OpEdNews, PA
Feb 18 2008
Always Remember And Don’t Ever Forget
by The Stiletto
French President Nicolas Sarkozy wants all fifth-graders in his
country to be `entrusted with the memory’ of one of the 11,000 Jewish
children who were deported to Auschwitz and other death camps in
eastern Europe during the Nazi occupation of France. Speaking to
French Jews at a dinner in Perigueux, Sarkozy said, `Nothing is more
moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who has
the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, in
the dawn of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew.’
Since 2002, fifth-graders have studied the Holocaust as a crime
against humanity, watching films, visiting museums and memorials and
taking field trips to concentration camps, The New York Times
reports, and schools that lost students to the Holocaust hang plaques
in their memory.
Some psychiatrists and teachers object to the curriculum change on
the grounds that forcing students to identify with a specific victim
would be psychologically traumatic, and would `unfairly burden
children with the guilt of previous generations,’ reports Reuters.
Counters Sarkozy: `You do not traumatize children by giving them the
gift of the memory of a country.’
Others complain that the proposal doesn’t go far enough, and should
also include Gypsies and other victims of the Nazis. The Stiletto
agrees, and suggests that the proposal also be extended to include
the Armenian Genocide – France has a large population of Armenians in
the Diaspora, and their history of near-extermination is currently
not taught in French schools.
The Armenian Genocide is not taught in Turkish schools – it is a
criminal offense to teach, talk about or write about Ottoman Turkey’s
systematic annihilation of its Christian Armenian population (second
item) – which is why Turks are convinced it never happened (last
item, `The Other Shoe Drops’).
Israeli children do not learn about the Armenian Genocide in school,
according to historian and scholar Yair Auron, author of `The
Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide’ (Transaction
Books, 2003), which is why Israel can enter into a military and
economic alliance with Turkey without too many people asking
inconvenient and uncomfortable questions about what `never again’
should mean to Israelis.
And, except for a handful of school districts in MA and CA that have
a large Armenian population, the Armenian Genocide is no longer
taught in American schools, which is why our elected officials caved
in to Turkish threats and tabled a vote on a symbolic resolution to
acknowledge the 20th century’s first crime against humanity.
"It is ignorance that produces abominable situations. It is not
knowledge," insists Sarkozy.
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