The Four Color Media Monitor

JTA/Israel National News tells of a schoolteacher in Texas who was dismissed by her district for making use of leftist animator/illustrator Ari Folman and David Polonsky's GN based on Anne Frank's Holocaust diary, which was developed more for the sake of foisting explicit material upon underaged children in schools and LGBT fetishes than actual history education:

A middle school teacher in a district outside Houston, Texas, has been fired reportedly for reading a sexually explicit passage from Anne Frank’s diary out loud to eighth-grade students, the district told local news.

The passage came from a 2018 graphic version of the diary by the world-famous Jewish Holocaust victim that restored some portions of the initial book that had been cut from the most well-known editions.

“Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” has also been at the center of several other recent book-related controversies in public schools: It was briefly pulled from another Texas district, permanently removed from a Florida district and has spent several months under review at another Florida district; a Republican Jewish lawmaker in Florida has called it “Anne Frank pornography.” [...]

In the book, adapted by Ari Folman and David Polonsky, a passage dated March 24, 1944, depicts Anne describing male and female genitalia, including descriptions of female genitalia and pubic hair. The words are really Anne’s own, and appear in her initial handwritten draft of the diary. The passage comes immediately after a passage describing “the sound of gunfire” as Nazi soldiers attacked Allied forces parachuting out of a crashing plane.

“It’s bad enough she’s having them read this for an assignment, but then she also is making them read it aloud and making a little girl talk about feeling each other’s breasts and when she sees a female she goes into ecstasy, that’s not OK,” a parent of twin boys in the class told local news. The parent was referring to another passage from the book, in which Anne briefly describes her latent feelings toward another girl, that some conservative parents and activists say they find objectionable.

What's described really is sick and perverse, and the worst part is that when it's as forced previous descriptions point out, it actually makes Anne Frank look bad. What were Folman and Polonsky thinking? And they're not the only ones to wonder about:

The Anne Frank Fonds, the Switzerland-based foundation that oversees the copyright to Frank’s diary and authorized the new graphic adaptation, has defended the work in the past. “We consider the book of a 12-year-old girl to be appropriate reading for her peers,” board member Yves Kugelmann has told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Jewish books including “Anne Frank’s Diary,” “Maus” and “The Fixer” have become frequently ensnared in a broader, conservative-led effort to purge schools of material that activists deem inappropriate, largely for content involving sexuality, gender identity and race. Teachers are increasingly facing censures and firings for including controversial books, including by race writer Ta-Nahisi Coates, in class.

Oh, so far-left Coates, one of the worst things that could happen to Marvel/DC, also has books with potentially inappropriate content turning up in class? Another reason for concern. For now, it sure is disturbing the foundation named after Anne is okay with this, and apparently sees nothing wrong with fetishizing a graphic allusion to lesbianism.

National Review addressed the latest scandal involving this GN as a form of betrayal:

The most recent episode — which is likely not over, since the fired teacher has reportedly hired an attorney — is being portrayed as conservatives wanting to ban Anne’s diary entirely, when in fact the dispute was over the graphic adaptation. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, tweeted, “Texas teacher fired for reading Diary of Anne Frank to class-THIS Speaks for itself!!!” Ben Collins, a reporter with NBC News, tweeted to his more than 400,000 followers that “this is the apology a Houston school district sent to parents for assigning an illustrated version of Anne Frank’s Diary to students” and that “the teacher was fired for assigning it,” with an image attached. When a reply pointed out that the objections were not to the diary itself, he responded, “who gives a sh*t.”

Generally, I’m against sanitizing the contents of books. I find the aversion to the sexual passages in the diary naïve: It shouldn’t surprise anyone that a teenage girl wrote about undergoing puberty in her diary. Still, I think parents could reasonably argue that schools should assign an edition of the diary without descriptions of puberty, and that such an edition wouldn’t detract from the larger educational mission of studying the Holocaust.

But whatever one thinks about presenting students with a revised or an unrevised text of Anne Frank’s diary, that is completely distinct from whether middle-school students benefit from reading a graphic-novel version for class.

Why were eighth graders assigned to read a graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary rather than her own writing, whether the latter contained the sexual passages or not? Anne Frank received her diary on her 13th birthday. Students in eighth grade are usually ages 13 or 14. If she was old enough to write the diary, then they are old enough to read it.

The graphic adaptation betrays Anne by reducing her hardship to cartoonish drawings with captions, and it betrays teenage students by assuming they aren’t emotionally and intellectually mature enough to grapple with the material. Perhaps most egregiously, it’s a simplification that dishonors the care that Anne devoted to her writing. The issue is not whether teenagers are prompted to engage with her explicit passages; it’s whether they’re prompted to engage with her writing at all.

And if it's far more about the graphic references to sexuality than Anne's wartime experiences themselves, that's minimizing the seriousness of the issue, and offensive to her memory. And it is absurd that the GN is considered the edition to read to students, but not the original plain-text diary itself. The MSM should be ashamed of themselves for making this all into a case of conservative hysteria. Mainly because Front Page Magazine has a troubling report about something occurring in Canada - and very likely the USA too - that these same sources promoting Folman's GN aren't discussing themselves:

The Diary of a Young Girl by Holocaust victim Anne Frank, the massively popular Harry Potter series, and the Newberry Medal-winning novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry about racial conflict in 1930s Mississippi are some notable examples of books that 10th grader Reina Takata can no longer find in her public high school library in Ontario, Canada. Why not? Because those titles were culled as part of a new “equity-based” weeding process implemented by the Peel District School Board (PDSB) last spring, leaving library shelves as bare as supermarket shelves in Biden’s America.

Miss Takata told CBC Toronto that the shelves at Erindale Secondary School were full of books as recently as May, but gradually began to empty out. When she returned to school in the fall, “I came into my school library and there are rows and rows of empty shelves with absolutely no books.” (Takata herself took the photo above, of the bookshelves in her Mississauga high school’s library.) She estimates that more than half of her school’s library books are gone.

Libraries across Canada and in the United States have long followed standard weeding plans to dispose of damaged or outdated books; this is understandable and reasonable. But Reina Takata and many other students and parents are concerned that this new process emphasizing the leftist buzzwords “equity” and “inclusion” seems to have led some schools to remove thousands of books simply because they were published in 2008 or earlier. [...]

For all of the Left’s shrill, false charges that conservatives are frenzied, anti-intellectual book-banners, it is the totalitarians of wokeness who are actively engaging in the online stealth editing of classic fiction, the mob cancellation of insufficiently woke authors, and the quiet culling of books from library shelves to accommodate the ideological requirements of “equity” and “inclusion.”

This neo-Marxist agenda is being perpetrated, meanwhile, at the same time that its fanatical activists are hell-bent on ensuring that school libraries stock pornographic works of gender ideology aimed at prematurely instilling a sexual consciousness in very young schoolchildren. Parents who object to this blatant grooming are smeared as bigots and investigated by federal law enforcement as domestic terror threats, because leftists don’t believe in parental rights; they believe the State should be raising our children.

Although the aforementioned “equity” book weeding policy was implemented in Canada, make no mistake – a similar woke targeting of the West’s literary heritage will be coming to school libraries in America, if it hasn’t already, and possibly even to public libraries and bookstores as well. And this agenda to erase the West’s literary heritage is only going to intensify unless and until it is stopped in its tracks by a determined, righteously fearless opposition.

So while all this hypocritical fuss over the banning of a gross GN allegedly focused on Anne Frank's been going on in the USA, over in Canada, the regular text-based printings of her diary have been banned in Ontario, which once again is giving signs its one of the worst places you could possibly be in the great white north. Something tells me that, if this happened in the USA's side of the border, it wouldn't elicit even a whisper from the MSM. And is the Anne Frank Foundation okay with what's going on in Canadian libraries? If they don't object, that's a sad sign they've become woke in their own way, which is throughly unbecoming of anybody who claims to be safeguarding history.

A writer at the Federalist who's worked as a teacher addressed the topic too, and says the Houston teacher who caused this flap deserved to be booted:

I’ll admit, as an English teacher myself, I sympathized with this woman at first, thinking she must’ve been caught in the crosshairs of some vindictive parents or administrators who disagreed with her politics or lifestyle. I’ve witnessed this and can attest the attacks can be from both sides, and it gets ugly.

However, once I made it past the headline, it became apparent why this teacher was removed from the classroom. First, the book wasn’t included in the class’s approved curriculum. Second, the book included sexually explicit content that was wildly inappropriate for a middle school English class.

At best, the teacher was incompetent and thought using this book would help her struggling readers understand Anne Frank’s story, not thinking about the material in it. At worst, the teacher knew what was in the book, thought it would be good for her students, and wanted to rebel against prescribed standards by going off-script.

For most people, all this might be confusing. After all, how can Anne Frank’s diary be inappropriate when so many millions of students read the book and missed these salacious descriptions? This is because the original version published in 1947, which most people have read, doesn’t include Frank’s descriptions of puberty, genitalia, and lesbian desires, which were in the original diary. For whatever reason, the graphic novel version published in 2017 includes these missing portions, as the Daily Mail’s writeup on this story shows.

That said, this doesn’t make it a bad book. Puberty and sexual desires are normal aspects of young adulthood, and many adolescent readers may take solace in the fact that Frank felt the same things some of them do.

But this kind of content does make it a bad book for whole-class reading in a middle school English class. In this context, the teacher is effectively acting as an authority on sensitive topics, taking it upon herself to introduce, explain, and evaluate what Frank is talking about.

Instead of students encountering these subjects when they’re ready, they are forced to adopt and apply their teacher’s interpretation. Otherwise, they may be punished or suffer a bad grade.

Naturally, this makes for an extremely uncomfortable classroom environment. In addition to assigning the graphic novel to her classes, this teacher was making her students read these parts aloud, which is extremely questionable. Why would she ask 13-year-old boys and girls to read lines about how Frank feels about menstruating or how she wants to grope her friend? Either she gets a perverted thrill from this, or she wants to somehow de-stigmatize or normalize this subject matter for her young students — two things most people would consider sexual grooming.

As noted before, such graphic descriptions also run the danger of making Anne Frank look bad, no matter how young her age. I should also note that my father, who'd read the diary compilation years before, once stated that Anne had told there was a boy she'd loved, which seems to be lost in all this controversy. As a result, it compounds the suspicions this GN by Folman and Polonsky was written more for the sake of promoting the LGBT agenda, exploiting a historic figure to advance their goals, which is monumentally offensive.

Overall, far from condemning the administrators and parents as bullies and book banners, we can say that they did the right thing in dismissing a teacher who crossed more than a few lines. Not only did she neglect to teach age-appropriate content to her classes, but she corrupted her students, doing untold damage to their mental and emotional health.

Exactly, and she should apologize, but probably won't. There's only so much of this horrific perversion going about in north America now, and it's doing severe damage to children, and little or nothing to provide them with an education, history-based or otherwise. And do any of these pseudo-educators actually care about historical figures who were victims of racially-motivated hatred and totalitarianism? It's doubtful they do. Illustrated medium can have have its advantages for telling history as much as escapist entertainment. But the way this whole subject has been handled by ideologues at schools most definitely wasn't good, and did more harm than good to comicdom, along with Anne Frank's memory.

Labels: censorship issues, Europe and Asia, golden calf of LGBT, history, libraries, misogyny and racism, moonbat artists, politics