Couple randomly attacked, 1 stabbed, by group of teens in Toronto, police say
A man has been transported to hospital after police say he was stabbed in a random attack carried out by a group of teens in Toronto on Friday night.
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 man has been transported to hospital after police say he was stabbed in a random attack carried out by a group of teens in Toronto on Friday night.
Dozens of Ontarians are expressing frustration in the province’s health-care system after their family doctors either dropped them as patients or threatened to after they sought urgent care elsewhere.
With carriers' flight volumes above the 60th parallel hovering below pre-pandemic levels, Canadian North’s first Inuk CEO now bears the task of balancing those financial and logistical challenges with the needs of communities for which she feels a deep affinity.
One of greatest climbing guides on Mount Everest has scaled the world's highest peak for the 29th time, extending his own record for most times to the summit, expedition organizers said Sunday.
Amid significant criticism from advocates, Diversity, Inclusion and Persons with Disabilities Minister Kamal Khera is defending her government's long-promised, newly unveiled Canada Disability Benefit, calling the funds an "initial step," but without laying out a timeline for future expansion of the program.
RCMP commissioner Mike Duheme says he wants the government to look at drafting a new law that would make it easier for police to pursue charges against people who threaten elected officials.
Homicide investigators in B.C. say murder charges have been laid against a fourth Indian national in connection to the killing of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar outside a Surrey gurdwara last year.
Past left-leaning presidents who enacted some of the most socially liberal policies on the continent have given way to a self-proclaimed "anarcho-capitalist" whose fiery appraisals of social justice and efforts to dismantle diversity and equity programs have made him into a global far-right icon.
For decades, North Bay, Ontario's water supply has harboured chemicals associated with liver and developmental issues, cancer and complications with pregnancy. It's far from the only city with that problem.
A family of fifth generation farmers from Ituna, Sask. are trying to find answers after discovering several strange objects lying on their land.
A Listowel, Ont. man, drafted by the Hamilton Tigercats last week, is also getting looks from the NFL, despite only playing 27 games of football in his life.
The threat of zebra mussels has prompted the federal government to temporarily ban watercraft from a Manitoba lake popular with tourists.
A small Ajax dessert shop that recently received a glowing review from celebrity food critic Keith Lee is being forced to move after a zoning complaint was made following the social media influencer’s visit last month.
The Canada Science and Technology Museum is inviting visitors to explore their poop. A new exhibition opens at the Ottawa museum on Friday called, 'Oh Crap! Rethinking human waste.'
The Regina Police Service says it is the first in Saskatchewan and possibly Canada to implement new technology in its detention facility that will offer real-time monitoring of detainees’ vital health metrics.
Just as she had feared, a restaurant owner from eastern Quebec who visited Montreal had her SUV stolen, but says it was all thanks to the kindness of strangers on the internet — not the police — that she got it back.
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.