Barry Duke, the Angry Atheist

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1. 

   As someone who produced dozens of nativity plays as a teacher and a Sunday School leader, that title ‘A Gay…

2. 

   The defence of a Christian view never seems to be settled by debate: exchange of facts, reference to historical events.…

3. 

   But …… Rwanda is a safe place: Parliament says so.https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/8/contentsSafety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024 S 2 Safety…

4. 

   Religion can survive only on the most unquestionable assumptions. The statements made on Sundays on the BBC as if they…

5. 

   Yes, if I’ve got anything remotely like a phobia, as an ex-fundy, its bibles, churches, tracts etc. I like to…

IN her famous diary, Jewish Holocaust victim Anne Frank, who perished aged 16 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February, 1945, discussed sexual matters and described clinical details of her own vagina.

The passages she wrote are included in Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation by Ari Folman and artist David Polonsky, published in 2018.

Cue outrage.

The Jerusalem Post, in a piece about the growing number of controversies involving book removals from school libraries in Florida and Texas, reported this month that those demanding the removal of the diary from schools include some Jewish parents and at least one Jewish lawmaker—Florida Republican firebrand Randy Fine, who said:

I read the diary of Anne Frank many times as a kid. I don’t remember any of that stuff that they put in that graphic novel.

Image via YouTube

Labelling the adaptation an “Anne Frank pornography book,” Fine, above, continued:

And frankly that graphic novel is antisemitic. To sexualize the diary of Anne Frank in that sort of inappropriate way, it is antisemitic.

Fine, as per The Palm Beach Post, is a frothing right-wing lunatic.

He said that Democrats who oppose restrictions on classroom discussions of gender identity for young children are “perverts” and “groomers.”

And in April 2019, he made international headlines when he called a Jewish organiser of a local Israel-Palestine panel a “judenrat”, a derogatory term for Jews who collaborated with Nazis during the Holocaust.

‘Bigoted’ and ‘misguided’

Writing for the JP, Andrew Lapin said:

To defenders of the illustrated book—including the foundation created in Frank’s memory, historians and Jewish groups—the inclusion of Anne Frank’s diary among the list of banned books is a sign that the [book banning] movement is bigoted and misguided.

The illustrated version was authorised by the Anne Frank Fonds, the Switzerland-based foundation started by Anne’s father Otto Frank.

Kasey Meehan, Director of the Freedom to Read program at the literary free-speech activist group PEN America, is quoted as saying:

People are just so uncomfortable with the idea of seeing anything represented visually. Time and time again, when graphic novels are taken, an image is pulled out of context or an image is held up and declared as porn.

Meehan suggested that parents who objected to Anne exploring her sexuality were doing so because of the passages’ latent LGBTQ themes.

In one passage Frank discusses a time she asked a female friend if they could show each other their breasts, but was rebuffed.

Folman and Polonsky reproduced the passages and included a full-page illustration showing her wandering through a garden of female nude statues in the Greco-Roman tradition. 

The Swiss-based Anne Frank Fonds, which controls the diary and authorised the adaptation, reacted to attacks on the book by saying:

We consider the book of a 12-year-old girl to be appropriate reading for her peers.

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