The US Department of Defense has removed or plans to purge thousands of articles about the Holocaust, 9/11 terrorist attacks, cancer awareness and sexual assault among others from Pentagon websites as the department adhered to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s order to scrub “diversity” content from all its platforms.
According to a report by CNN, over 24,000 articles could be deleted with several taken down already. The purge comes a month after the Pentagon in a memo said it would be removing news and feature articles promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) content.
Pages taken down include an article about the experience of Holocaust survivor Kitty Saks, who later immigrated to the US, an article about Holocaust Remembrance week and an Air Force Academy cadet majoring in history describing his experience taking scholarly visits to concentration camps in Europe.
“Honouring the memory of the Holocaust and those who survived is not a matter of political ideology – it is a moral imperative and a vital component of education, remembrance, and the fight against anti-Semitism,” he said.
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Several articles containing ‘sexual asault’ themes have also been chalked off the websites and now have “DEI’ in their URL. “April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month” and “A call to action – Three ways to combat sexual assault” are some of the pages that have faced the axe.
Notably, many of the up to 24,000 pages that might be purged were not submitted by individual units but rather identified using automated scripts.
“In the rare cases that content is removed – either deliberately or by mistake – that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components and they correct the content so it recognizes our heroes for their dedicated service alongside their fellow Americans, period,” Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot said in a statement.
Ever since it became evident that Donald Trump was returning to the White House, several US companies have rolled back their DEI policies amid criticism from conservatives. The likes of Google, Meta, Amazon and McDonalds have either entirely scrapped or dramatically scaled back their DEI programmes.