When facts don’t matter
Some facts, one would assume, are beyond question.
The earth really is round. American astronauts did land on the moon.
Vaccines do prevent disease and epidemics. Slavery was cruel. Children were massacred in schools at Sandy Hook and Parkland.
The Holocaust did happen. In each case, however, there are people to whom facts don’t matter. Some of their absurdities, such as a flat earth, are simply silly. Others are malicious and dangerously harmful.
Holocaust denial is one of the evil ones. It’s an “essential manifestation of anti-Semitism,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups. The ancient pestilence is a growing menace again in the United States, as well as around the world.
To deny that 6 million people were murdered simply for being Jewish is to dehumanize the living, as well as the dead. It glosses over the ghastly crimes perpetrated by the Nazis, the poison spouted by their counterparts at Charlottesville and the targeting of Jews at synagogues in Pennsylvania, California and New Zealand.
We can’t say whether William Latson, the former principal of Spanish River High School, is an anti-Semite. His widely quoted remarks to a concerned parent don’t prove that he personally denies the Holocaust. But he did give Holocaust denial an undeserved and indefensible respectability, a false equivalency with historical truth. His belated apology doesn’t unring the bell.
Specifically, he refused to acknowledge that the Holocaust is “a factual historical event because I am not in a position to do so as a school district employee.”
His duty as a school district employee was to teach that it is. That failure rightfully has cost him his principal’s posting.
It remains in question why it took the Palm Beach School District more than a year to act and whether he should be fired, not merely reassigned. His new position, still unannounced, should have nothing to do with instruction.
The parent who raised the issue with him was concerned that Holocaust education wasn’t a mandatory classroom study as Florida law requires.
He claimed that an educator’s duty is to be “politically neutral but support all groups at the school.” That would be true with regard to Democrats vs. Republicans, but not for the malicious lie of Holocaust denial.
For a student or her parents to disbelieve that the Holocaust happened does not overcome the school’s duty to teach that it did. To the contrary, it makes the lesson all the more important.
It’s as wrong to let Holocaust deniers influence the curriculum, even indirectly, as it would be to make science classes optional to humor the Flat Earth Society.
There are an estimated 400 Holocaust survivors in the Boca Raton area. It’s time for Latson to meet them.