Teacher did not deny Holocaust, Lottides says

A teacher at a private school who was accused by parents of denying the Holocaust was found on Monday not to have done so by human rights commissioner Maria Stylianou Lottides.

While the name of the teacher or of the school, or the content of the alleged Holocaust denial were not disclosed, Lottides wrote in her report that “among other things”, a “poster about the Holocaust was posted in a school hall” with what parents had alleged included “a derogatory or misleading message”.

That message had, according to the parents, “shifted the emphasis fro the murder of six million Jews in a way which was interpreted and perceived by the pupils as a downgrading of the event”.

Lottides disclosed that the parents who had filed the complaint are Israeli nationals, who had said that in addition to the poster, the teacher had “made comments and actions which target their children”.

She said that the parents had alleged that those comments were “antisemitic and politically biased”, and that they “constitute … discrimination based on religion and national origin which constitutes a hostile and unsafe environment to the detriment of Israeli and Jewish students”.

The parents had also alleged that the teacher had insisted “on the identification of a pupil based on her religious identity as Jewish and not according to her nationality as Israeli”, and that the teacher had said that a visiting alumnus of the school “looks like a Jew”.

Lottides wrote in her investigation that the teacher “has not denied that he made some of the statements or actions attributed to her”, but said that those statements “did not take place in the context attributed to them”.

“At the same time, it was noted that she herself committed to showing increased attention to her public and pedagogical discourse, so as to limit the possibility of misinterpretations in the future,” she wrote of the teacher.

She said that the school “denies that any targeting of Jewish or Israeli students has been committed”, and that it says that no “behaviour which constitutes discrimination based on religion and national origin” has taken place on its grounds

The teacher, she said, has been working at the same school as a history teacher for almost ten years, “with positive performance and without the school having received any complaints of a similar nature”