ThoughtCrime: 01/09/95
House Historian Fired for Even-Handedness
Scarcely had new U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich appointed
a new House historian, Christina Jeffrey, 47, than she was fired on January
9. Her crime? Even-handedness.
It seems that back in 1986, when she was called upon to conduct, for
the then Republican-run U.S. Department of Education, a review of a program
for teachers of eighth and ninth graders called "Facing History and Ourselves,"
she found that part of the course dealt with the Holocaust and crudely linked
it with the problems of modern American society like race relations and
homelessness.
Co-founder of the course, William Parsons, is director of education
at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Jeffrey's panel recommended against
federal funding for the course. She said that the course lacked balance.
"Will former Nazis, etc., be asked to speak?" She called the proposed course
an exercise in "mass reality avoidance."
The latest brouhaha reveals what no U.S. taxpayers previously knew,
incidentlly: that their tax dollars, $70,000 of them a year, are now being
used to fund this Holocaust "education" program.
In her 1986 report, Miss Jeffrey - then Christina Price - accused the
program's Jewish authors of using the same propaganda techniques "that Hitler
and Goebbels used to propagandize the German people" and to "change the
thinking of students." "The program gives no evidence of balance or objectivity,"
she stated in her opinion. "The Nazi point of view, however unpopular, is
still a point of view and is not presented, nor is that of the Ku Klux Klan."
Jeffrey was not alone in her criticism of the course. Phyllis Schafly,
president of the Eagle Forum, denounced the course as "psychological manipulation,"
designed to invade student's privacy and "induce behavioral change" by using
the emotional power of the Holocaust to confront youngsters with their own
attitudes on current issues.
The disputed course, "Facing History" now reaches about half a million
students each year across the United States; the course also offers a teacher-training
program which more than fifteen thousand teachers have attended since it
began in 1976.
Nine years later Miss Jeffrey's out-of-line opinion has cost her brand
new $85,000 job.
Adapted from: David Irving's Action Report No. 9, May 1995
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