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Hylton Dennis | Sorry for what, Hillel? Inconvenient truth?!

Published:Sunday | April 15, 2018 | 12:00 AM

Who found the history assignment question on African slave torture, set at Hillel Academy for its grade-nine students, objectionable and offensive, giving rise, according to your newspaper, to "intense social media pressure" (the current bane of civility and democracy) and the school's public apology?

How come there is no public objection to the deliberate omission, from official discourse, of the inconvenient truth that it was the dislocated Jews' money that financed European post-conquest restoration and expansion, reinforced with redistribution of territorial sovereignty by the Roman Catholic Pope, the rape of Africa; 'Amerindia' (euphemistically called the Americas); Asia; the Mediterraneans and horrific enslavement on West Indian and United States worksites and plantations of Africans?

What accounts for the ignoring, by those claiming to seek justice for African descendants (pejoratively called black people or blacks), despite the long persistence of the deliberate undereducation? Or is it one of those things you hide in books from the 'black people', who it is claimed don't like to read?

 

DELIBERATE UNDEREDUCATION

 

In my opinion, deliberate undereducation, illustrated by the attack on Hillel, is the greatest tragedy and travesty of the 'Target Whites Reparation Movement', incubating in enclaves of oftentimes belligerent, instead of rigorous, rebellious scholarship, like the 'hallowed' University of the West Indies. It suggests to me that some who profess to be our brightest historians could either, themselves, be intellectual scoundrels or not that bright after all.

The Hillel assignment question, well read by me, as a past history teacher, was quite sterile and in the relevant context of the reliance on evidence by historians, rather than suspicious opinion and emotion.

 

REAL REASON BEHIND SOCIAL MEDIA PRESSURE

 

All ancestral categories of the human race were enslaved, when conquest and subjugation by force were in vogue. This is the criminal foundation of monarchy and imperialism, past and present. It may be difficult to accept, by those born and living in the age of diplomacy, many of whom think history is boring, and, maybe, as I think Jamaica's current minister of education, Senator Ruel Reid, does, an irrelevant curriculum subject.

I posit that the real reason for the objection or "intense social media pressure" claimed by The Gleaner, to the Hillel assignment question, is because the school is partly populated by scions of the Jamaican Jew clan, regarded on the island, unlike most other places, as 'white'. If that is the case, Jamaica has a far way yet to go in the necessary self-indulgence of 'emancipation from mental slavery'.

- Hylton W. Dennis is a publisher. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and denscriptions@yahoo.com.