Are UK dropping Holocaust from curriculum as offends Muslims?

Rumours that the UK are debating whether to ban teaching the holocaust for fear of offending Muslims are spreading across the Internet.

Facebook posts like the one below claiming that the UK has just had a debate as to whether to remove the Holocaust from the school curriculum because it “offends Muslims” have sparked a viral rumour.

When I was a kid, I couldn’t understand why Eisenhower was so popular. Maybe this will explain why.
General Eisenhower Warned Us.
It is a matter of history that when the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, found the victims of the death camps he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead.
He did this because he said in words to this effect:
‘Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses – because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened’
THIS WEEK, THE UK DEBATED WHETHER TO REMOVE THE HOLOCAUST FROM ITS SCHOOL CURRICULUM BECAUSE IT ‘OFFENDS’ THE MUSLIM POPULATION WHICH CLAIMS IT NEVER OCCURRED.
It is not removed as yet… However, this is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it.
It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended. This message is being posted as a memorial chain, in memory of the, six million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians, and 1,900 Catholic priests Who were ‘murdered, raped, burned, starved, beaten, experimented on and humiliated’ while many in the world looked the other way!
Now, more than ever, with Iran , among others, claiming the Holocaust to be ‘a myth,’ it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets.
This message is intended to reach 400 million people! Be a link in the memorial chain and help distribute this around the world.
How many years will it be before the attack on the World Trade
‘NEVER HAPPENED’, Because it offends some Muslim???
Do not just delete this message; it will take only a minute to pass this along.
FREEDOM ISN’T FREE…SOMEONE HAD TO PAY FOR IT
IN GOD WE TRUST, IN GOD I TRUST!
WE WILL SURVIVE WITH GOD’S HELP
May you always have Love to Share, Health to Spare, and
Friends who Care…

It’s a hoax, and one that dates back to around 2007. April 2007 to be exact, which was the time that the Historical Association published a report concerning the teaching of emotive and controversial subjects in history, which started the whole debacle.

To be clear, the Historical Association’s report had no agenda even remotely concerned with censoring certain subjects, including the Holocaust, for any reasons whatsoever. The objective of the report was to investigate ways of teaching such emotive subjects more effectively.

Within the report it was noted that one history department had avoided discussing the Holocaust, not for fearing of offending Muslims, but for fear of confronting anti-Semitic sentiment from Muslim pupils. Given the revelation of this isolated incident, this report then sparked a slew of 2007-penned, misleading and sensationalist media articles that reported that schools everywhere were dropping the Holocaust from the school curriculum because of offending Muslims, which was untrue.

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Needless to say, these misleading media articles – many still exist today – created mass confusion, a confusion to widespread it even has its own Wikipedia page explaining what happened. In fact so widespread, then Schools Secretary Ed Balls had to write to every Embassy in the country dismissing the confusion.

Since then the rumours have rarely stopped, spreading throughout 2007, 2008 (when the bulk of the example above was first penned) and coming back again in 2013 and now 2015. The rumours blatantly misrepresent the content of the History Association’s report and assert that “this week there has been a debate” over whether the Holocaust will be dropped, which is simply untrue. In fact these rumours have claimed that this phantom debate occurred “this week” for well over 7 years now.

Despite the rumour being dismissed back in 2007 by many including from the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET.org.uk), it seems to come back every year or so, often unchanged, and it is essentially one of a large number of ‘it offends Muslims’ type hoaxes that we see all of the time.

Karen Pollock, the Chief Executive of HET said back in 2007 –

Obviously we and all Holocaust related organisations in the UK take this very seriously, however on this occasion we want to allay all fears and impress upon everyone that the Holocaust is not being removed from the National Curriculum

Also worthy of a mention is that this rumour has not only affected the UK. In fact at one point the hoax managed to travel overseas to the United States where somebody managed to misinterpret UK to mean University of Kentucky instead of United Kingdom. And as is so common with these types of rumours, this sparked a spin-off version of the hoax, this time targeting the University of Kentucky as the alleged school to drop teachings of the Holocaust for fear of offending Muslims – a rumour the university had to later refute via a statement.

Bottom line – the Holocaust is still very much in the curriculum, and schools still do teach it to their pupils. There are no plans to drop it in the future.

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