a period of seven days, the assignment presented material from three different Web sites with which students were to develop answers to questions such as “Was the Holocaust an actual tragic historical event or a propaganda tool?” and support the answers with citations of statements from both the presented material and other material, from two extensive websites and “the library,” to be used only if the student’s teacher “allows you to.”

(Read more…)

By Jett Rucker-

Letter distributed to Jews in Donetsk, Ukraine, April 2014

Abe Foxman, venerable head of the Anti-Defamation League, hasn’t exposed many false-flag attacks during his long career, but a peculiar echo of the Holocaust in eastern Ukraine has drawn just such a reaction from him.

It’s Byzantine. As this article details, Jews exiting a synagogue in Donetsk this Pesach just past were handed an ominous letter apparently from the local Russia-favoring militia instructing them to register with the local government as Jews (no report of anyone attempting to do so has surfaced as yet).

(Read more…)