Common Core Assignment is Virulent anti-Semitic Propaganda

Photo: While on an inspection tour of the newly liberated Ohrdruf concentration camp, General Dwight Eisenhower and a party of high ranking U.S. Army officers, including Generals Bradley, Patton, and Eddy, view the charred remains of prisoners that were burned upon a section of railroad track during the evacuation of the camp. Also pictured is Jules Grad (third from the left taking notes), correspondent for the “Stars and Stripes” U.S. Army newspaper.

In April of 2014, two thousand eighth graders in a California Common Core school system were given an 18-page group project assignment requiring them to “read and discuss multiple, credible articles” on the issue of whether or not the Holocaust “was an actual event in history, or merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain wealth.” The project, consuming seven full days of class time, included a multi-page required-reading “credible source” article from a website containing hundreds of pages of anti-Semitic propaganda, that begins with the declaration, “Within five minutes, any intelligent, open-minded person can be convinced that the Holocaust gassings of World War II are a profitable hoax.”

The “credible” article, which the thousands of students were mandated to read, next cites the findings of Fred A. Leuchter, described in the article as America’s leading specialist on execution equipment, finding no evidence of homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz and other death camps. In fact, Mr. Leuchter, named “Mr. Death” in a documentary film about his life, had no formal training or education in methods of execution. He claimed that he was asked by the defense team in a foreign Holocaust denial trial to take residue samples from gas chambers and that he found no evidence of the gassings.

Eerily, Mr. Death spent his honeymoon in Auschwitz; yet he is the scholarly, scientific source of “credible” evidence presented to a captive audience of students required, in order to pass a course, to read an article that touts a man who proudly honeymooned at the Auschwitz Hotel, which had served as the German officers’ quarters during the Holocaust.

In order to testify in favor of a Holocaust denier, Mr. Leuchter surreptitiously sneaked into crematoria in various death camps and illegally chiseled chunks of their walls as “samples” for chemical testing, using his bride as his “look-out.” Needless to say, she divorced this man, who testified in a courtroom on Hitler’s birthday that the Holocaust gassings were a hoax, based upon his report which was later translated into dozens of languages and featured in a special edition of the Aryan Nations Newsletter.

As a popular speaker at Neo-Nazi rallies, Mr. Leuchter denied the mass gas murders of Jews, saying:

It’s a tough job to execute several hundred people at once …. I think it would be easier to shoot them or hang them …. Why didn’t they just shoot them [the Jews]? Bullets would have been cheaper than doing this.

The Rialto group project’s “credible article” citing Mr. Leuchter’s scientific evidence of the Holocaust as a hoax also purveys every conceivable anti-Semitic claim – that the “Diary of Anne Frank is a hoax” and that Israel receives $35 billion per year from the United States, such that “every family in America could afford a brand new Mercedes Benz” were it not for “the irrepressible Zionist influence and control of our country.”

Mohammad Z. Islam, Superintendent Rialto School District

While the Rialto School District, with a city population that is 68% Hispanic and 16% Black, admitted under pressure that the assignment was “a mistake,” the evidence shows that the group project had been reviewed at multiple levels for at least many months and distributed to middle schools in February, when teachers were asked for comments prior to compelling students to read the insidious hate materials against Jews. Importantly, according to the Superintendent, Mohammad Z. Islam, who initially defended the lengthy and weighty Common Core group project, there were never any complaints received from parents, teachers, or administrators about the project, until it was widely exposed by the media. Thus, the virulent anti-Semitic theme of and materials included in the project were not “a mistake” until the public outcry forced an apology under duress. [You may reach Superintendent Islam at mislam@rialto.k12.ca.us]

Since when is it educationally sound or morally decent to subject captive students to hate propaganda, repeatedly described by their school as “credible”? As an educator for 36 years, with a doctorate in education and child psychology, I consider the assignment to be abusive to students and a gross violation of their inherent right to receive school materials that uplift their minds rather than thrust them into the depths of delusional hatred.

The actual question before the thousands of students infected with the pernicious materials they were required to read should be simply, “Is this assignment a hoax?” Assuredly, of the 2,000 children directly affected by the forced reading of hate literature and thousands more indirectly impacted, many have been irreparably poisoned against Jews. Forced resignations of the Superintendent and other defenders of the project should follow from the forced readings. The core of the project within Common Core should be thoroughly cleansed from the curriculum, although the young affected minds can never be cleansed of the filthy, fallacious thoughts planted in them by well-educated educators.

What is the cost of a hoax? This hoax has cost human minds. Sadly, the mind damage was done before the hoax was exposed, and the great-grandchildren of the Greatest Generation are left to question not only the Holocaust but also the enormous loss of American lives and limbs in defeating “a hoax.”

Did our veterans fight for “a hoax”? That part of the curriculum materials was “mistakenly” omitted – the testimonies, written records, films, and photographs of death camp liberators and Holocaust Survivors, the real eyewitnesses to history’s most hideous acts of human inhumanity.