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WOW: 8th Grade Common Core Lesson in California Asks Kids If Holocaust Was Real or Just a ‘Propaganda Tool’

Photo Credit: IJ Review

Photo Credit: IJ Review

By Soopermexican / IJ Review.

School officials said they will be rewriting a controversial essay question developed through the Common Core guidelines that asks eighth graders to consider whether the Holocaust a “real event” or “merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain.”

From the San Bernardino Sun:

The district says the assignment is merely to teach students to evaluate the quality of evidence made by advocates or opponents of an issue. “When tragic events occur in history, there is often debate about their actual existence,” the assignment reads. “For example, some people claim the Holocaust is not an actual historical event, but instead a propaganda tool was used for political and monetary gain. Remember to address counterclaims (rebuttals) to your stated claim.

Wait, what? Since when do we debate whether tragic events happen? No one doubts 9/11 happened, or the disappearance of the Malaysian flight, or that Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. Is this really “critical thinking”? According to their interpretation of the Common Core, it is:

The project was designed by district teachers and assigned during the eighth grade’s “Diary of Anne Frank” unit, according to district spokeswoman Syeda Jafri.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: REUTERS

Photo Credit: REUTERS

California school district cancels lesson plan that involved Holocaust denial

By Karl de Vries.

Following a storm of criticism – and at least one death threat – a California school district Monday canceled a lesson plan that instructed middle school students to make arguments denying the Holocaust happened.

The assignment, aimed at eighth-grade students in Southern California’s Rialto Unified School District, sought to teach children to learn the nature of propaganda.

“Some people claim the Holocaust is not an actual event, but instead is a propaganda tool that was used for political and monetary gain,” the assignment said, according to a document posted by The Daily Bulletin. “You will read and discuss multiple, credible articles on the issue, and write an argumentative essay, based upon cited textual evidence, in which you explain whether or not you believe this was an actual event in history, or merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain wealth.”

But critics said the assignment risked misleading the 13- and 14-year-old students into believing that propaganda about the Holocaust bears factual legitimacy.

“Whatever (the district’s) motivation, it ends up elevating hate and history to the same level,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, told FoxNews.com on Monday. “We should train our kids to have critical thinking, but the problem here is the teacher confused teaching critical thinking with common sense, because common sense dictates you don’t comingle propaganda with common truth.”

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: New York Public Library Digital Collection

Photo Credit: New York Public Library Digital Collection

State Department ‘partner’ of fair featuring anti-Semitic books

By European Jewish Press.

The US State Department is listed as a “cultural partner” of the 24th Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, which reportedly features a number of anti-Semitic publications. Books in English and Arabic listed on display at the Fair include Holocaust denial, Henry Ford’s “The International Jew” and Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

Also exhibited is “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” the second most published book in the Arab world, which promotes the anti-Semitic notion that Jews are planning global domination.

According to the Book Fair’s official website, the US Department of State is among the event’s “cultural partners” along with Ikea, France 24, The National Geographic and the French Embassy.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of Jewish human rights group the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), urged the US to disassociate itself from the fair.

Read more from this story HERE.

Atheist Group Opposes Holocaust Memorial on Ohio Statehouse Grounds

Photo Credit: daniel-libeskind.comA Wisconsin-based atheist group has expressed its opposition to a Holocaust memorial set to be built on the ground of the Ohio statehouse, arguing that its location violates the separation of church and state and calling the Star of David “exclusionary” in memorializing victims of the Nazis.

But Ohio Gov. John Kasich and proponents of the memorial say it will teach people about man’s inhumanity to man and that, contrary to the atheists’ claim, it will include all those killed by the Nazis — including U.S. soldiers, ethnic and religious minorities, homosexuals and the mentally ill.

Joyce Garver Keller, executive director of Jewish Communities, an organization that represents Jewish groups across the state, said the memorial is intended “mostly to honor those who had survived and who had come to Ohio to build a life.”

Keller said it is appropriate to build the structure on state grounds because it will “remind lawmakers and those who work in and around government of the important role and responsibility they have in speaking out in the face of hatred, anti-Semetism and genocide.”

“The Holocaust did not begin in concentration camps in the ovens with smoke stacks and mass graves,” Keller told FoxNews.com. “It began in the halls of government with the passage of laws that targeted Jews, taking their properties, their businesses, their home, their freedom and ultimately their lives.

Read more from this story HERE.

Scalia: Judicial Activism a Cause of the Holocaust

Photo Credit: The Higgs BosonU.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia used the twin terrors of Nazi Germany and radical Islam to warn a Snowmass Village audience Saturday about the dangers of judicial activism.

Speaking to a gathering of the Utah State Bar Association at the Westin Resort in Snowmass Village, the longest-serving justice on the nation’s highest court lamented a trend among federal judges, including his colleagues on the Supreme Court, to read and interpret the U.S. Constitution as a “living document” that changes over time…

When judges begin to reinterpret founding documents like the Constitution and make value-laden decisions about individual rights and liberties, Scalia said, they distort the workings of a democratic society. The title of Scalia’s talk, “Mullahs of the West: Judges as Moral Arbiters,” underscores his point that societal decisions about morality and human rights — most of which have no right or wrong answers — should be made in the political arena and not by the courts…

Scalia cited numerous issues that have been thrown to the courts — a woman’s right to an abortion, society’s right to execute someone for a crime, whether “homosexual sodomy” ought to be allowed — and claimed that judges are unqualified to answer them. Medical doctors, engineers, ethicists and even “Joe Six Pack” would be just as qualified as a legal professional to settle some issues that have come before the high court…

Scalia opened his talk with a reference to the Holocaust, which happened to occur in a society that was, at the time, “the most advanced country in the world.” One of the many mistakes that Germany made in the 1930s was that judges began to interpret the law in ways that reflected “the spirit of the age.” When judges accept this sort of moral authority, as Scalia claims they’re doing now in the U.S., they get themselves and society into trouble.

Read more from this story HERE.

Atheist Group Seeks to Block Star of David on Holocaust Memorial

Photo Credit: BreitbartAn atheist activist organization wants a proposed Ohio statehouse Holocaust memorial to remove the Star of David symbol, which, the group claims, is an “exclusionary” religious symbol.

According to The Columbus Dispatch, the non-profit Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), known for its activism concerning church-state separation, claimed that the inclusion of the Judaic symbol is a breach of the U.S. Constitution.

In a June 14 letter to Richard H. Finan, chairman of the Capitol Square Review and Advisory Board, two FFRF officials said they have no objections to a Holocaust memorial at the statehouse, but claimed that the cut-out version of the six-pointed Star of David would be a violation of the separation of church and state as provided for in the Constitution.

“Permitting one permanent sectarian and exclusionary religious symbol… would create the legal precedent, for instance, to place an equally large or larger permanent Latin cross on Capitol grounds,” wrote Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-presidents of the Madison, Wisconsin group. Gaylor is the daughter of Anne Nicol Gaylor, author of Abortion Is A Blessing. Barker said that the Holocaust memorial, as currently proposed, would amount to a “constitutionally problematic endorsement of religion.”

The FFRF officials said the memorial excludes five million non-Jews killed in the Holocaust, including Roma Gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled, and others.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Path to Hitler’s Eugenics Paved with Legal Abortion

“People have often asked, and we’ve asked ourselves—how could Nazi Germany participate in the Holocaust? How can you take entire segments of your society, Jews as well as Gypsies as well as dissenting pastors, and round them up, and exterminate them in the millions?” Brock Thoene says, “Germany was widely regarded as the most advanced, the most civilized, most cultured nation in Europe of that era. It seems almost imponderable. How can you reconcile those things?”…

Speaking on the phone from his office, Brock Thoene offers his own theories on the questions he has just posed to me. First, he notes, the Nazi regime demonized the Jews and other dissenters as the root of Germany’s economic problems. However, one of his theories touches rather shockingly on a very controversial issue: Abortion.

“There’s the other thing that’s often overlooked,” Thoene notes, “In the year before Hitler came to power, 1932 in Germany, there were one million abortions. Germany was not even that populous a nation—I don’t know what the German population was in 1932, but a million! A million is a significant number. If you don’t have regard for the segment of your society that is least able to defend itself, that being the unborn, then why do you accord protection to anybody else?”

This, of course, is a controversial point to say the least—but one that demands attention. Once the concept of “personhood” is separated the status of being a human being, it becomes an arbitrary label to be bestowed or rescinded by the state. Historical circumstances surrounding the denial of personhood, of course, differ widely—with one brutally evident similarity: in each case where personhood was denied to human beings—Jews, African Americans, Native Americans, and now the pre-born, the youngest members of our species—atrocities resulted. Or, in the case of abortion, are still ongoing.

To Brock Thoene, the logical progression from killing one subset of human beings into killing another is almost inevitable. “The only people who can protect the unborn are folks…who have the ability to stand up for themselves,” Thoene tells me, “Once you’ve made that decision that as a society you don’t extend the protections of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness to the unborn, it’s not really much of an issue then to say, the elderly are a drain on society, so whether they live or die is up to the state. The physically handicapped are a drain on society, so whether they live or die is up to the state. The mentally challenged, the mentally ill, all of these groups—and then it’s really not much of a stretch, it’s just one more step to say, ‘Well, the Jews…’ or whoever you want to target, Christian pastors, dissenting politicians, and so on. They are a drain on society because they are in opposition to what we know is progress.”

Read more from this story HERE.

On the Eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Anonymous Conducts Massive Cyberattack on Israel

Photo Credit: AP

Hackers launched a coordinated cyberattack on Israel over the weekend in an attempt to “wipe Israel off the map of the Internet,” defacing some 20,000 Israeli Facebook accounts and nearly 2,000 Israeli websites.

The anarchist hacking collective known as Anonymous formally launched “Operation Israel” on Sunday, the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day. The stated goal of the attack was to wreak havoc on Israeli servers, government websites, and Internet users.

The hackers penetrated and defaced multiple Israeli websites including government, schools, banks, and a website for children with cancer, according to regional media reports.

Among the government websites breached were the Central Bureau of Statistics, the Government Publications Office, the Haifa Sewage Treatment Plant, and the National Insurance Institute, which provides social security benefits to Israelis, according to a list of hacked websites posted on Hackers News Bulletin.

The hackers brought Israel-based web traffic to a crawl on Saturday and leaked the personal information of more than 1,700 Israeli credit card users, according to Hackers News Bulletin, which reported the Jewish state had lost some $2 billion as a result of the attack.

Read more from this story HERE.

On The Anniversary Of The Nazi Invasion, This Is What Austrians Are Saying About Hitler

Photo Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Seventy-five years after the Nazi invasion and occupation of Austria, a newspaper in country has asked citizens about their opinion of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi annexation during World War II. Jewish leaders who have been raising the alarm about anti-Semitism in Austria say the results were not surprising.

Forty-two percent said life was not all bad under Hitler, while 61 percent said they would be interested in a strong-armed leader who did not have to deal with democratic challenges like political opponents and elections. The survey, published this weekend, is getting prominent play in the media in Israel, which is home to some 250,000 Holocaust survivors. That’s half the number of survivors who arrived in the country since Israel was founded in 1948.

Reuters reports:

Timed to coincide with the 75th anniversary next week of Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany, the Market Institut poll for newspaper Der Standard found 61 per cent of respondents, mostly the elderly, liked the idea of a strong man as leader.

Many Austrians wanted a union, or Anschluss , with Germany in 1938. A few Austrians put up resistance that grew over time. In the latest poll, 53 per cent thought the Anschluss was voluntary and 46 per cent saw Austria as a victim. Forty-two per cent said “not everything was bad under Hitler” while 57 per cent saw no good aspects to the Hitler era.

Additionally, 54 percent said they believed neo-Nazi groups would succeed in Austrian elections this September if they were not banned there.

Read more from this story HERE.

Holocaust Survivor Returns US Flag to Family of Soldier Who Rescued Him

A Holocaust survivor returned an American flag to the family of a soldier who had given him the gift, the sole memento from his war-torn childhood that he kept for 67 years.

Stephan Ross, now 81, was found by U.S. serviceman Steve Sattler, emaciated and terrified at Dachau concentration camp in Germany. After handing over his rations to the boy during the 1945 liberation, Sattler then gave him his handkerchief decorated with the Stars and Stripes.

On Veteran’s Day this Sunday, Mr Ross had the opportunity for the first time to thank the family of the man who rescued him.

He hugged the children and grandchildren of Mr Sattler during the emotional meeting at the State House in Boston. Mr Ross wore a striped jacket and hat, like the camp uniform, along with his identification number.

The 81-year-old gave Mr Sattler’s family a boxed flag, saying: ‘God Bless, America’.

Read more from this story HERE.

Lawsuit: EPA Conducted Gas Chamber-like Experiments on Elderly, Infirm at University of North Carolina

An Eco-Fascist Gassing Experiment with Diesel Fumes at the EPA

By Mark Musser. [T]he EPA has been conducting human experiments on people by piping diesel fumes from a running truck mixed with air into their lungs at a North Carolina university. The agency has ginned up yet another green crusade — the lethal dangers of diesel fumes. They even had a gas chamber set up to accommodate the environmental research project that shockingly recalls the death camps in Poland.

Not surprisingly, the EPA is now in the process of being sued for conducting dangerous experiments on human guinea pigs. The courts will decide whether or not serious laws and practices were violated, including the international Nuremberg Code that was set up after sixteen Nazi doctors were executed for medical terrorism. After the barbaric fallout of Nazi Germany, where many people were treated like experimental animals, the Nuremberg Code was designed to be an international governing set of principles to regulate the practice of human experimentation. The whiff of the Jewish holocaust is therefore unmistakable.

When the Nazis found out how difficult it was in practice to shoot so many Jews on the Eastern Front at the outset of the war, they switched to gassing them en masse at death camps with engine fumes. Such gassing methods became notorious at Treblinka, where almost one million Jews were killed.

In the early part of the war, the infamous commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, visited Treblinka. Hoess testified at Nuremberg that the Treblinka motor room used tank and truck engines to pipe diesel fumes into the gas chambers. According to Hoess, it usually took about half an hour before the gas chambers fell silent. Another half-hour passed before the doors were opened.

Hoess commented that the engine fumes at Treblinka were not always entirely effective in killing the Jews. While all the victims fell unconscious, many of them were still alive and had to be shot afterwards. Adolf Eichmann told Hoess that they were experiencing the same problems in other death camps at the time. Auschwitz used Zyklon B, which was far more effective. Read more from this story HERE.

The EPA’s Disturbing Human Experiments

By Arnold Ahlert. If the shocking allegations contained in a lawsuit filed last Friday by responsible science advocate Steven Milloy are accurate, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a major scandal on its hands. As reported by the National Legal and Policy Center, Milloy initiated litigation in U.S. District Court in Virginia, based on evidence he accumulated via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). He alleges that the EPA engaged in disturbing experimentation that deliberately exposed human beings to airborne particulate matter the agency itself considers lethal. The experiments were conducted at EPA’s Human Studies Facility at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “That EPA administrator Lisa Jackson permitted this heinous experimentation to occur under her watch shocks the conscience,” said Milloy.

The suit accuses the EPA of paying as many as 41 participants $12 an hour to breathe in concentrated diesel exhaust, for as long a two hours at a time. The exhaust was directly piped in from a truck parked outside the Chapel Hill facility. According to the lawsuit, the fine particulate matter, called “PM2.5,” was piped in at levels 21 times greater than what the EPA calls its “permissible limit.”

Yet even that phrase is misleading. In testimony delivered to Congress in September of 2011, EPA chief Lisa Jackson claimed that exposure to fine particulate matter of 2.5 microns–or less–was lethal. ”Particulate matter causes premature death. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should,” she testified at the time.

Milloy learned about the experiments last year, after reading about them in a government-supported scientific journal. In June, he filed a complaint with the North Carolina Medical Board, accusing Drs. Andrew Ghio and Wayne Cascio, both of whom were employed by the EPA, along with Dr. Eugene Chung, who worked for the University of North Carolina, of violating EPA standards of conduct in human research and the Hippocratic Oath. “During these experiments, the study subjects were intentionally exposed to airborne fine particulate matter (‘PM2.5′) at levels ranging from 41.54 micrograms per cubic meter to 750.83 micrograms per cubic meter for periods of up to two hours,” Milloy wrote to Dr. Ralph C. Loomis, president of the NC Medical Board. “The EPA also believes that PM2.5 is carcinogenic to humans,” he added.

Dr. David Schnare, a former EPA litigator who is now director of American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center, which filed the lawsuit, painted a detailed and chilling picture of exactly how the experiments were conducted. “EPA parked a truck’s exhaust pipe directly beneath an intake pipe on the side of a building,” he revealed. “The exhaust was sucked into the pipe, mixed with some additional air and then piped directly into the lungs of the human subjects. EPA actually has pictures of this gas chamber, a clear plastic pipe stuck into the mouth of a subject, his lips sealing it to his face, diesel fumes inhaled straight into his lungs.” Read more from this story HERE.

Host of Young Turks and Al Gore’s Cable Network is a Holocaust Denier

Photo credit: z@doune

Apparently, the Young Turk’s Cenk Uygur’s “Turkish pride” has short-circuited his own brain cells to the point that he actually denies the Armenian holocaust – that other great, ethnically driven genocidal catastrophe of the 20th century.

Though Uygur has not made much of his unusual (and, shall we say, historically indefensible) convictions during his time at MSNBC or Current, he’s held them for a very long time, the record shows.

Back in 1999, Uygur wrote a letter to the editor of Salon disputing the Armenian genocide as a fabrication of self-deluded Armenian historians.

“I am a Turkish-American, and I am sure my views will also be looked upon with a certain wariness, but I do not subscribe to the idea that I am disqualified from objectivity by my ethnicity,” Uygur wrote about an earlier article in the online magazine. “First, at the very beginning of the article, you seem to reach a conclusion – ‘The central Armenian experience of the 20th century, after all, was the death of as many as 1.5 million Armenians …’ and ‘Every neutral scholar agrees that the Turkish position is propaganda.’”

Like other holocaust-deniers – including those of the anti-Semitic variety – Uygur explains that the Christian Armenian deaths at the hands of the Muslim Turks was all just a matter of war propaganda – in this case World War I that brought an end to the Ottoman Empire. The U.S. was behind it all, Uyger wrote, just “as it [was] with Germany.” The other problem, he said, was that there weren’t enough “Turkish-Americans to combat the insinuations of savagery.”

Read more from his story HERE.