LOS ANGELES — (Press Release) The Simon Wiesenthal Center has urged the San Dieguito Union High School District to take proactive action regarding Carmel Valley Middle School where Adolf Hitler’s portrait was placed alongside inspirational historical leaders including U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, U.S President John F. Kennedy, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. When a Jewish student complained the teacher responded “Hitler may have done some bad things, but he also had strong leadership qualities.” The principal’s initial action was to excuse the boy, who is Jewish, from the class. The principal has since apologized.
In a letter to the heads of San Dieguito Union High School District, Superintendent’s Office and Carmel Valley Middle School, SWC Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action Agenda, Rabbi Abraham Cooper said that “we need to understand that Hitler was not just another “leader “and “Nazism” was not just another political movement. If you want to compare Hitler’s “leadership qualities,” present him next to photographs of Stalin, Mao and Ayatollah Khamenei, not icons of liberty and human decency.”
Cooper urged that all history teachers in the district and their students spend a day at the SWC’s renowned Museum of Tolerance adding that “such hate almost destroyed civilization and bigotry is alive and well in today’s America in many forms… Please let’s make sure our teachers receive the proper training and our children receive an education that infuses them with basic ethical values.”
And what will the response be from the San Diego Jewish community? We should learn to mobilize and pressure institutions like this one to fire people in the same way that anti-semites have so successfully canceled Zionists on college campuses and corporate America. The American Jewish community should learn from our Israeli coreligionists that the only way to handle hatred is through unified strength and a willingness to confront evil aggressively.
This is outrageous. The teacher and the principal should be fired immediately. We cannot let these incidents become normalized. Everyone should speak up. Why aren’t more people horrified by this matter? Where is the ADL?