Holocaust Remembrance Project For French Kids Sparks Ire

President Nicolas Sarkozy has enraged the French with his recently proposed plan to educate schoolchildren about the Holocaust:

Sarkozy told France’s Jewish community on Wednesday that every 10-year-old schoolchild should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child victim of the Holocaust.”

The proposal unleashed a storm of protest from teachers, psychologists and his political foes who said it would unfairly burden children with the guilt of previous generations and some could be traumatized by identifying with a Holocaust victim.

This hue and cry may be unintelligible to Americans, many of whom grew up “unfairly burdened” with The Devil’s Arithmetic and The Diary of Anne Frank without succumbing to shell-shock. And how is one to argue with the children’sNicholas Sarkozy with Ehud Olmert rights group spokesperson who said (we can only assume with a straight face) that “[n]o educational project should be constructed on death”? I’d love to see what a French history textbook looks like: Napoleonic paintball wars? Nerf guillotines?

But is the real problem that children might be traumatized—or that this project was originally proposed in tandem with a call for faith to be returned to public discourse? It’s unsurprising, given the nose many of us have developed for even a whiff of the theocratic, that the French have been put on the defensive by Sarkozy’s recent speeches. But Sarkozy’s clarification is more or less satisfactory: “I never said that secular morality is inferior to religious morality. . . . My conviction is they complement each other and that, when it is difficult to discern good and evil . . . it is good to take inspiration from both of them.”

It’s worth keeping in mind, too, that the group most likely to be upset about nationwide Holocaust remembrance is also the group most due for a reminder that France is a religious composite, not a religious vacuum to be filled.

Radar reports that “nearly 40 percent of Americans believe that the government conspired in, or had precise foreknowledge of, the 9/11 attacks.” That figure may sound like something only a conspiracy enthusiast could believe, but it comes to you not from late-night college radio but from a Scripps Howard poll. Cut it in half, if you like: One in five of your fellow citizens is completely bananas, and he votes. (Here and here is some recommended reading on why.)

Granted, it’s likely that a much smaller number are as far gone as the boys and girls of 9/11 Truth goon squad (Josh Strawn wrote about the “Truthers” here), but, if I may paraphrase Margaret Mead, never doubt that a group of thoughtless citizens who ought to be committed can change the world. The unholy union of camcorders and YouTube has made it easier than ever to disseminate misinformation and propaganda, especially if your day job is sitting on the couch eating Funyuns and drinking Red Bull.

The Nation is worried about the rise of the “homeland security campus”:

From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to “violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism prevention”—as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name—have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.

Usually this sort of paranoia—the Nation’s, not the government’s—is nothing more than a fun and harmless way for student groups to feel more influential, I daresay threatening, than they really are. The belief that his views are important enough to repress is as indispensable to the campus activist as his Pink Floyd poster and well-thumbed copy of Manufacturing Consent.

The times must be a-changing, though, because the measures the article describes really do sound draconian, if not outright illegal. The University of Florida taser incident, which is mentioned in the article, is emblematic of the triumph of “procedure” over restraint and common sense. (Not to mention that there’s something both pathetic and sinister about a politician who keeps droning on while a twenty-one-year-old showboat is electrocuted in front of him. If you listen hard enough, you can almost hear him asking “Is it safe?” over and over again.)

These developments are worth keeping our own watchful eyes on, but it’s also worth bearing in mind that sometimes the government has a point.

“Everyone’s entitled to his opinion!” How often do we hear this—and from those whose entitlement is most in doubt? Laura Ingraham squeezed an entire book out of the slight thesis that entertainers should Shut Up and Sing rather than soak us with their spittle-flecked rantings about international affairs. Curiously, she included “UN elites” in her herd of bêtes noires, though political figures aren’t generally known for their crooning abilities. Dancing abilities, maybe. But what about novelists?

That’s the question the Guardian poses in its review of Martin Amis’s The Second Plane, a collection of writings inspired, or perhaps fired, by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. (Amis disdains the use of the short form of the infamous date: “There is a long argument about the inappropriateness of the contraction ‘9/11’ to describe the enormity of that day.”)

I think the question is misguided, but not because I feel, in that most irritating formula, “entitled to my opinion.” There are those whose work never draws them into the realm of political thought—the Dixie Chicks, for instance—but the novelist makes his living considering what makes people tick, and no one ticks quite so literally as the suicide terrorist. As Amis writes, “Geopolitics may not be my natural subject, but masculinity is. And have we ever seen the male idea in such outrageous garb as the robes, combat fatigues, suits and ties, jeans, tracksuits and medics’ smocks of the Islamic radical?”

This is not to say that novelists invariably get it right, or even half-right. John Updike didn’t, though his attempt was more than admirable and nothing if not sincere. All the same, there’s a big difference between someone who sings other people’s words, and someone who’s always had his own keenly rendered psychological portraits at the ready, weighing in on the heaviest issues of our day. If novelists feel compelled to delineate this problem, I can think of few more qualified to do so than Amis.

As I noted elsewhere last week, Iran’s Mehr News Agency has reported that a contingent of Columbia University professors plan to travel to Iran to apologize “officially” for the rudeness that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suffered at the hands of Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger. As the news service left all of these professors “anonymous” and didn’t provide a statement from Bollinger, I had to write that I “sincerely hope [the report is] incorrect,” though I couldn’t bring myself to say that I sincerely believed it was.

Now The New York Times reports that “[o]fficials at Columbia University were taken aback on Tuesday” by the Mehr News Agency’s claims, and one professor commented that it was probably a “metropolitan legend.” That’s a bit silly, as one is surely more inclined to believe that it’s an Iranian fabrication than that Iran has its finger on the pulse of the Upper West Side rumor mill.

The sad fact is that whether or not the story is true, it is perfectly plausible and consistent with the behavior of professors at Columbia and other schools. Once you’ve invited a dictator to your institution and then drafted a letter, signed by dozens of professors, condemning your own university president, is it any wonder the public is quick to believe that a Sean Penn-style fact-finding mission is next? (Note also that Victoria de Grazia, a professor who simply denied all knowledge to the Times, told the Columbia Spectator, “I am abroad and I know nothing about what promises to be a fine adventure.”)

The truth is paramount, but this contretemps is a good opportunity for the professorate to reflect on what it would like its reputation to be. When some shoddy Middle Eastern state propaganda organ has got your number, might it not be that you’ve grown a little . . . predictable?