Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) National President Morton A. Klein released the following statement:

I make the following statement even more fervently as a child of holocaust survivors born in a displaced persons camp in Neu Ulm, Germany. I lost most of my family in Hitler’s holocaust – aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, and more. My father, Rabbi Herman Klein, lost his first family and survived Auschwitz. 

The ZOA urges Texas legislators to make it clear that the Carroll, Texas school district administrator who instructed teachers that they need to teach “opposing perspectives” on the Holocaust was absurdly misinterpreting Texas law. The Texas civic instructions law only requires teachers to strive to provide diverse and contending perspectives if they teach “widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy.”  The existence of the Holocaust and the Nazis’ brutal, deliberate murder of 6,000,000 innocent Jewish men women and children, plus other minority victims, is not a “widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy.”  The Holocaust is a proven fact.  Holocaust deniers (such as Palestinian Authority/PLO dictator Mahmoud Abbas, the Iranian Mullahs, Clifford Irving and neo-Nazi groups) did not change the proven fact of the Holocaust into a “widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy.” 

An audio recording obtained by NBC News revealed that Carroll, Texas administrator Gina Peddy told teachers that, in order to comply with Texas House Bill 3979, if they teach or have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they should also teach or offer students access to a book from an “opposing” perspective.  In fact, Ms. Peddy’s instruction was a gross misinterpretation of both Texas House Bill 3979 and the updated Texas bill, Senate Bill 3, entitled “An Act Relating to the Social Studies Curriculum in Public Schools.” Indeed, Texas Senator Bryan Hughes (who authored Texas Senate Bill 3), Texas State Teachers Association union spokesman Clay Robison, and other Texas educators have all stated that the Carol, Texas administrator is misinterpreting the Texas law.   

ZOA urges Texas legislators, and all Texas politicians and educators to join Senator Hughes and the Texas teachers’ union in making it crystal clear that the existence of the Holocaust is a fact – not a controversy.  We suggest that the Texas legislature should consider enacting an additional amendment to Texas law to re-emphasize this fact, and to ensure that teachers can continue to teach about the horrors of the Holocaust without giving credence to falsehood-purveying Holocaust deniers.