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, incidentally: 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