The Texas state education board recently has considered draft legislation that would create the nation’s first-ever statewide K-12 required reading list for public schools. Inevitably, Jewish sourced material is prominent among the texts on the list, including Elie Wiesel’s holocaust memoir “Night” and Anne Frank’s Diary. It appears that the legislation will be approved and, if it is, each of the selected works would become mandatory reading for Texas’s 5.5 million schoolchildren as soon as the 2030-31 school year.
Texas already has a so-called Holocaust Remembrance Week education mandate which has contributed to the process, meaning that Jews are one of the few non-Hispanic ethnic groups whose stories are likely to be well represented on the state’s reading list. It also has a board labeled the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, which was involved in the discussions. The Jewish titles were also selected with additional input from Houston’s holocaust museum experts, local rabbis and Jewish day school administrators in the state. One should note that everyone involved would likely be dedicated to promoting the state of Israel and of the Zionist movement.
The problem with the material selected for the schools is that it reflects the standard holocaust and antisemitism narrative that now prevails in America and the anglophone world as well as in much of Europe. This has largely come about through deliberate Jewish seeking to dominate both the news and entertainment industries to achieve that goal, witness declarations by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu concerning an “8th War” to sway US opinion and by recent media purchases by the likes of arch Zionist billionaire Larry Ellison. It is a political contrivance intended to support Jewish nationalism and supremacy otherwise referred to as Zionism and much of it is easily demonstrable as false.
No one should deny that many Jews died as a result of the political convulsion that accompanied the Second World War but the scale and methodology of Jewish suffering as distinct from the many others who died in the war has been deliberately inflated both in terms of numbers and of details. A former Israeli government minister Shulamit Aloni, describing how the charge of “antisemitism” in particular has been exploited to her country’s benefit, claimed at one point that labeling any and all critics of Israel as “antisemites” in a discussion with foreigners was a deliberate way to intimidate and shift perceptions. She said “It is a trick. We always use.”
More to the point, if one wants to learn about the horrors of the Second World War, Elie Wiesel and Anne Frank would hardly be the go-to texts as they are not exactly truthful depictions of what was being experienced. Elie Wiesel’s book “Night” claims to be an honest depiction of his experience in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald Prison camps but it is full of invented material including the alleged murder of his mother and sister to make the story more compelling. When the Buchenwald camp was finally liberated by the US Third Army in 1945 Wiesel was reportedly in the camp hospital recovering from an illness. Camp hospital? In an alleged extermination camp? In any event, Wiesel, who was himself an Irgun terrorist after the war, profited greatly from his imposture and from the selling of his fiction. Indeed, he turned it into a career and was a passionate defender of Israel and all its crimes against the Palestinians. I will never forget many years ago seeing him seated next to no less a phony than Hillary Clinton in the congressional gallery for the State of the Union Address delivered by husband Billy Boy.
Anne Frank is a genuine victim of the war, though she went into hiding in Amsterdam, often in attics and back rooms of neighbors, and eventually died of typhus while at the Bergen-Belsen prison camp shortly before the war ended. The Germans had caught and imprisoned her and her family but did not kill her. Her famous diary has some text that is derived in fact from observations and comments that she recorded and kept in a notebook somewhat in the form of a diary, but it was also compiled, heavily edited and somewhat written to completion by her father Otto after the war to include made-up narratives. He produced the diary in hopes of it being both a war memoir and profitable, at which he was successful.
Texas, a state overloaded with Christian Zionist trash, which I can attest to from having lived in Houston for five years, will no doubt force the accepted narrative of Jewish suffering down the unresisting throats of its poor public school students. If there is any consolation, a high percentage of the state’s home schooled students will be getting an even worse dose of Israel-philia as their parents opt to teach them at home so they can get more Bible-learning in a curriculum that is real heavy on the Old Testament.
Missouri is also on board for a bit of that Old Fashioned Religion Jewish Style. A bill currently moving through the Missouri legislature will censor public school curricula, legalize punishment and firing of teachers over content issues, and generally chill First Amendment speech when it comes to any discussion of Israeli or Jewish group behavior.
The mechanism for the repression will be to criminalize or institutionally punish those who defy the a legally accepted definition of antisemitism. If passed, HB 2061 would adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism into the codes of conduct for Missouri’s public schools and universities, both in terms of curricula and regarding positions taken by teachers. The IHRA definition, which labels any criticism of Israel “antisemitism,” has been widely and justifiably criticized by dozens of civil society and rights groups as well as by educators since its adoption starting in 2016 by the federal government as well as at state levels. There has been considerable justifiable concern expressed because historically pro-Israel activist groups have wielded the IHRA definition and its list of so-called “contemporary examples of antisemitism” to censor any and all criticisms of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. If the bill is passed both “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” which it is, and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,” which is also true, will be condemned no matter how they are contextualized for academic consideration.
It might be considered that going after critics of Israel and the Zionist movement is considered a bit of fun in Washington and in the thirty-nine states that have drafted punitive legislation to discourage and penalize such behavior. The US government even has a senior State Department Official with ambassadorial rank as Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat antisemitism. Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun’s job is to identify and fight antisemitism worldwide. The US government under Donald Trump also, uniquely, believes in appointing ambassadors whose jobs appear to consist of accusing their host countries of being “antisemites.” This has recently taken place with Ambassadors Bill White in Belgium and Charles Kushner, a convicted felon and father of CTrump’s esteemed son-in-law Jared, in France.
In that light, the problem intrinsic in criminalizing free speech on the “Jewish state” Israel which is carrying out a genocide directed against Christian and Muslim Palestinians, became clear recently at a meeting on “combating antisemitism and upholding religious freedom” at the Museum of the Bible in Washington. Note how “antisemitism” and “religious freedom” were topically linked. The meeting was called by Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, which was founded in May by executive order to support “Federal laws that protect all citizens’ full participation in a pluralistic democracy, and protect the free exercise of religion.”
The gathering was disrupted when a board member Carrie Prejean Boller, a Catholic, who was wearing a Palestinian flag pin, got into tense exchanges with other participants. She objected to the bundling of Zionism with Judaism as a protected religious belief when it is in reality a political system that is designed to favor only one persuasion and regard other believers as expendable. She particularly objected to the “free ride” granted to the state of Israel in spite of its ghastly behavior.
She put it this way in her condemnation posted to X regarding Israel and what it represents: “Christians have been manipulated into believing that God blesses bombing, starvation, and mass killing. That is the opposite of Christ, who came to stand with the suffering and confront power. I reject that lie completely. I am not owned by money, donors, or access. I belong to Christ alone who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. I would rather die than bend the knee to Israel.” In a subsequent statement she elaborated “As a Catholic, I have both a constitutional right and a God given freedom of religion and conscience not to endorse a political ideology.”
Thank you Carrie for stating the truth so precisely and, predictably, I see Trump fired you from the commission for your comments. Now all we have to do is to convince Congress that killing thousands of people is not somehow free exercise of religion and therefore exempt from any censure. We might even try to convince them that having American go to war with Iran on behalf of a state that is most distinguished by its brutality is also not exactly part of God’s plan for the human race!
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
