£2m for Holocaust education is welcome – But what will it truly teach?
1 November 2024, 14:58 | Updated: 1 November 2024, 16:20
An extra £2m for Holocaust education can be no bad thing. My only question is: what does “Holocaust education” mean?
Listen to this article
Loading audio...
The fires of anti-Jewish racism are raging all around us. The traditional tools of Holocaust teaching are inadequate to put them out. We can’t fight fire with a few tears and a hanky. And yet, this is what we expect when we send schoolchildren for a day to Auschwitz. Or when we ask them to listen to a Holocaust survivor tell their story.
Yes, the audience feels horror at what happened. Yes, they feel empathy and admiration for incredible survivors like Martin Stern and Janine Webber. But the audience cannot link their stories to anti-Jewish racism today. This is where expert educators come in. It’s why I only employ people from professional teaching backgrounds to do the job. They know how to run a class of schoolkids ranging from the apathetic to the overtly hostile.
Our educators don’t just rely on the facts of 80-year-old history. They address the unconscious bias that surrounds the topic in a multicultural classroom today. They explain who Jews actually were and are. They do not teach the Holocaust as a one-off; but as the darkest chapter of a 2,000-year, ongoing story.
They do not say the culprits were the Nazis; but suggest the real culprit was European civilisation. The Holocaust could not have happened without the aid of 200 million ordinary men and women in 22 countries. What they felt about Jewish people was the real cause of the Holocaust. Not what they knew. What they felt.
Many descendants of that generation feel the same things about Jews today. For most, it is a quiet, passive assumption. And most will never have met a Jew. So, it is easier for them to remain silent when a monstrous anti-Jewish conspiracy theorist comes along. Like Sinwar, Nasrallah or Khamenei. Or their ‘useful idiots’ in this country.
Hard Left and Islamist propaganda about Jews is built on the same conspiracy theories as Nazism. They pin every world problem on ‘Jewish power’. The big difference is how they frame it.
The Nazis blamed ‘The Jews’. Anti-Israeli activists today blame ‘The Zionists’. When they try to erase the world’s only Jewish nation, they are saying “I hate the Jews”. When they repackage Israeli self-defence as ‘oppression’ but never criticise, let alone march against, barbaric oppressors like Putin, Assad or ISIS, they are saying, “I hate the Jews”. By their monomania, they reveal their delusional racism.
They hate Jews and the Jewish state simply for being Jewish; for the imagined behaviour traits of being Jewish. Power, greed, control. It’s the only racism to punch up not down, believing in the omnipotence of a people constituting 0.2% of the world population.
We at the National Holocaust Museum began teaching the Holocaust in 1995. Today we run a very different kind of Holocaust education, for a very different kind of Britain. We tackle the ‘Why’ of the Holocaust, not just the ‘What’ — because that ‘why’ is a rampant, racist elephant marauding right now through our city centres. It is waving banners with vile conspiracy theories which trample on truth, decency and cohesion for all of us. I hope the Government is truly prepared to tackle this elephant.
________________
Marc Cave is the Director of the National Holocaust Museum.
LBC Views provides a platform for diverse opinions on current affairs and matters of public interest.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official LBC position.
To contact us email views@lbc.co.uk
