The Times should apologise for publishing front-page claim that privately-schooled children in Britain face discrimination akin to Nazi propaganda
Today The Times published an article on its front page claiming that children who attend private schools in the UK face discrimination akin to Nazi propaganda.
In the article, Dr Anthony Wallersteiner, headmaster at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, complained that the universities of Oxford and Cambridge had been reducing the number of places that they offered to pupils from private schools.
However, without a trace of disagreement, The Times then wrote: “Dr Wallersteiner, who is of Jewish descent, also likened criticism of private schools and the elite to antisemitic abuse, saying: ‘The rise of populists and polemicists has created a micro-industry in bashing private schools. Some of the criticisms echo the conspiratorial language of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was relatively easy for Hitler and his henchmen to suggest that the Jewish minority was over-represented in key professions: medicine, law, teaching and the creative industries. Privately educated pupils in the UK are also being accused of dominating the top jobs and stifling social mobility…it is all too facile to stereotype groups and ignore the fact that lawyers, doctors, writers and politicians are individuals.’”
Nazi propaganda against Jews was used to generate public support not only for exclusion from education but also for brutal beatings, boycotts, degradation and eventually the mass murder of six million Jewish men, women and children.
Tasteless Holocaust analogies do not belong in the debate about education in this country. Moreover, they do not belong on the front page of respected national newspapers.
Campaign Against Antisemitism calls on The Times to apologise for publishing Dr Wallersteiner’s remarks without editorial indication of their absurdity, and investigate how such an offensive comparison came to pass all of the many levels of editorial supervision to be published on the front page. It is clear that senior members of the editorial team responsible for this decision are in dire need of history lessons.
