William Diamond Middle School in Lexington, Massachusetts, is the second-best-performing middle school in the state, ranked number one in math instruction by U.S. News and World Reports. Its seventh-graders just received a mandatory lesson on the Holocaust and antisemitism.

Then the principal apologized for it.

Dr. Johnny Cole, the school's principal, sent an email to families after Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, and Lebanese students complained that the lesson made them feel "unseen" and "less safe." The lesson's stated goal was to help students "recognize hate, understand where it comes from, and encourage you to speak up against it." Apparently, recognizing hate made some students uncomfortable. So the school said sorry.

"Some of you felt unseen," Cole wrote. "Some of you felt like your own history, your identity, or your community was left out or erased." He added: "We are sorry because every one of you deserves to walk into this school and feel that who you are matters — Arab students, Jewish students, Lebanese students, Muslim students, Palestinian students, every student."

The school committed to working with teachers and families to develop new lessons addressing "hate, prejudice, and justice that includes all of our communities." In other words, the lesson about six million Jews being systematically murdered didn't include enough communities. The school "missed the mark," Cole said.

This is the logical endpoint of a culture that treats discomfort as harm. A presentation on the industrialized extermination of an entire people group — documented with photographs, survivor testimony, and the meticulous record-keeping of the perpetrators themselves — is now something a public school feels obligated to apologize for. Not because the facts were wrong. Not because the lesson was poorly taught. Because some students felt their identity wasn't centered in a lesson about someone else's genocide.

StopAntisemitism, the watchdog organization, responded with the question most people were already asking: "Since when is teaching historical fact something that requires an apology?"

The school had reason to teach the lesson. William Diamond Middle School has dealt with neo-Nazi graffiti and anti-Israel vandalism on its own campus. Students had flagged escalating incidents of antisemitism at the school. The presentation was a direct response to that environment. The principal's solution to rising Jew-hatred at his school was to teach kids about the worst-case historical example of where Jew-hatred leads. Then he apologized for doing it.

Strom pointed out the historical irony that the complaint conveniently sidesteps: the Armenian genocide, in which approximately 1.5 million Christians were killed — by Ottoman Muslims. Nobody is demanding schools apologize for teaching that, mostly because nobody teaches it in the first place. The selective outrage runs in one direction.

The school ranked fifth in the state for reading. Its students can apparently comprehend complex texts. Whether the adults running the building can comprehend that teaching history isn't an act of aggression against anyone's identity — that's a different question.

A school with swastikas on its walls taught a lesson about where swastikas lead. Parents complained. The principal apologized. The swastikas are presumably still a problem.