Repeating history and the Holocaust

SEARCHING THROUGH the attic of my Jerusalem office/apartment, the musty and grainy photographs spoke volumes. A couple and their children in happier times, of places and people with names I didn't know, and suddenly, it was if this intruder was in a time warp.
And I also felt as if I had violated a family's privacy so I quickly closed the attic opening and tried to erase those photos from my mind, but I never could. That was in the summer of 1999 -- more than seven years ago.
Later I was to learn, from a weeping relative, that the fading photos were of a few members of a family, who had somehow survived Nazi Germany's genocide of the Jews, known as the 'Final Solution,' to barely escape to Israel with only grim memories.
That life-altering experience awoke dramatically earlier this week when a news report out of Britain caught my attention with this headline: British schools drop Holocaust lessons for fear of enraging Muslims.
Of course, the mainstream press has given the report little coverage, if any, when it should have received front page headlines, but then again we seem to be preoccupied with appeasing this generation with frivolous coverage and photographs of Paris Hilton and news of British PM Tony Blair's acquiescence to Iran, who have not only openly declared to wipe out the United States (which would include Canada), as well as their main target, the tiny sliver of land known as Israel.
But then again, this generation seems bent to forget the past and its savage history when six million Jews were slaughtered in the Holocaust just prior to a few being able to escape and establish a homeland in May, 1948, less than 60 years ago.
And while the British may be the epitome of that so-called plague of "political correctness," such denial of man's inhumanity to man has spread around the world, with anti-Semitism becoming a plague once again as it was just before the Second World War.
In the 1940s, Britain and the U.S., along with Canada, were major forces against Hitler and Nazi Germany and their demonic plan to "rule" the world and annihilate the Jews. Today, however, militant Islam has been given its head to march across the globe without so much as a whimper.
While this generation might be hoodwinked into believing it's all about control of oil resources in the Persian Gulf; those with a sense of history well know that world wars and atrocities have their roots in the evil premise that Jews must be annihilated.
And where does such thinking begin -- in schools. It already has in Britain where a sense of history has evaporated. Of course, Canada has not been immune to such vile words from the equally venomous pronouncements of Ernst Zundel and Jim Keegstra.
"Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government-backed study has revealed," was the lead paragraph in Britain's Daily Mail. However, every school child throughout the world should be made aware that Hitler's rampage began in stages, starting with racially discriminatory laws in Germany and then "expanded to mass murder ... Besides Jews, others deemed "unworthy of life" included Roma (Gypsies), people with disabilities, some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians and others) while other groups, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, were "persecuted on political and behavioural grounds ..."
In addition, any so-called "holocaust denier" must constantly be reminded of the millions of murders committed at such places as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.
While the denial of even using the word, "Holocaust" in British schools might seem to be a trivial matter, it could have dire consequences, for as philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952) once wrote: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
Or as a reader of the Israel Insider wrote: "Ever hear of the Dark Ages? We are returning to them and I imagine this is how they came about, a society that lost all sense of reason came into being."
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NEWT GINGRICH (Former U.S. Speaker of the House by video to the Herzliya security conference outside Tel Aviv): "Our enemies are fully as determined as Nazi Germany, and more determined than the Soviets ... freedom as we know it will disappear, and we will become a much grimmer, much more militarized, dictatorial society."