A bogus but persistent rumour that British schools are dropping the Holocaust from the curriculum to avoid offending Muslims forced the Government to issue an official denial this week.
The rumours appear to stem from an article I wrote in The Times on April 2 last year which amounted to only 164 words.
The speed and ferocity with which this rumour turned into a “faux fact” as it spread around the globe, via an orchestrated viral e-mail, provides a compelling and cautionary tale of the power of the internet to inform and misinform.
It began with a report called Teaching Emotive and Controversial History, produced by the Historical Association and funded by the Government, which examined the premise that history teachers sometimes avoid controversy in the classroom.
The report noted that a history department in a northern school had avoided the Holocaust as a topic for GCSE coursework for fear of confronting anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils.
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Another school steered clear of the Crusades because it felt that a balanced treatment of the topic would have directly challenged what was taught in some local mosques.
In a third school, teachers reported opposition from some Christian parents to their treatment of the history of Israel.
Shortly afterwards I received a string of hysterical and offensive e-mails from readers in the United States who had apparently seen my article online or been sent an e-mail version.
Why had I not done anything to stop the British Government removing the Holocaust from the curriculum, they asked (only not so politely).
I tried to explain, but the e-mails and calls got nastier. Somehow, I was being held personally responsible for an act of heinous revisionism. I later received a calmer, but equally alarming, e-mail from a distinguished academic in the US, which said:
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“Recently this week, UK removed the Holocaust from its school curriculum because it ‘offended’ the Muslim population, which claims it never occurred.
“This is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving in to it.”
It ended with the plea to pass the e-mail on, and I could see from the header that it had already done the rounds of academics at some of America’s leading universities.
Identical e-mails arrived at the Department for Children, Schools and Families. When the trickle turned into a torrent, Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary, felt compelled to issue an official denial to all embassies and world media.
Viral e-mails, like the ones that spread the Holocaust story, have become a marketing tool for corporations and lobbyists because they reach so many people so quickly and because they can provide both blanket and targeted coverage.
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Websites can do the same, most notably Wikipedia, the reader-written online encyclopaedia, which is bursting with false “facts” and which is banned in a number of newsrooms, including that at The Times.
One such example followed the death last year of the composer Ronnie Hazlehurst. Obituary writers at The Guardian online, The Independent, The Times and Reuters credited him with writing the S Club 7 pop hit Reach for the Stars — based on a mischievous entry on his Wikipedia profile.
Perhaps because of our increasing reliance on the internet for finding out factual information, news and gossip, many claims made in such e-mails go unchallenged. Their very pervasiveness makes them credible.