DEARBORN, MI - A recent survey conducted by graduate students at the University of Michigan found that nearly one-half of high school students believed that the leader of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler, is nothing more than a myth or a meme used in internet cartoons, while one-forth had no idea who Hitler was.

This ignorance of history is believed to be caused by the perception among the local academic community that teaching the "potentially offensive" history about the Second World War and the Holocaust could upset Muslim students who come from families that outright deny that the Holocaust ever happened. In an effort to be more culturally accepting, some schools have chosen not to teach their students WWII and Holocaust history.

A teacher at one Dearborn school, who insisted on staying anonymous, shared this with us:

We started having problems teaching about the Holocaust back in 2001. Almost every parent-teacher conference ended in explosive arguments at the mention of the history class, especially concerning WWII and the Holocaust. We had the parents jumping from their seats, pointing fingers, and yelling at us in Arabic, accusing us of force-feeding Jewish propaganda to their children. Some parents even threw their shoes at us while we stood at the front of the room.

We used to have a Jewish teacher who lived through the Holocaust as a child. He would often show the students the number the Nazis tattooed on his arm during those historic lessons. Back in 2006, at one PTA meeting he had a tooth knocked out by a shoe thrown at him by an angry parent. When the School Board chose to side with the parent, he turned in his resignation. After that we figured the best way to avoid those kinds of incidents was to stop teaching about the events in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s.

Today, ten years after Dearborn schools dropped the Holocaust and WWII from their history classes, most of the millennial students in the area have little to no knowledge of one of the most important chapters in human history, and Adolf Hitler has become a fading memory. In the minds of the upcoming generation Hitler and the Nazi movement in general have been reduced to a strange curiosity or funny cartoon characters, distant from the realm of reality and the horrors they caused.

With Hitler and the Holocaust disappearing from the school curriculum, the prospect of reintroducing the historical lessons is becoming unlikely. Furthermore, an increasing number of the teachers and staff agree that it would cause discomfort and violate the "safe space" of their Muslim students.

"This is really about keeping the peace while promoting a multi-culturally-friendly environment for the students," said Umar Fareed-Asam, the head of the Dearborn Board of Education. "We can't cultivate tolerance and acceptance in our schools unless we stop teaching certain parts of so-called history that many in our community believe is a lie designed to demoralize and oppress them."

Mr. Fareed-Asam further stated that his school district had plans to purge the school libraries of any text that Muslim students may find offensive, such as the works of Heinrich Heine, Jack London, and Ernest Hemingway, only to name a few.

I need Snopes to help me figure out, whether this is true or not...

mi wrote:I need Snopes to help me figure out, whether this is true or not...

The truth is more terrifying than fiction, Comrade!

Chedoh wrote:The truth is more terrifying than fiction, Comrade!

Indeed, it is. Ignorance of "Hitler" may not even be the most terrifying...

Komrades! Somehow I believe this will not deter these fresh young minds from calling evil, knuckle dragging conservative rustic obstructionists fascists...

In accordance with accepted Laws of the Internet, I now invoke Godwin's Law.