The Holocaust teaching controversy of 2007 was a scandal sparked by claims mainly circulated in emails which stated that teaching of the Holocaust had been banned in British schools because of fears that this could offend Muslim pupils. The claims contained in the emails were partially false but inspired by real events.
The emails alleged that the ban had been put in place because of fears that such teaching could offend Muslim pupils, due to the rampant trend of Holocaust denial in the Muslim population. On 2 April 2007, the Daily Mail started the story on the subject with "Schools [plural, contrary to the findings of the report] are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government backed study has revealed."
Following this, the tabloid New York Post ran an article headlined "U.K. SCHOOLS' SICKENING SILENCE" in which the writer asserted the statement "may be the scariest sentence I ever read". The main medium for the claims, however, was a chain email. The emails led some to email the BBC enquiring as to whether the facts contained in the email were true. In fact teaching of the Holocaust is mandatory in English schools and has not been banned elsewhere in the United Kingdom.
After email messages continued to circulate into 2008 the British government Schools Secretary Ed Balls was forced to write to every Embassy in the country to refute the allegation that schools had banned or were reluctant to teach about the Holocaust.
Report
The emails were based upon a wide-ranging report which the Department for Education and Skills commissioned from the Historical Association, a group which promotes the study of history. This report suggested that teachers may avoid emotive and controversial periods of history, but did not recommend that they do. The report went on to give an example of "a northern city" in which a history department had "recently avoided selecting the Holocaust as a topic for GCSE coursework for fear of confronting anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils"; it was also noted that, in another school, the Holocaust had been taught in spite of "anti-Semitic sentiment among some pupils" but that study of the Crusades had been avoided because of the contrast to the stories with which Muslim pupils were raised. In no case was it suggested that avoiding causing offence to Holocaust deniers should be an aim.