California School Condemned For Assignment About Whether Holocaust Was ‘Political Scheme’
Students in Rialto Unified School District, outside of Los Angeles, asked 8th graders to argue about whether the Holocaust happened.
Students in the Rialto Unified School District near Los Angeles were asked to write an essay on whether the Holocaust was “merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain,” the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group, said Monday.
“This assignment mistakenly provides moral equivalency between history and bigotry,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Los Angeles-based center…
Mainstream public debate about the veracity of the Holocaust, in which an estimated 6 million Jews died, is almost unheard of in the United States.In what it called a clarification, the school district said Monday in a statement on its website that there was no offensive intent in the assignment, which was designed to “exercise the use of critical thinking skills.”
