NEW: A school administrator in Southlake, Texas, advised teachers last week that if they have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they should also have a book with an "opposing" perspective. Listen to the audio recording obtained by @NBCNews: nbcnews.to/2YNVugH
@NBCNews Everyone's freaking out in the comments, from an education standpoint. It makes total sense. You learn about the Holocaust, and then you learn about the people who caused it, both perspectives. People are misreading this...or maybe I'm being too open-minded if that's a thing.
@HaqMeeran @NBCNews I agree with you that it's important to teach the average German viewpoint. Too often Nazi Germany is portrayed as an outside evil that was defeated. For example: 1/?
@HaqMeeran @NBCNews "The SS arrested peaceful dissidents who protested the harsh treatment of Jews and sent them to concentration camps. They were among the millions of "undesirables" the Nazi murdered over the course of their reign." is the type of thing you hear in history class. 2/?
@HaqMeeran @NBCNews But an average German would've seen news stories that were like: "The Protection Squadron arrested White Rose rioters in downtown Berlin yesterday during a protest against the mass incarceration of Jews." 3/?
@HaqMeeran @NBCNews Maybe news stories about protesters against the mass incarceration and brutal treatment of illegal immigrants being arrested by the Department of Homeland Security would've raised more eyebrows if we taught history from the side of normal Germans who were neither Nazis nor Jews.
@HaqMeeran @NBCNews Unfortunately, I highly doubt that's the other side they're talking about here. In this context the other side means claiming that the Holocaust was a bad solution to a real problem, or that it wasn't as bad as people think it was, or that it didn't even happen at all.