Tel-Chai Nation

I find this very impressive news, though it suggests there's still a ways to go before being really effective:

(IsraelNN.com) A growing number of Arab youths take part in the Holocaust Studies Program at Holocaust Museum Yad VaShem, according to the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor (MoITL). Most of these youths attend professional schools that are run by MoITL.

According to the ministry, a total of 3,800 eleventh grade students from MoITL schools are participating in the Holocaust Studies Program this year, and of these – about 1,500 are Arabs. Last year, the total number of MoITL school students who participated was about 3,200 and 1,300 of them were Arabs.

[...]

Arabs who participate in the studies have special problems with the subject matter, Birger said, including ignorance of basic Holocaust-related terms and mixed feelings including “suspiciousness toward other people's suffering and social alienation toward Israeli society.”

The Holocaust studies program for Arabs therefore treats the Holocaust first as a universal event, and only later tells the personal stories of Jews who were murdered.

This brings up some challenging questions: do they teach clearly about the Arab/Islamic role in the Holocaust, such as that of Haj-Amin el-Husseini? Because if they don't, that's buckling to political correctness! No matter what their reaction is, they have to know if a member of their society committed an act of evil, and how they can learn to avoid and prevent those kind of things from happening in the future.

Labels: anti-semitism, Europe, islam, Israel, Israeli Arabs