An eight-year-old boy, dressed as Hitler and warped by repeated viewings of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, leads a marching parade past the town synagogue. “Es is Zeit fur Rache!” Eric Cartman chants (“It is time for revenge!”). “Wir mussen die Juden ausrotten!” the crowd replies (“We must exterminate the Jews!”). This is the world of South Park, the animated satire that last week depicted the bloody suicide of the Queen, bringing predictable calls for censorship when the series is broadcast in Britain later this year. Her Majesty got off lightly. In the same episode, Hillary Clinton had a terrorist nuclear device cunningly planted within. The adverb is the clue.

The phrase most commonly used to describe South Park’s creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, is that they are equal-opportunity offenders. So, while Jesus hosts a lame Jerry Springer-style daytime television show, Satan is a wimp, bossed about by Saddam Hussein, his boyfriend. The South Park staple is to satirise all sides. George W. Bush is rarely flattered, but Osama bin Laden died in season five after a Bugs Bunny-style chase scene in which a joke was made about the size of his penis. Yet in a week when a government-funded report claimed that some schools no longer teach the Holocaust for fear of upsetting religious extremists, maybe the morality of the most offensive show on television is what is missing from our multicultural society. Instead of banning South Park, shouldn’t we feed its attitude into our curriculum?

Its writers might joke about the Final Solution (Mum: “Can Eric spend the night?” Cartman’s mum: “No, Eric is grounded for trying to exterminate the Jews last week.”), just as they have 9/11, Aids and the destruction of the rainforests, but they would also know what to do with fanatical bullies and Holocaust deniers. Parker and Stone are not cowards. The Historical Association briefing, commissioned by the Department for Education, cited a school in northern Britain that did not teach the Holocaust as part of its GCSE coursework for fear of stirring anti-Semitic sentiment among Muslim pupils. Give our kids the teachings of South Park any day.

How have we ended up like this? Was it not meant to be the most unreasonable elements of the Muslim faith that were Holocaust deniers? Are we to justify our capitulation by now suggesting a majority of Muslim youth believe the Holocaust to be an exaggeration? Surely not. And if it is the case, should we not confront this fiction, rather than indulge it? To pretend the event is insignificant in the context of 20th-century history is tantamount to denial anyway.

They would recognise that on South Park, where two episodes dealt with censorship in the wake of the Jyllands-Posten controversy. With a favourite cartoon show about to be suppressed for depicting the Prophet Muhammad, Kyle, eight-year-old alter ego of co-creator Stone, makes an impassioned plea to a TV executive. “Pulling an episode because someone is offended starts a chain reaction,” he says. “You’ll have to pull more and more episodes until the show goes off the air completely.”

Over here it is not a TV show that is being blacked out in schools; it is historical truth. And once we have concealed one chapter of it, what next? In the eight stages of genocide, extermination comes seventh, just before the denial that allows the process to continue elsewhere.

Almost five years before the Danish cartoons caused outrage, South Park depicted the founders and deities of the main religions, including the Prophet Muhammad, as superheroes in an episode called Super Best Friends. The Paramount Comedy Channel no longer features this programme in its reruns. And when Parker and Stone wished to satirise the fury around the Jyllands-Posten cartoons by drawing Muhammad again for a double episode, Cartoon Wars, Comedy Central in the US withdrew the image entirely. In its place was a statement explaining the scene that had been censored. “In this shot Muhammad hands a football helmet to Family Guy. Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Muhammad on their network.”

Stone and Parker played their hand well, though, lampooning the double standard by creating a crudely animated al-Qaeda response, which portrayed Jesus defaecating on George W. Bush and the American flag. The network broadcast that gag, uncensored, which is pretty much where we are now, choosing which passages of history we teach on the ground of extreme reaction.

If you have visited Auschwitz, it is hard to deny the Holocaust while standing in a gas chamber talking to one of the survivors; but cost and location render school trips impossible. Yet what would happen if British children did go? The DfE report stated that part of the reason schools were reluctant to study the Holocaust was fear of stirring antiSemitic sentiment, as if certain pupils would produce coursework focusing on the positive aspects of religious extermination. Isn’t the role of the educator then to challenge, rather than withdraw? “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” wrote Benjamin Franklin. Surely, if the divide grows bigger we need these lessons in moral bravery more than ever. We need education. We need intelligence. We need tolerance.

“I follow what the church teaches now, such as love my family, be nice and help people and even though a lot of people in this town may think that’s stupid, I still choose to believe it. All I ever did was try to be your friend, Stan, but you’re so high and mighty you couldn’t look past my religion and just be my friend back. You’ve got a lot of growing up to do, buddy. Suck my balls.”

We need South Park.

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