Let’s start out with this quote from the Palm Beach Post, because you have to read this to really get the feel for the story. “The mother, who asked not to be named to protect her child’s identity, was stunned. Was the principal of one of Palm Beach County’s largest public schools suggesting that the Holocaust was a belief rather than an actual event?”
The answer is yes. That is what the principal of the county’s largest public school was saying. That he couldn’t say the Holocaust is a real thing.
Before we go on, you may be interested to know this guy is not a white supremacist.
Anyway, here’s what happened. A mother wrote to the principal concerned about the curriculum and what her child was being taught about the Holocaust. Also he said that about slavery, adds Yahoo News. The response she got by email in 2018, exposed in a recent news article after a year-long fight, was unbelievable.
She wanted to make sure, she wrote to the principal, that her child’s school was making Holocaust education “a priority.” The response she received five days later, in April 2018, was anything but routine.
In an email reply, Principal William Latson assured her that the school had “a variety of activities” for Holocaust education.
But he explained that the lessons are “not forced upon individuals as we all have the same rights but not all the same beliefs.”
The mother, who asked not to be named to protect her child’s identity, was stunned. Was the principal of one of Palm Beach County’s largest public schools suggesting that the Holocaust was a belief rather than an actual event?
Thinking Latson simply had expressed himself poorly, she wrote back, asking him to clarify his comments. “The Holocaust is a factual, historical event,” she wrote. “It is not a right or a belief.”
She expected a chastened response. Instead, the veteran principal doubled down.
“Not everyone believes the Holocaust happened,” he wrote, according to email records obtained by The Palm Beach Post through a public records request. “And you have your thoughts, but we are a public school and not all of our parents have the same beliefs.”
He went on to say that as an educator he had “the role to be politically neutral but support all groups in the school.”
“I can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event because I am not in a position to do so as a school district employee,” Latson wrote.
That response led the mother to launch a yearlong effort to address what she called a school leader’s failure to separate truth from myth regarding the genocide of an estimated 6 million Jews under Germany’s Nazi regime in the 1940s.
He now regrets his phrasing, he says.
In a statement to The Post, Latson apologized for the way he expressed himself in his emails, saying it was not indicative of his actual beliefs or regard for historical fact.
“I regret that the verbiage that I used when responding to an email message from a parent, one year ago, did not accurately reflect my professional and personal commitment to educating all students about the atrocities of the Holocaust,” Latson wrote.
Trying to pawn it off as a hasty reply or poorly chosen words is nonsense. You don’t accidentally type out “I can’t vouch for the Holocaust” as an educator. No, he meant it and he said it, either out of sympathy for anti-Semitism, or out of the pervasive American fear of crossing some kind of social justice warrior red line, afraid to commit even to historic fact in case it might get an angry mob of liberals at his door.
Instead, that poor choice now has him facing angry parents, and the rebuke of thinking people who accept facts regardless of the whims of the liberal mob.
Read the whole story here. There is a LOT more.
By the way, Democrat member of the Florida House Carlos Guillermo Smith graduated from this high school. He torched the principal on Saturday.
As an alumnus of Spanish River, I find these comments disgraceful. The Holocaust is not a belief, it’s a historical fact and an evil atrocity against our Jewish siblings and against our humanity. We have ZERO obligation to appease any ignorant person who thinks otherwise. https://t.co/tTsp5uLqFz
— Rep. Carlos G Smith (@CarlosGSmith) July 6, 2019
Via TRS
