Hezbollah pressured Beirut school to drop excerpts of “The Diary of Anne Frank" from textbook

Hezbollah pressured Beirut school to drop excerpts of “The Diary of Anne Frank" from textbook

Hezbollah pressured a private school in Beirut to drop from its curriculum a textbook containing excerpts of “The Diary of Anne Frank.”
The English-language school, which asked not to be identified, acceded to pressure after Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television station ran a segment chiding the school for including the posthumously published Holocaust memoir in its lessons, the French news agency AFP reported.
Hezbollah, which Israel and the United States consider a terrorist group, called the diary’s inclusion part of “an open arena for the Zionist invasion of education.” 
Attorney Naim Kalaani, a member of a committee to ban Zionist products, told Al-Manar the use of the book in a school constituted a violation of Lebanon’s penal code and “tantamount to a step toward normalization” in ties with Israel. Hezbollah could not be reached by the station for comment.
The Paris-based organization Aladdin’s Project, which fights Holocaust denial and was the first to translate Anne Frank’s diary into Arabic, issued a statement condemning Hezbollah’s “intimidation campaign.”
The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors denounced what it called a disgraceful act as a “twin blow against decency. It is a blatant expression of Holocaust denial, and an assault on one of the great works of modern literature and civilization.”
This marks the second time in a month that Hezbollah has pressured a school into censoring information it dislikes. In October, the International College, one of Lebanon’s most renowned private schools, agreed to put opaque stickers over pages of a textbook that named Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad as terrorist organizations.
 

 

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