UK Row over schoolboy's Hitler poem

From The Times Online: November 09, 2005 By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent...

RUTH KELLY, the Education Secretary, was coming under increasing pressure last night to intervene in the case of a poem for schoolchildren written from the viewpoint of Adolf Hitler.

The verse, written by a 14-year-old schoolboy, Gideon Taylor, includes the lines: "Jews are here, Jews are there, Jews are almost everywhere, filling up the darkest places, evil looks upon their faces."

Another part reads: "Make them take many paces for being one of the worst races, on their way to a gas chamber, where they will sleep in their manger. I'll be happy Jews have died." The poem ends with the question: "At what price world domination?"

The poem appears in Great Minds, a publication produced by the Forward Press group, which promotes poetry and creative writing and publishes the results in anthologies. The book was distributed free to schools in Britain. The Hitler entry appears in the latest anthology, featuring the work of 11 to 18-year-olds.

...Lord Janner of Braunstone, the chairman of the Holocaust Education Trust, is ...“looking into” the poem’s publication. A trust spokeswoman said: “The poem is insensitive and tasteless and we are taking this further.”

Louise Ellman, Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, who is writing to the publisher and to the Education Secretary about her concerns, said that the poem appeared to promote prejudice. She said: “This could feed anti-Semitism.”

...A spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews said that the board was anxious to discuss the latest poem further with the publishers. “There is something slightly troubling about it,” he said.

...Irene Lancaster, a Jewish academic, is among those who have written to the Education Secretary to protest. She said: “Many of my university students have gone on to become secondary school teachers. If they had written essays glorifying Hitler and the Holocaust in this way, I would have failed them and reported them to the appropriate university authorities.
In present-day Germany they would have been prosecuted. Anti-Semitism is increasing in many of our secondary schools and not nearly enough is being done to counter this.”