Refer to the AFP news report (in French) for some info that is missing from the Haaretz story: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j3h28KUJowtkon19RDZ4vsmg1kvQ

For those who can't read French, the Google translation retains the gist of the story.

In any case, it's probably worth mentioning here that both the Haaretz story and this blog entry are incorrect. The report doesn't complain that she uses "Holocaust" instead of "massacre"; the word she is accused of over-using is "Shoah", and the word the authors would prefer as an alternative is "genocide".

For what it's worth, the education minister has called some parts of the report "deeply inappropriate" and has asked for a corrected final version within 10 days.

Or maybe Haaretz.com mistranslated it, or whatever. I just checked and a more accurate translation would be:

The ministry's report cites that in a meeting with investigators, the teacher used the word "shoah" 14 times while using the more neutral term "holocaust" only twice.

Shoah, as far as I know, refers to only the Jews killed in the death camps, whereas holocaust/genocide/whatever refers to everyone who did. Like in English, "Shoah" and "holocaust" are different words in French, just like "genocide" and "massacre" are.

The AFP article goes on to say that the teacher's attention to World War II history detracted from all other subjects in a class about European History, and that the entire class had been turned into something about the Holocaust and nothing else. They also accuse her of using rabbis to help teach classes, a violation of France's secularism laws. After the trip's funding was cut in half, the teacher told her students that the IGEN (French school system inspectors and whatnot) was "fascist" and that the students should boycott the system.

The article goes on to say that many teachers had also complained about the woman, who "played the victim" despite the fact that none of her family was affected by the Holocaust and that she espoused "extremist attitudes".

Last January, 180 members of the faculty and staff signed a letter condemning the teacher for staging a protest over Luc Chatel--a government official--involving the students, and inviting the media to cover it.

The teacher denies the accusations and says that while she is a "provocateur", she is not opposed to the government or anything.

Thirteen goddamn years of French class have finally paid off!

I just noticed that you're the same guy from the "Supreme Leader Twitter" post earlier. Look, I get that these are short, mostly meaningless online blogs, but can you try to fact-check every now and then?

Please?

:(

I was about to call you out on the fact-checking, considering how ridiculously partial and biased the Haaretz article is, but I see that previous commenters have beat me to it.

Again, the neutral word that should have been used according to the inspectors is not "massacre", but "genocide". And apparently, there are several other reasons that would justify her suspension, such as her temperament.

In any case, don't use Haaretz as the only source of information, unless you want to call France an antisemitic country in the first place...

For the trip's funding cut in half, the main reason doesn't seems to be her "obsession" with the holocaust but the fact that during the last trip, some students have been drunked, and she haven't been able to manage it. So her school decided to cut by half the number of students allowed to do the next one, for security reasons (it seems that she qualified the school decision as "fascist" and "revisionnist".

How would it sound to Americans if some French blogger wrote "USA suspend teacher who teaches about the Natives genocide" ?.

I see that several readers have already corrected most of the blatant inaccurracies in Andrew Swift completely biased article. Knowing the bureaucracy and the PC attitude of the French National Education and particularly in the case where the concerned person is openly showing its Jewish identity (which is not the case for 99% of the French Jews, the second biggest diaspora in the world, because they couldn't care less), one must come to the conclusion that something was REALLY wrong with that teacher.

Andrew Swift's article is nothing else than undocumented French bashing, using the antisemite card. Very popular in some circles. He won't write about the recent standpoints of the German's Central Banks president attack on the "Jewish gene" (in France he had been indicted for hate speech) but of course he will probably write of the SNCFs "participation" (at Nazi gunpoint) in the holocaust as a motive for not giving a High Speed Train contract to California or Florida, conveniently forgetting that the other bidder, Siemens, created and powered the death camps. That how it goes in the wonderful hasbara world.

excuse me if I go out and vomit over so much ignorance and bias, Mr Swift. Maybe when you have cleaned your laptop, you'll come to your senses.

- the current French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, is Jewish from his mother's side
- his son recently married a Jewish girl and converted to Judaism
- his not yet running socialist opponent, Dominique Strauss-Khan (IMF director) is Jewish and would win the presidential bid hands down, if there were elections tomorrow, according to all polls
- his Foreign Secreterary (equivalent to Hillary), Bernard Kouchner, is Jewish and one of the most popular politicians in France
- former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius is Jewish, now one of the leaders of the Socialist Party
- the leading "philosophical elite" in France is Jewish, : Henri-Levy, Finkielkraut, Glucksman to name some is Jewish

I could make a longer list, even without going historical

they must all be "self-hating Jews" since, according to Swift, "France" suspend holocaust-teaching teachers...

This is strictly an institutional matter, procedure was followed and a teacher that practiced against educational protocol was fired.

People get fired all the time for all sorts of reasons, if you are a rebellious element that is alleged to incite dysfunction in institutions, you will be weeded out.

No mention of France's powerful teachers' unions, because no civil body of public educators support anti-establishment tendencies in their midst.

She was weeded out in an institutional practice of ministerial powers, no reason to question France as a nation.
People tend to forget that France is the motherland of civil liberties, the nation touts an impressive heritage of freedoms since the French Revolution.

Sail on Liberty!

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I'm just working on my college research paper on The Holocaust. Your materials helped me with writing.