Part of the chain letter e-mail reads as follows:
Recently this week, UK removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it "offended" the Moslem population which claims it never occurred. This is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it.
This e-mail is intended to reach 40 million people worldwide! Join us and be a link in the memorial chain and help us distribute it around the world.Please send this e-mail to 10 people you know and ask them to continue the memorial chain.
Ed Balls, British Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, has issued a statement to media and embassies worldwide denouncing the e-mail as a hoax.
"The Holocaust was one of the most horrific and profound events in world history and I want every young person to have an understanding of it ... Teaching of the Holocaust is compulsory in all secondary schools between the ages of 11 and 14 and can also be studied in GCSE history courses when studying the Second World War," said Balls.
"It is simply not true that UK schools are banned from teaching about the Holocaust, and anyone forwarding messages like these is unwittingly feeding an urban legend," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "We have seen many reports of this chain letter and it's clear that this message is not just propagating via traditional e-mail but also via social networking Web sites like Facebook where people forward nonsense messages to all of their friends without necessarily engaging their brains."
Experts note that some variants of the chain letter claim that the teaching ban is at the University of Kentucky rather than the United Kingdom -- presumably because of a confusion over the term "UK."
"Hoaxes waste valuable bandwidth, impact staff productivity and can even place e-mail addresses into the wrong hands. They have been a problem for years, but this must be the first time that a government has taken such firm action to debunk one," continued Cluley. "E-mail spreads like wildfire and forwarding one copy could result in 100 more being sent -- break the chain by hitting the delete button, and learn not to believe everything you read in your e-mail."
In a separate initiative announced today, Balls announced that two pupils from every sixth form and college in the UK would be invited to visit the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland.
