Australian Jewish News, Thursday, August 19, 2004

by Mark Franklin [no relation to Larry Franklin]

ALLOWING high-school teachers to choose whether or not they teach Holocaust history in high schools is unacceptable, NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president David Knoll said this week.

David Irving comments: I AM already inundated with emails from innocent school children in Australia, frantically asking me to do their Holocaust homework for them. Do the Jews in Australia have no insight into child psychology whatever? If they were disliked until now, this addition of Holocaust propaganda indoctrination to their proper school homework burden is one surest way to make them hated throughout the length and breadth of one of the most beautiful countries on earth. And your average Australiam school teacher is hardly going to warm to his Jewish fellow citizens after this either. My message to David Knoll and the Jews of Australia: Get a Life. Before you lose it all over again.

“It leaves a dangerous gap in the immunisation of the next generation from racial hatred generally and from racial hatred against the Jews in particular,” Knoll told the board’s AGM on Tuesday night.

The board is currently lobbying the NSW [New South Wales] Government and the Department of Education to ensure that all high-school students study Holocaust history, he said.

An AJN investigation earlier this year revealed that many schools in NSW do not include it in their syllabus.

A similar survey of Victorian high schools found that while Holocaust education is not mandatory, the proportion of schools teaching about the Shoah appeared to be higher than in NSW.

 Australian Twelfth-Grader Jenna submits her essay on Holocaust deniers to Mr Irving, and he suggests changes (pdf)