Tuesday, September 08, 2009

lessons in hate

Jim Keegstra taught anti-Semitism in his high-school history class for 14 years in rural Alberta. He went way beyond--shall we just say--the curricular guidelines set out by the county, so there was little give in the decision county supervisors should have made to warn him first and then again and then fire him. But, again, it took fourteen years. He had tremendous local support and the school board (and others) were overwhelmed by the popular defense.

He taught that the American Civil War was a Jewish plot. He taught that World War II was caused by the Jews and that Hitler didn't kill any Jews. (Where did they go? "Hundreds of thousands went to Madagascar.") He made his students memorize the "fact" of the story of the Illuminati - a sect of Jews in colonial America who were given their instructions by the devil. He taught that John Wilkes Booth was Jewish. When a student wrote in a paper that Lenin and Trotsky were athiestic, he scrawled in the margin that that was incorrect--that they were Jewish, for the communist revolution in Russia was primarily a Jewish plot against the state. He says he most fears "that hard-core communist Jew, the financier, that hard-core rebel, that rabbinical Jew."

"The people who oppose me just do not know their history," says Keegstra.

A Canadian TV magazine - like 60 Minutes - ran a 20-minute segment on Keegstra. It was called "Lessons in Hate." I'm now making this segment available here.