re: #103 Fairly Sure I’m Still Obdicut

That assignment gets weird from the first sentence:

“When tragic events occur in history, there is often debate about their actual existence.”

Uh, no. There’s not.

Whoever is responsible for creating that assignment purposely failed to let the students do real research and just provided propaganda.

To write the in-class essay, students were given printouts from About.com, History.com and Holocaust denial site BibleBelievers.org.au.

The claims made in the Holocaust denial handout were not specifically addressed by the other materials provided, apparently leading some students to conclude “The Diary of Anne Frank” was a hoax and that there is no evidence any Jewish people were gassed to death in German concentration camps.

“According to Fred A. Leuchter (leading specialist on the design and fabrication of execution equipment) there is no significant cyanide traces in any of the alleged gas chambers,” one student wrote. “So any open minded person can easily be persuaded to believe that the gassings were a Hoax.”

All of the names of the minors whose essays were released this month were withheld to protect their privacy.

Students completed the assignment in class, with no access to a computer or the library to debunk the claims made by the site. Such debunking is easily achieved with Internet access: