Anne Frank’s diary has been censored out of a school textbook in Lebanon following a campaign by the militant group Hezbollah claiming the classic work promotes Zionism.
The row erupted after Hezbollah learned excerpts of “The Diary of Anne Frank” were included in the textbook used by a private English-language schoolin western Beirut.
Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television channel ran a report slamming the book for focusing on the persecution of Jews.
“What is even more dangerous is the dramatic, theatrical way in which the diary is emotionally recounted,” said the report aired last week and also published on the station’s website.
It questioned how long Lebanon would “remain an open arena for the Zionist invasion of education.”
A member of the school board, Jimmy Shoufani, told AFP the school dropped the textbook from its curriculum after the controversy erupted. He asked that the school not be identified.
Hezbollah officials could not be reached for comment.
In the Al-Manar report, party MP Hussein Hajj Hassan had criticized the school for showing poor judgement in picking out its textbooks.
“These respected, established schools are teaching the so-called tragedy this girl lived, and yet they are ashamed to teach the tragedy of the Lebanese people, the tragedy of the Palestinian people… the tragedy of the people of the south under the hands of Zionist occupation,” he told Al-Manar.
Paris-based organisation Aladdin’s Project, which fights Holocaust denial and first translated Anne Frank’s diary into Arabic, issued a statement condemning Hezbollah’s “intimidation campaign.”
Hezbollah fought a devastating war with the Jewish state in 2006. It has since refused to surrender its weapons arguing they are necessary to fight Israel, which withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000 after close to two decades of occupation.
The militant party last month also took aim at another textbook used in a leading private school in Beirut in which Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas are referred to as “terrorist organisations”.
The chapter in question is usually blanked out by Lebanon’s censorship bureau, but an uncensored copy purchased by a student abroad apparently sparked the uproar.
Lebanon, which remains technically at war with Israel, bans the import of products from the Jewish state.
Attorney Naim Kalaani, a member of a committee to ban Zionist products, told Al-Manar that the use of the book was a violation of Lebanon’s penal code and “tantamount to a step toward normalisation” in ties with Israel.
However journalist and criminologist Omar Nashabe rejected such arguments as unfounded.
“The law talks about the state of Israel — the Israeli flag, Israeli institutions, the Israeli entity, as a nation,” Nashabe told AFP.
“Besides Anne Frank is not Israeli,” he added. “Anne Frank is part of world literature.”
He also pointed out that Frank’s diary was available online.
Frank wrote the diary while her family hid from Nazi police and sympathizers in an Amsterdam attic from 1942 to 1944.
She later died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the age of 15, and the diary was published posthumously.
(Source: AFP)
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11 Responses
While I abhore censorship, they do have a point.
Most of the support Israel has comes from the United States. It’s important to Israel that Americans don’t change their mind about that. Ever.
Ever since WWII, the Holocaust has been drummed into Jew and gentile alike. 6 million dead. (Which has since been revised downward considerably, but people still use the 6 million figure)This was one of the leverages used to form Israel. Sympathy.
Over the years, this has grown into that abomination called the “Holocaust Industry”, which is geared for generating support for racist, apartheid Israel.
Since when has apartheid become a Jewish value?
People have a right to suspect zionists behind many things in the Middle East. The book censorship was wrong in my opinion, but it demonstrates a simple formula.
That zionism is responsible for most of the troubles in the area. Radical Islam was born as a response to radical Judaism.
Unplug the zionists from power, watch the entire Middle East settle down. They don’t hate you because you’re Jewish. They hate you because you’re zionists. And that you practice genocide on the only true semites left in Israel, the Palestinians.
Take a hint.
x
#1 – Wake up. They do hate us because we are Jewish. They use the “Zionist” label as an excuse. And you obviously fall for their propaganda. All through history we’ve been persecuted. Is anti-semitism on the rise all over the world because of “Zionism”? I think NOT.
I don’t know what your affiliation is, but if you are Jewish, you sound like a self hating Jew. “The holocaust has been drummed into Jew and Gentile alike”? – Yes – it should be. Those who forget the past are doomed to relive it. We must never forget!!!!!!
x,
you are wrong on many accounts and you are blaming the victim
please don’t post any more “theories”
they are unwelcome here
I wonder if they still allow the Bible. After all its entire subject matter is the Israelite nation.
Xenon are you mizshnoon?
I can’t beleive you guys are actually responding to xexon, who is either Arab or English.
xexon does show a pretty good point. There is to much in the “holocaust industry”. Yes it should never be forgotten and it was a terrible event for the Jewish people and others.But radical islam was not created because of radical judaism. Zionism and Zionists have been a major problem for all jews for over 100 years now. And no i do not support Neturei Karta for the soul purpose that they attented a holocasut denial conference even tho spokesman Rabbi Dovid Weiss lost family in the holocaust.
xexon,
“And that you practice genocide on the only true semites left in Israel, the Palestinians.”
That gave you away. You’re pretty silly to post such garbage on a site like this. Please take your hatred somewhere else, it’s not pretty.
#6 – Please!! It’s a diary written by a teenager living through (and dying in) the holocaust. It’s not meant to be a Hashgafah book.
#7 – I see your point. Why should we validate his comments by answering him? Yet I also feel we should express our opinions and refute the points he makes (or tries to make) – which are so obviously anti-semetic. Is he another Muslim in disguise – like the one at the army base in Texas.
#9 – I agree. He doesn’t belong on this website. However, if he takes his hatred elsewhere, it might be worse. He could actually influence others to see his point. At least here, I don’t think he’ll have an effect like that. Anyway, he sounds derranged to me – which is pretty scary.
xexon, you and your kind believe in a person which the Ramban refers to as “the crazy one”. It is in your mentality to lust for blood spilt and to lie. If anyone demonstrates any type of opposition to you, you will take to the streets with the shouts of jihad.
Please do us all a favor; gai ling in drert!
Poster #1 is a crank who’s prolifically posted his boilerplate anti-Semitic lies elsewhere.
There are some “red flags” that prove the poster is an anti-Semitic liar rather than just a left-wing (or right-wing) critic of Israel.
1) ” Ever since WWII, the Holocaust has been drummed into Jew and gentile alike. 6 million dead. (Which has since been revised downward considerably, but people still use the 6 million figure)”
This is a flat-out lie.
The death toll at Auschwitz itself was revised downward, not the Holocaust’s death toll.
The revision of Auschwitz’s numbers was seized upon by Holocaust deniers, as detailed in Wikipedia:
For many years, a memorial plaque placed at the camp by the Soviet authorities stated that 4 million people had been murdered at Auschwitz. The government of the People’s Republic of Poland also supported this figure. In the west, this figure was accepted, but some historians had their doubts. After the collapse of the Communist government in 1989, the plaque was removed and the official death toll given as 1.1 million. Holocaust deniers have attempted to use this change as propaganda, in the words of the Nizkor Project:
Deniers often use the ‘Four Million Variant’ as a stepping stone to leap from an apparent contradiction to the idea that the Holocaust was a hoax, again perpetrated by a conspiracy. They hope to discredit historians by making them seem inconsistent. If they can’t keep their numbers straight, their reasoning goes, how can we say that their evidence for the Holocaust is credible? One must wonder which historians they speak of, as most have been remarkably consistent in their estimates of a million or so dead. In short, all of the denier’s blustering about the ‘Four Million Variant’ is a specious attempt to envelope the reader into their web of deceit, and it can be discarded after the most rudimentary examination of published histories.
2) “ And that you practice genocide on the only true semites left in Israel, the Palestinians.”
This is another filthy lie that anti-Semites embrace.
Basically, they claim that all current-day Jews are descended from Khazars, and therefore have no right to Israel.
This is a perversion of a book written to actually diminish anti-Semitism:
Russian-American writer Arthur Koestler wrote a book called The Thirteenth Tribe, which speculated that a great number of Ashkenazic Jews are descended not from ancient Hebrews, but from a Turkish tribe called the Khazars, who ruled in much of what is now southwest Russia and Georgia and converted to Judaism en masse. Anti-semites seized on this hypothesis as proof that modern Jews were not truly Jewish at all but usurpers, and that those who had Semitic ancestry came not from Judah but the Edomites of the Negev desert (these claims are circulated widely in the Arab world as part of anti-Israel propaganda). Modern genetic studies have largely disproved the Khazar hypothesis and supported Levantine ancestry for the vast majority of modern Jews, even going so far as to prove the existence of a Y-chromosomal Aaron (again, more at Wikipedia) who is a common ancestor of a great many Jews identified as being of priestly ancestry; this and similar genetic markers have been used to support some claims of widely distributed groups throughout Africa and western Asia to Jewish ancestry. In fact, despite the survival of the Khazar canard among anti-Jewish hate groups, modern descendents of the Khazars have yet to be positively identified. Oddly enough Koestler himself was Jewish and a non religious Zionist, he actually believed that his book would help end anti-Semitism.
I don’t have time to line-by-line debunk the multiple lies that infest post #1, but rest assured they are lies and easily provable as such.