When Anne Frank was 13, she and her family, along with four other people, went into hiding in Amsterdam to escape the Nazi transports. Two years later, the Nazis captured them. Of the eight people, only Anne’s father survived. After the war, he discovered and then published Anne’s diary. It became and has remained a worldwide bestseller. For almost as long, leftists have attempted to coopt it for their own purposes, none of which have to do with fighting the genocidal antisemitism that still exists today. The latest battle is playing out in Florida, where anti-DeSantis leftists are falsely claiming that conservatives have canceled Anne Frank.

At my blog, I’ve written about the way in which the left is coopting Anne Frank for its own ends. This post sums up what the left has been doing to Anne Frank’s legacy, which is to erase her Jewishness and attack Israel. (Had Anne Frank and her family made it to British-mandate Palestine, the only true refuge in the world for Jews, they would have survived WWII.)

Image: Anne Frank’s passport photo. Public domain.

The latest use to which leftists have put Anne Frank is to place her in the service of the gay pride movement. Thus, in Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation, some illustrations focus on Anne’s nascent sexuality, providing truly graphic images of Anne viewing sexually explicit nude statutes or focusing on her appreciation for the nude female body. These concepts were in Anne’s unexpurgated diary, but they were also the ruminations of a precocious young woman from a European progressive household (by the standards of the day), who clearly wrote her diary with an eye to future publication and was experimenting with ideas.

In any event, they were mature content and are not meant to be presented in full graphic form for a very young audience—yet that was precisely what was happening in Florida:

Leftists will tell you: patriots are a bunch of book-burning neo-Nazis who are busy even now trying to control what people think by taking books out of the hands of our young people who are thirsting for knowledge. And so the headline of the Wednesday report from Tampa Bay’s WFLA was downright ominous: “Florida school district removes book about Anne Frank from libraries.” Heavens to betsy! Even Anne Frank! Do these right-wingers want another Holocaust? Will they stop at nothing? But the truth, as is usually the case with establishment media reports, was quite a different matter.

WFLA’s lead paragraph is just as misleading as its headline: “A book about Anne Frank was removed from a Florida school library after a new policy was approved.” What was removed was not her famous diary, but a graphic novel entitled Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation. In this case, “graphic” is used in both senses of the word.

“In one graphic scene in the book,” WFLA informs us, “Frank asks a friend to expose themselves to one another.” And in another, “Frank walks along nude statues that are sexually explicit.” The book also portrays Anne Frank as a budding lesbian; the caption on the page where she walks among the nude statues is: “I must admit, every time I see a female nude, I go into ecstasy. If only I had a girlfriend!” It was this marginally pornographic book that “was removed from school libraries in Indian River County” after complaints from a group of parents.

Moms For Liberty (a group to which I belong in South Carolina) wasn’t protesting Anne Frank or her diary. The organization and its members were protesting the graphic novelization of the diary—that is, a cherry-picked rendition that used some of Anne’s words and provided illustrations from the imaginations of Ari Folman and David Polonsky. Indeed, when you go to the Amazon page for the book, Anne Frank is designated, not as the book’s author, but as a “Contributor.”

This is a comic book, not Anne Frank’s diary—and Haaretz has acknowledged that it’s “edgy.” When it comes to Anne Frank’s actual book, Moms For Liberty is fine:

The parents’ group in question, Moms For Liberty, of course has no problem with the real Anne Frank book. Jennifer Pippin of Moms For Liberty explained, “We think true history absolutely needs to be taught, the Holocaust, the Anne Frank diary.” And Dr. Kyra Schafte of the Indian River County school district pointed out that the real Diary of Anne Frank is still available in school libraries there. Cristen Maddux, a spokesperson for the district, said that the graphic novel, on the other hand, was “not age appropriate.” She added: “That’s not the actual diary of Anne Frank. It’s a fictional novel that has some inappropriate content in it.” It was removed, she said, “due to minimization of the Holocaust.” Echoing Schafte, Maddux concluded, “Library spaces in the district currently have factual accounts of The Diary of Anne Frank.”

For the left, nothing is sacred. Everything is simply a vehicle for passing along its values—or, more accurately, its values of the moment. The leftist goal is power, and it will use anything (race, sexuality, children) to achieve that goal. Anne Frank’s diary is just another weapon in the long war.