How do you educate Muslim kids about the Holocaust?

[Potoooooooo]

http://forward.com/articles/216119/dutch-muslim-students-resist-holocaust-education/#ixzz3WR7HOE7d


A number of Dutch schools refrain from teaching about the Holocaust because of resistance from Muslim pupils, teachers told lawmakers.
The centrist Christian Union party held a roundtable discussion about Holocaust education with teachers and other professionals Wednesday in parliament in The Hague, The Algemeen Dagblad daily reported.
“Holocaust survivor Bloeme Evers does not dare give guest lessons in some schools,” Arie Slob, the party’s parliamentary leader and a former history teacher, told the daily , describing the discussion. “I am horrified by this. It is unacceptable that 70 years after the Holocaust, anti-Semitism in the Netherlands is growing.”

“The teacher says Jews, the pupils say Gaza,” said Feriani, who is Muslim. “The teacher says Holocaust, the pupils say it’s all bullshit.” In class, he adds, “It’s always the Jews’ fault. Some pupils say they [Jews] don’t belong. It’s difficult.” There are no available figures on the difficulties examined, the report said.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Assuming this article is accurate, the simple fix is to review the historical events and all of the people killed at the camps. And then look at the bulk number to give it the proper perspective it requires. Turn the statistic in to people.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Educate them by presenting the facts and failing anyone who doesn't put those facts onto a test. If they're so anti-semitic that they want to deny the Holocaust then they don't deserve a passing grade in history the same way that anyone who's so anti-science that they want to deny evolution doesn't deserve a passing grade in biology.

 

[Valjean]

Don't graduate them unless they can credibly counter the pro holocaust evidence presented in class.

If an astronomy student insists the Sun orbits the Earth he will fail an astronomy class. If a student maintains that Pi=3 she will fail a mathematics class.
If a history student rejects one of the most well documented events in history, citing unsupported political propaganda, he should fail that class.

If failing the history class means he will not be awarded a degree, so be it. A degree is a guarantee of competence. A holocaust denier is historically incompetent.

 

[ksen]

How do you educate muslim kids about the Holocaust?

Throw them in an oven.

 

[SimpleDon]

I don't claim to understand religion or the grip that it has on so many people. But isn't this is the basic reason for religion, to deny reality? To build a fantasy that in some way denys what we know to be true, but that we wished wasn't? That we go to a better place after we die. That good always triumphs in the end. That we are right about our fantasies and every other fantasy is wrong, and those people are going to hell.

In effect aren't we saying that these people have to be realistic in their fantasies?

 

[ideologyhunter]

Religion doesn't refine the intellect. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Prez mentioned how Christians once used Bible texts to justify the Crusades and slavery and Jim Crow, and our homegrown nutjobs lost their minds over his unpatriotic, irreligious assault on the faith community.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Don't graduate them unless they can credibly counter the pro holocaust evidence presented in class.

What? That's dangerously close to teaching them to think, or maybe holding them accountable for their actions/opinions! Schools don't DO that!

Also, I see no reason to give them a forum. Same as I would not give class time to a creationist or to a 'pi is a rational number' theorist or the guy who thinks the Arabs stole algebra from Ethiopians.
Same as when my wife teaches sentence diagramming.
She really doesn't CARE if the student has interviewed 500 family members and fellow congregationists and everyone at the drive-through where they work, and none of them ever diagramed a sentence following graduation.
The state has decided that the student will know what a verb is, and a preposition, and an adverb, and she feels this is a method which will force them to learn that information.

It's the assignment. Do the assignment. Or don't.
Your grade reflects the work you do, not whether or not you agree with Mrs. &Co. about the value of being able to diagram the preamble to the Constitution. (Sometimes she threatens to leave that as the assignment for class when she has a substitute teacher. Never fails to scare the hell out of the substitute teachers in the room.....)

 

[ksen]

But isn't this is the basic reason for religion, to deny reality?

No.

 

[Keith&Co.]

I don't claim to understand religion or the grip that it has on so many people. But isn't this is the basic reason for religion, to deny reality?

I don't think the 'basic' reason for religion is to deny reality. Rather, it's to explain it. At least at the beginning.
It's easier to understand weather if you think some asshole runs it and is out to get you. And complexity is more attractive if you attach agency to it. And it's comforting to think that maybe you can appease the sky-assholes or the ground-assholes or the river-assholes and stay safe from their whims.

It has BECOME that way, though. The net effect of religion, these days, as people hew to it rather than huge piles of evidence, is to deny that evidence, unless it can be filtered in such a way as to dovetail with the religion.

Mostly, it seems to me, because they're still afraid of the sky-asshole and what he'll do to them if they allow doubt.

 

[dystopian]

The article is somewhat misleading: there are no schools that have a policy of not teaching the holocaust; and the Dutch article in the AD doesn't claim that there are. Muslim students denying the holocaust and making it difficult to teach *is* something of an issue in some areas though; but afaik there are no schools that don't teach the holocaust because of it.

 

[maxparrish]

The Dutch are paying the price for allowing the significant immigration of Muslims. It a perfect world Muslims would be back in their parents (or their) country of origin and be free to spew all the anti-semitic propaganda they like. An alien people that cannot assimilate to the basic cultural and moral understandings and requirements of a modern and civilized host nation need to be shipped out.

 

[ksen]

You're not fooling anyone Max. You don't think the dutch are modern and civilized, I mean they think their government can do things competently.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Don't graduate them unless they can credibly counter the pro holocaust evidence presented in class.

If an astronomy student insists the Sun orbits the Earth he will fail an astronomy class. If a student maintains that Pi=3 she will fail a mathematics class.
If a history student rejects one of the most well documented events in history, citing unsupported political propaganda, he should fail that class.

If failing the history class means he will not be awarded a degree, so be it. A degree is a guarantee of competence. A holocaust denier is historically incompetent.

This. A holocaust denier fails history. If that means they don't graduate then they don't graduate.

 

[maxparrish]

You're not fooling anyone Max. You don't think the dutch are modern and civilized, I mean they think their government can do things competently.

They are not up to my standards (but who is?) but compared to the Muslim world they are utopia.
,

 

[maxparrish]

Rather than shrink from teaching these "Islam" pre-programmed students, Dutch schools ought to make sure that they engage in activities of participatory learning. A rural school district in SE Tenn. saw fit to teach its children an essential event in history - the children, through the help of a teacher, obtained one of the few remaining death train cars Europe, a relic lost in a huge train yard (as I recall).

They built a holocaust museum in the car, filling it with 6, then 11 million paperclips - all of them obtained in a national and international campaign for people to send at least one clip, each representing a death in the Nazi extermination camps. Anyone who has seen the moving documentary on PBS, knows the story:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_Clips_Project

The Children's Holocaust Memorial consists of an authentic German transport car (which arrived in the Baltimore seaport on September 9, 2001) surrounded by a small garden. The railcar is filled with 11 million paper clips (6 million for murdered Jews and 5 million for Roma, Catholics, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other groups). The monument was uncovered on the anniversary of the Kristallnacht, November 9, 2001.^{[2] [3]}
Linda Pickett sculpted eighteen butterflies of twisted copper which are embedded in concrete around the railcar. Butterflies came from a poem written by a child who lived inTerezin concentration camp in 1942 (I Never Saw Another Butterfly) and the number 18 in Hebrew symbolizes life (in Gematria, 18 is the numerical value of the word חי, pronounced Chai, meaning life). Inside the railcar, besides the paper clips, there are the Schroeders’ book and a suitcase filled with letters of apology to Anne Frank by a class of German schoolchildren.
A sculpture designed by an artist from Ooltewah, Tennessee stands next to the car, memorializing the 1.5 million children murdered by the Nazis, and incorporating another 11 million paper clips.

 

[laughing dog]

An alien people that cannot assimilate to the basic cultural and moral understandings and requirements of a modern and civilized host nation need to be shipped out.

If the USA applied that standard, where do you think you would live?

 

[Bomb#20]

The Dutch are paying the price for allowing the significant immigration of Muslims. It a perfect world Muslims would be back in their parents (or their) country of origin and be free to spew all the anti-semitic propaganda they like.

Well, actually, in a perfect world Muslims would all convert to atheism.

An alien people that cannot assimilate to the basic cultural and moral understandings and requirements of a modern and civilized host nation need to be shipped out.

One of the basic cultural and moral understandings and requirements of a modern and civilized host nation is that there is no such thing as "a people". "People" is the plural of "person".

Granted, judging from the typical cultural and moral understandings of the people of modern host nations, none of our nations are civilized yet. We need to work on that.

 

[dystopian]

The Dutch are paying the price for allowing the significant immigration of Muslims. It a perfect world Muslims would be back in their parents (or their) country of origin and be free to spew all the anti-semitic propaganda they like. An alien people that cannot assimilate to the basic cultural and moral understandings and requirements of a modern and civilized host nation need to be shipped out.

Contrary to your opinion and that of some of our more colorful politicians; most muslims assimilate just fine and the religion doesn't appear quite the threat as people have claimed. The number of muslims in the country has actually dropped instead of increased (doomsayers were worried muslims would start to outnumber us). According to studies, a little over half of Dutch muslims have been secularized to such a degree that they rarely if ever see a mosque from the inside.

It's less an issue of muslim students having issue with jews as it's arab students who may or may not be muslims digging their heels in the cultural sands because they feel rejected and hated by dutch society because of the local equivalent of people like you.

 

[Keith&Co.]

It a perfect world Muslims would be back in their parents

Wow, there's an image.