'A beautiful soul': Funeral held for baby boy killed in wrong-way crash on Highway 401
A funeral was held on Wednesday for a three-month-old boy who died after being involved in a wrong-way crash on Highway 401 in Whitby last week.
Nearly a third of North American students think the Holocaust was exaggerated or fabricated, according to a new study, which also found that 40 per cent of students reported learning about the Holocaust through social media.
“They’re getting information from who knows where and it’s resulting in… (them thinking), did this event in history happen?” the study’s author, Alexis Lerner, told CTV News. Lerner is an assistant professor of political science at the U.S. Naval Academy in Maryland.
“We hear about the negative, dangerous impacts of social media,” Lerner said. “I think this is part of the same story.”
For the study, nearly 3,600 students in Grades 6 through 12 were surveyed both before and after a two-day virtual conference focusing on the Holocaust. Almost 80 per cent of the students were in Canada, while the rest were in U.S. classrooms. Just over six per cent identified as Jewish.
According to the study, nearly 33 per cent of the students felt the Holocaust was fabricated or exaggerated, or they were unsure if it even took place. Social media also wasn’t their only source of information.
“A lot of them talked about Marvel as the place where they had originally learned about the Holocaust,” Lerner said, referring to the superhero media franchise, which includes fictional Second World War hero Captain America. “Or 12 per cent said that they heard about it from a videogame, which is sort of the same story.”
A shocking 42 per cent of the students reported unequivocally witnessing an antisemitic event, including at their own schools. Some students, Lerner noted, also believed something like the Holocaust couldn’t happen again.
“And yet we do have the Uyghurs (in China), and we do have the Rohingya (in Myanmar), and we do have all these groups that are the victims of genocidal violence,” Lerner, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral fellow at Ontario’s Western University, said.
The study was commissioned by Ontario-based Holocaust education non-profit Liberation75, which was created to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration and death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
The date of the camp’s liberation – January 27, 1945 – now stands for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which falls this Thursday.
Also referred to as the Shoah, the Holocaust genocide claimed the lives of an estimated six million Jews during the Second World War, and also led to the murders of five million others, including Roma people, ethnic Poles and Slavs, and members of the LGBTQ community.
“The Holocaust isn’t just a Jewish story,” Liberation75 founder Marilyn Sinclair told CTV News. “It’s a story of what humans are capable of and what we need to do to be responsible to other people in our society.”
In 2020 and 2021, Sinclair says Liberation75 was able to run virtual Holocaust programming for 650,000 students across North America.
“Holocaust education teaches us about the dangers of what happens when hate goes unchecked and we don’t stand up for each other,” Sinclair, whose father was a Holocaust survivor, said.
Although it may be mentioned in things like high school history textbooks, no Canadian province or territory has mandated Holocaust education as part of their secondary school curriculum. In the U.S., 22 states do, including Florida, which requires it from kindergarten and up. For younger kids, Lerner says lessons are focused not on the horrors of Nazi crimes, but on topics like bullying, tolerance and kindness—and they show results.
“They were more likely to say that antisemitism was happening, they were more likely to say antisemitism was a problem, and they were less likely to say that the Holocaust didn’t happen,” Lerner said of Florida students. “Education makes a huge impact.”
The study also showed that after an educational seminar, students were nine-per-cent more likely to say they’d intervene if they saw an antisemitic event, while 92 per cent of students wanted to know more about the Holocaust – proof to Sinclair that it’s time to update Canadian curriculums.
“My father spoke to schools for more than 20 years and he always finished his talks this way: he said, ‘We must fight hate and protect the freedoms that this country Canada provides,’” Sinclair recalled. “If you want to live in a great country, you have to protect freedom for everybody—not just yourself. And I think that’s what we need to educate our students about.”
A funeral was held on Wednesday for a three-month-old boy who died after being involved in a wrong-way crash on Highway 401 in Whitby last week.
There has been a "sophisticated" cybersecurity breach detected on B.C. government networks, Premier David Eby confirmed Wednesday evening.
Toronto police say a man was taken into custody outside Drake's Bridle Path mansion Wednesday afternoon after he tried to gain access to the residence.
U.S. President Joe Biden said for the first time Wednesday he would halt shipments of American weapons to Israel, which he acknowledged have been used to kill civilians in Gaza, if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders a major invasion of the city of Rafah.
Dakota Joshua had a goal and two assists and the Vancouver Canucks scored three third-period goals to claw out a 5-4 comeback victory over the Edmonton Oilers in Game 1 of their second-round playoff series Wednesday.
One of the Indian nationals accused of murdering British Columbia Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar says in a social media video that he received a Canadian study permit with the help of an Indian immigration consultancy.
Pfizer has agreed to settle more than 10,000 lawsuits about cancer risks related to the now discontinued heartburn drug Zantac, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the deal.
Quebec Premier Francois Legault is defending his comments about a new history museum after he was accused by a prominent First Nations group of trying to erase their history.
Independent U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a parasite in his brain more than a decade ago, but has fully recovered, his campaign said, after the New York Times reported about the ailment.
The stakes have been set for a bet between Vancouver and Edmonton's mayors on who will win Round 2 of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
A grieving mother is hosting a helmet drive in the hopes of protecting children on Manitoba First Nations from a similar tragedy that killed her daughter.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
A P.E.I. lighthouse and a New Brunswick river are being honoured in a Canada Post series.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.