Schools in Virginia allow opt-out from Holocaust lessons

The school board of Fairfax County, Virginia, is doing something terrible they won't do with LGBT ideology:

Virginia’s largest school district will let students skip a presentation from a Holocaust survivor, saying the diverse district includes students with “different experiences.”

“We understand that all students have different experiences. If you prefer to opt your child out from participating in this presentation, please email your child’s history teacher and they will be provided an alternate assignment. Please email your child’s history teacher with any questions that you may have,” a letter from Cooper Middle School said.

The letter referred to a scheduled presentation from a Holocaust survivor to seventh-graders, according to Adele Scalia, a mother of one of those middle schoolers.

[...] Scalia said on social media that she is drawing “less charitable (but more likely) conclusions.” The Left has been pressured by Islamic extremists to demonize Israel following Hamas’ terrorist attacks on the Jewish nation on October 7, and liberals have used the same language of “colonization” and “oppression” that they apply to whites in the U.S. to Israelis.

“If the email had said ‘We understand that some students are very sensitive and Mrs. X’s stories my be disturbing and traumatizing to them…’ I would have given them the benefit of the doubt. But it didn’t,” Scalia wrote.

Fairfax County contains a hotbed of Muslim extremism. A mosque there, attended by several 9/11 hijackers as well as the Fort Hood terrorist, was presided over by the father of Abrar Omeish, who until this year was a member of the Fairfax County school board. Omeish voted against an FCPS resolution offering a moment of silence for victims of 9/11 and another for victims of October’s Hamas attacks on Israel, said the decisive World War II victor at Iwo Jima was “unfortunate,” and gave a graduation speech encouraging students to “remember your jihad” and reject capitalism.

This definitely says quite a bit, right down to how the manager of a mosque is allowed on the school board, and even desecrated the memory of 9-11 victims. This also makes clear the sad path the USA is regrettably headed on if something isn't done to put a stop to this indoctrination.

The opt-out of the Holocaust lesson in FCPS, whose school board is entirely Democrat, is a reversal from the Left’s position on opt-outs on topics like transgenderism and anti-racism, which typically holds that hard truths are often uncomfortable, that it is the role of a school to instill certain values, and that on some issues, there are not two sides, but only good and evil.

[...] With some people claiming that the Holocaust did not even occur, the lesson is one of the last chances to hear from someone who survived it first-hand, as survivors are perishing of old age.

Prior to the election of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a video promoted by Virginia’s state Department of Education, then presided over by Democrat Atif Qarni, sought to dampen the emotional resonance of 9/11, advising teachers not to call it “terrorism” and to focus on “anti-Muslim racism” while making sure not “to reproduce what’s understood as American exceptionalism.”

This is the most terrible part about Virgina, how, Youngkin's election notwithstanding, there remains a considerable amount of far-left influence, and now it's resulted in a truly awful situation. It's clear Virginia has a serious problem with misogyny, anti-Semitism, and the Religion of Peace is really going to make things awful soon enough. Maybe most grating about the whole matter is that, if LGBT ideology is cleared away from schools in Fairfax, it'll only be due to Muslim influence, not because Judeo-Christians, Hinduists and Buddhists ask for it to stop. That's one of the worst things about "protected class" statuses.

Antisemitic Minnesotan wants Jewish children removed from their parents

Those who know how chilling the state of Minnesota's become nowadays - to the point where a family cousin of mine who once lived in St. Paul decided to move away - won't be surprised by this horrific news that could be worse than we think:

One of the candidates on the ballot for an upcoming Minnesota school board election is an avowed Holocaust denier who has called for all Jews to be sterilized and tattooed with the Star of David, all synagogues to be closed and all Jewish children to be forcibly removed from their parents.

Vaughn Klingenberg is one of seven candidates on the ballot for three open seats in Roseville, a suburb of the Twin Cities. In addition to his views on Jewish people, which he recently published under his own name on a blog, he also visited two area synagogues during the recent High Holidays, actions that have earned condemnation from the state’s attorney general and from local Jewish leaders alike.

“He has our attention. He’s clearly tried to get the attention of the public by spewing hateful, antisemitic rhetoric, which is obviously untrue but is also dangerous,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told a local news channel.

If memory serves, Ellison's a follower of Islam, which makes this even more angering, since the news plays into the hands of defenders of the Religion of Peace, and takes away vital attention from such issues.

In blog entries titled “Vaughn Klingenberg in Zionist Wonderland,” published on the site VTForeignPolicy on Sept. 20, Klingenberg outlines his proposal for Jews who “refuse to testify” against the wrongdoing of other Jews: They “will have all of their wealth stripped from them, they will be tattooed on their forehead with a Star of David (in order that they not remain hidden from the broader public), they will be stripped of all employment, they will receive as monthly income what is currently paid to those on disability, and they will be given Section 8 housing in which to live.”

He further outlines his plans to have all Jews “permanently rendered sterile so that they cannot, ever, reproduce,” to close all synagogues, and to have Jewish children “placed in foster homes to be adopted by non-Jews.” (Klingenberg said he would make exceptions for anti-Zionist Jews.)

Though the article may not actually mention the subject, what if this Klingenberg would want to have Jewish children undergo a transsexualizing, something that the far-leftists in Minnesota have already gotten around to upholding with many others? That would be a modern neo-Nazi's dream come true, and let's not forget the original National Socialists in WW2 produced the repulsive scientist Josef Mengele, who conducted horrific experiments on Jews in the past century. Such nightmares are something you can be sure even Islamofascists would celebrate, and no doubt, many already are. Don't be shocked if, unlike anybody in Minnesota considered a "kuffar", many Islamists do get exceptions and exemptions when it comes to LGBT ideology being forced down everyone's throats.

We must hope this awful man named Klingenberg won't be elected to the school board, but with the way Minnesota's going now, you can never be sure what'll happen.

Israeli president Isaac Herzog's speech at Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial service

While Herzog may be a leftist, an important distinction between him and some others is that he seems to know how to remain apolitical, and refrain from taking divisive positions most of the time. Here's what he had to say for Holocaust Memorial Day:

Israeli President Isaac Herzog spoke Wednesday at the State's Opening Ceremony for Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day 2022 at Yad Vashem.

"There are moments in which a single photograph, in black and white, tells the whole story and echoes all the words that could be said," Herzog began. "I stand here before you, carrying with me, etched on my heart, such a photograph. It is a rare photograph, which nobody who sees it can ever forget."

"The eyes see, the mind grasps, yet the soul refuses to believe that what appears in black and white is in fact blacker than black."

He continued, "It is not a photograph about big numbers, about thousands, tens of thousands, or millions. It is a photograph of a single Jewish family. A family executed by diabolical Nazi jackboots and their collaborators."

"A mother and her children on the edge of a pit. Rifle butts touching her back. We cannot see the woman's face, nor her children's. A moment before her body collapses into the pit of death, she bends over her infant children. And in a single moment, all the rifles send up a plume of smoke.

"They shoot her together, not making do with a single bullet. Coordinated. Efficient. One child slips beneath her. With her last ounces of strength, the mother grasps her little boy's hand, sitting on his knees barefoot, on soil drenched with blood.

"What did the mother whisper in her little boy's ear? Did she beg him not to cry? And what of the child? Did he cry? Did he stay silent? Did he understand? Was he afraid? The photograph is silent, but its voice cries out. It shakes us. It stuns us to silence.

"Do not murder." (Exodus 20:13)

"Do not raise your hand against the boy." (Genesis 11:12)

"Do not take the mother together with her young." (Deuteronomy 22:1)

"Do not slaughter it on the same day with its young." (Leviticus 22:28)

"This photograph was taken on 13 October 1941. When I saw it in a book by the historian Dr. Wendy Lower, a book about this photograph, and this photograph alone, I felt my entire essence being turned upside down inside me with grief, with fury, with pain."

Read the whole report. Herzog does a lot better than even the awful Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.

MIND-BOGGLING IGNORANCE

According to this source:

The Answers College Students Gave When Asked About The Holocaust Are Truly Depressing

Rhonda Fink-Whitman visited several college campuses to conduct her interviews and found that even some students at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania were completely clueless as to the world-changing events that took place just over sixty years ago.

Some students didn’t know where Normandy was, why the U.S. entered the war and who the president was at the time (Wilson, Eisenhower and even JFK were among the guesses).

One student reportedly thought that African Americans were the primary target in the Holocaust.

Fink-Whitman started her interviews with “What was the Holocaust?”

Here are some of the answers she received:

“Uh, I’m on the spot now.”

“It was a, uh, I don’t know how to say it like. It was something that happened in. Oh my God, I know the answer but I don’t know how to explain it.”

“I have no idea.”

“I have no idea … is it Europe? I don’t think so.”

She also asked which country Adolf Hitler had been the leader of:

“Amsterdam?”

“I forget.”

When she got to the University of Pennsylvania, Fink-Whitman asked students how many years ago the Holocaust occurred. One female student guessed around 1800 and then 300 years ago.Another UPenn student even thought that Winston Churchill was an American leader....

Video:


The words "dumbing down" don't even begin to describe the above travesty wrought by our educational system.

JANUARY 27: HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

Never forget.





Never again.

TZIPI LIVNI CRITICIZES NETANYAHU FOR BRINGING UP THE HOLOCAUST AT UN SPEECH

I would've posted this sooner, but because of Yom Kippur it took some time. Who would've thought that, if there's any Israeli politician who could slam Netanyahu for his excellent speech last week, that it would be none other than Tzipi Livni:

Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni became the first Israeli politician to criticize Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's landmark speech to the United Nations, in an interview she gave to Channel 2 on Saturday afternoon.

Netanyahu made a mistake when he invoked the horrors of the Holocaust in his criticism of Holocaust-denying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Livni said. The comparison could harm Israel's diplomatic efforts and make Israelis question their security, she said.

"We have to be careful not to encourage the world to think that Israel was established because of the Holocaust," Livni said. "When Obama said so in Egypt [at Cairo University in June], there was a justified uproar. It is wrong to compare any event in history to the Holocaust, because it minimizes the most horrible historic event that happened to the Jewish people. It also makes Israeli citizens feel less secure. The Jews of Israel in 2009 are not the Jews of Europe in 1939, and I've said this to Netanyahu."

Livni also attacked the prime minister on the diplomatic issue, saying that he is "neither ready nor interested in making the tough decisions."

"He is merely trying to survive, and this stalling might be good for Netanyahu, but it is not good for Israel," she said.

I don't think that disgraceful woman understood anything he said. He was not trying to compare anything, he was condemning Ahmedinejad for committing Holocaust-denial while threatening to commit mass murder with nuclear warfare. He was also expressing his disgust at the UN for allowing the monster a platform on which to spew his hatred.

I think Livni is the one who's going to frighten Israelis with her approach to the subject.

She even attempts moral equations - or something like that - in an attempt to offset the damage she's doing:

Livni also criticized her party's former prime minister, Ehud Olmert, for the far-reaching offer he made to the Palestinians that he revealed an interview to the BBC last week. She said that she, unlike Olmert, would not allow the influx of more than a thousand Palestinian refugees to within Israel's final borders.

"I had differences of opinion with [Olmert] on how to manage the diplomatic process and on its content," she said. "For me, there is no right of return, not symbolic and not partial. I would not even accept the entrance to Israel of a single refugee, and the Palestinians and the Arab world know this."

Sorry, but it's just weak, when she was lending herself at the time they were running the government to the damage Olmert was doing. I don't buy a word of what's she saying.

Likud MKs slammed Livni for criticizing Netanyahu's General Assembly speech despite the rave reviews it received in Israel and around the world. Party officials criticized Livni for vacationing in Hawaii during the proceedings at the UN and over the Rosh Hashana holiday.

"Livni should have stayed abroad instead of harming the diplomatic efforts of the state," coalition chairman Ze'ev Elkin said.

"It is very unfortunate that instead of supporting the prime minister in his struggle against Iran and international terror and welcoming his successful speech at the UN that was universally praised, the head of the opposition is allowing politics to interfere is issues that are part of the Israeli consensus."

I fully agree on that. Now is not the time for pathetic and needless criticism of a speech that's meant to protest evil. Livni is only showing why she really has no talent to be a prime minister, let alone a politician.

CHINA REMEMBERS ITS WW2 ERA JEWISH COMMUNITY

Here's an article in the Jerusalem Post about the Jewish community China once had in Shanghai of people who sought refuge during the Holocaust.

RIP: IRENA SENDLER

Excerpt from this obituary in the Washington Post:

...In recent years, a biography of Mrs. Sendler called her "Mother of the children of the Holocaust," and Polish President Lech Kaczynski awarded her the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest civilian decoration.

"Every Jewish child who survived due to my efforts has justified my existence on this Earth but is no cause for praise," Mrs. Sendler told the Express. "We who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. That term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little. I could have done more. This regret will follow me to my death."...

Read the rest of the article.

Read more about Irena Sendler and "Life in a Jar: The Irena Sendler Project" HERE. More details about her acts of heroism in saving 2500 Jewish children can be found HERE.

SWISS PRESIDENT INVITES IRAN TO OFFER "VARIOUS PERCEPTIONS OF THE HOLOCAUST" AT CONFERENCE

There was a time when Europeans' behavior was limited by a certain sense of taste and an aversion to the unseemly. That time is long past:

Switzerland secretly approached Iran offering to hold a conference regarding "various perceptions of the Holocaust" in Geneva, the Swiss magazine Weltwoche reported earlier this week. The proposal was made via confidential memorandum from Switzerland's President, Micheline Calmy-Rey, to Iranian deputy foreign minister Saaid Jalili, during his visit in Switzerland last December. The Swiss foreign ministry objected to the idea, annulling it. Calmy-Rey's proposal, which would have voiced anew the Iranian doubts over the very existence of the Holocaust, outraged many Jewish organizations, which demanded she apologize.

Charming, no? We wonder if they would have held the conference in a bank. Or maybe some kind of tastefully decorated conference room. "Mme. Calmy-Rey", the Iranian representative would say, "that's a lovely painting. Wherever did Switzerland acquire it?" To which she might respond: "oh that old thing? You know, we have no idea - it just turned up around here in the late 1940s."

[Cross-posted to Mere Rhetoric]

May Day

There are some people who want to make May Day (sorry I missed it) a Memorial to the Victims of Communism

Welcome to our annual Day of Remembrance. In past years, it has been held at our previous blog Catallarchy. This year, we were able to have our new project The Distributed Republic up and running just in time to host it here. Our goal is remember the plight of those lost lives to an ideology which promised to free the workers of the world but did the opposite.

There are a number of links to articles on the subject.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

AS FAR AS SMIRKING ANTI-SEMITISM GOES, UC IRVINE MUSLIMS HAVE REALLY OUTDONE THEMSELVES

UC Irvine blogger Reut Cohen is all over this latest outrage:

The MSU is, once again, manipulating the Holocaust to push their anti-Israel agenda. Although the Holocaust is a term that refers to the plight of Jewish people from Europe during World War II, the MSU continuously insists on promoting their despicable events with the use of this term.

The only Holocaust survivor that they've brought in to speak also happens to be a member of the International Solidarity Movement. The other two speakers are as follows: a lunatic anti-Semitic anti-Zionist imam from DC and a disgraced plagiarist who makes ever our academic commitment look admirable. If you guessed that the latter is Ward Churchill - and that UCI's Muslim Student Union managed to wrap anti-Americanism into their annual week of particularly intense Israel hatred - then you're the big winner. In a manner of speaking.

[Cross-posted to Mere Rhetoric]