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A high school along Floridas Atlantic Coast has removed a graphic novel based on the diary of Anne Frank after a leader of a conservative advocacy group challenged it, claiming it minimized the Holocaust.

Anne Franks Diary: The Graphic Adaptation was removed from a library at Vero Beach High School after a leader of Moms for Liberty in Indian River County raised an objection. The schools principal agreed with the objection, and the book was removed last month.

The book at one point shows the protagonist walking in a park, enchanted by female nude statues, and later proposing to a friend that they show each other their breasts.

Under the school districts policy, the principal makes the decision on a challenged book. If someone disagrees with a decision to keep the disputed book on the shelves, it can be appealed to a districtwide committee. The Anne Frank graphic novel had been checked out twice before it was removed, Cristen Maddux, a spokeswoman for the School District of Indian River County, said Monday.

Vero Beach is located 105 miles (169 kilometers) southeast of Orlando.

Other books about Anne Frank and copies of the published diary she wrote chronicling her time hiding from the Nazis with her family and other Jews in German-occupied Amsterdam remain in the school systems libraries. The Jewish teenagers diary was published in 1947, several years after she died in a concentration camp, and it has become a classic read by tens of millions of people around the world.

By law, Florida schools are required to teach about the Holocaust, and nothing has changed in that respect, Maddux said.

The feedback that the Holocaust is being removed from the curriculum and students arent knowledgeable about what happened, that is not the case at all, Maddux said. Its just a challenged book and the principal removed it.

Besides the Anne Frank graphic novel, Moms for Liberty in Indian River County objected to three books in the Assassination Classroom series, and they also were removed.

Moms for Liberty leader Jennifer Pippin said the Anne Frank graphic novel violated state standards to teach the Holocaust accurately.

Even her version featured the editing out of the entries about sex, Pippin said, referring to the original diary. Even the publisher of the book calls it a biography, meaning, it writes its own interpretive spin. Its not the actual work. It quotes the work, but its not the diary in full. It chooses to offer a different view on the subject.

Published in 2018, the graphic novel was adapted from Anne Franks diary by Ari Folman, and David Polonsky provided the illustrations. Folmans parents are Holocaust survivors.

When contacted by email, the books publisher, Pantheon Graphic Library, forwarded the inquiry to Yves Kugelmann, a board member of a foundation set up by Anne Franks father, Otto, devoted to distributing Anne Franks diary and other matters. Kugelmann didnt immediately respond to questions.

The American Library Association reported last month that there were more than 1,200 demands to censor library books last year in the U.S., the highest number since the association began tracking more than 20 years ago.

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A group called Moms for Liberty just got a Florida school to censor a graphic novel about Anne Frank and the Holocaust - Fortune

Georgia public schools now must have a complaint resolution policy that allows challenges to material believed to be harmful to minors, defined by the law as sexual content appealing to the prurient, shameful, or morbid interest of minors, which lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors. This definition mirrors the U.S. Supreme Courts definition of obscenity.

When a parent or guardian submits a written complaint about school material, the school principal has seven business days to investigate whether the material is harmful to minors. The decision of whether to remove or restrict student access to the challenged material is left exclusively to the principal, although the school board may conduct a review.

The Georgia Department of Education does not give principals any guidance for determining whether material meets the definition of harmful to minors, and it offers no concrete steps for handling complaints. The departments model complaint resolution policy simply restates the laws requirements.

The law undermines students constitutional right to receive information. In the 1982 case of Island Trees School District v. Pico, the U.S. Supreme Court noted that school libraries afford students an opportunity at self-education and individual enrichment and that public school boards are not free to restrict student access to library books simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books. In the words of the court, the First Amendment rights of students may be directly and sharply implicated by the removal of books from the shelves of a school library.

Yet Georgia now empowers any parent to initiate a process that does exactly that.

Another year-old Georgia law only makes matters worse. Georgias divisive concepts law regulates whether and how teachers can discuss topics like race and ethnicity in the classroom. Both laws deprive students of their First Amendment right to receive information, and the combination has created uncertainty and normalized censorship.

Some teachers have limited or avoided discussing topics like the Civil War or figures like Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for fear of putting their jobs at risk. Georgia teachers report teaching in fear of crossing the divisive concept line.

In the just-ended Georgia General Assembly session, lawmakers considered encouraging even more censorship in our schools. Senate Bill 154 would have made school librarians criminally liable for distributing harmful materials to minors. Fortunately, the bill did not pass this year. But it could reappear in 2024.

What would such a law mean for Georgia schools? To see the damage it could do, we need only look one state south.

In 2017, Floridas Legislature passed House Bill 989 that was a precursor to Georgias SB 226. Floridas law lacks detailed guidance for resolving complaints, leading to significant uncertainty among educators about what books they can have in their classrooms, paving the way for self-censorship by teachers that deprives students of their First Amendment right to receive information.

Last year, the Florida lawmakers in addition to passing their own divisive concepts law passed HB 1467, which requires all books in public school media centers, as well as any books assigned or recommended by teachers, be pre-approved as content-appropriate by the schools media specialist. A public educator who allows students access to unapproved materials may be subject to felony prosecution.

Schools are unequipped to shoulder the administrative burden of this year-old law. For example, in Duval County, Florida, a mere 54 media specialists are responsible for vetting 1.6 million titles in the countys 200 schools. Fear of criminal consequences and a backlog of classroom materials waiting to be reviewed has led Florida teachers to box up and donate entire classroom libraries.

SB 154 would have similar consequences in Georgia. The proposal which remains on file for the 2024 General Assembly session would expose educators to potential arrest and prosecution for simply having books and resources in their classrooms, without any real, practicable guidance on which materials are allowed and which are not.

Georgia must learn from the mistakes weve already made by following in Floridas unconstitutional footsteps. Criminalizing teachers well-intentioned conduct and impeding students access to educational information would put us on a path to even more censorship in our schools.

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Opinion: A year later, book banning law normalizes school censorship - The Atlanta Journal Constitution

We Americans have been paying the feds to silence ourselves and interfere in our own elections, under a government-led Disinformation-Industrial Complex that has been brought into clear view through the yeoman efforts of a single billionaire entrepreneur, journalists, and activists, red state attorneys' general, and the House Judiciary Committee's Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

Perhaps because of this exposure, one of the federal agencies most integral to this byzantine censorship regime has been covering up its tracks.

Yet during a recent hearing of the House Appropriations Committee's Homeland Security subcommittee with the leader of said agency, the agency's scandalous behavior was not a core focus of the discussion.

One subcommittee member largely led the questioning touching on CISA's speech policing. Every member should have.

There was little indication appropriators intended to leverage the power of the purse to compel the agency to cease its censorship effortsthat is, to defund the censorship regime, and perhaps to dismantle it outright.

If Republicans are committed to combatting the ongoing assault against the core of our First Amendmentpolitical speechwhich could worsen as the 2024 election approaches, it is incumbent upon them to take a significantly more aggressive posture in defense of our liberties.

As disaffected liberal journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, as well as Sen. (and former Missouri Attorney General) Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, and Missouri Special Assistant Attorney General D. John Sauer all detailed in recent Weaponization Subcommittee hearings, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has served as a key cog in the Disinformation-Industrial Complex.

That complex, linking the administrative state to Big Tech and myriad often government-funded and ex-government employee-staffed "counter-disinformation" organizations, has created a moral panic over "mis-, dis-, and mal-information" (MDM), which it has tied to threats to public health and safety as a pretext to censoring unauthorized opinions.

The Disinformation-Industrial Complex's stated purpose is the protection of The People. The actual purpose is the protection of The Ruling Regime, through narrative control.

The plaintiffs in Missouri and Louisiana et al. v. Biden, who testified recently before the Weaponization Subcommittee, describe CISA as the "nerve center" of the federal government's censorship activities.

They allege that the Biden administration cajoled and colluded with social media platforms to "suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content...under the Orwellian guise of halting" MDM, violating the First Amendment and other laws in the process.

Among the defendants in the case are numerous Biden administration officials, including the president himself, former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, and CISA Director Jen Easterly.

As a measure of her perspective on speech, Easterly has previously asserted that "the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure," and has pledged that CISA will "work with our partners in the private sector," including social media companies, "to ensure that the American people have the facts that they need to help protect our critical infrastructure."

CISA has operated accordingly, expanding its definition of "infrastructure" to encompass virtually everything; its focus has shifted from "foreign interference" to domestic Wrongthinkcodified in transitioning its Countering Foreign Influence Task Force into its MDM teamand its mandate is now suppressing such Wrongthink if it has a nexus to "infrastructure."

This is the logic by which the Americans, myself included, who raised issues about the integrity of the 2020 electionand have thereby been treated by CISA as a threat to election "infrastructure"found ourselves censored.

A March 7, 2023 filing in Missouri and Louisiana et al. v. Biden, synthesizing voluminous discovery material and depositions from parties critical of the censorship regime, details CISA's centrality to the federal government's censorship efforts.

The filing records that CISA officials:

Much of the MDM these parties have combated concerns elections and aspects of the Chinese coronavirus, including information known by authorities to be true, if it undermined their preferred narratives. Evidence suggests CISA has also focused on "financial misinformation and disinformation," as well as offending content around the Russo-Ukrainian War. CISA has even pushed for censoring "supposed disinformation about CISA itself," according to the filing.

The day that filing hit the docket, Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, reported that in the prior week CISA had purged its website of references to its domestic censorship work.

Just over two weeks later, on March 24, Taibbi and journalist Susan Schmidt reported that CISA had several months earlier quietly disbanded its advisory "Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation & Disinformation" subcommittee.

Four days after that, CISA Director Easterly came before the House Appropriations Committee, asking for a 22 percent increase in CISA's budget for fiscal year 2024 to $3.1 billion. As the chair of the Homeland Security Subcommittee, Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio), noted in prepared remarks, CISA's budget has already increased nearly 44 percent over the three preceding years.

Despite this ballooning agency budget, requests for still more money, and the well-documented ways such funds have fueled America's public-private censorship regimea conspiracy to violate the First Amendment that constitutes taxpayer-funded election interferenceCISA's speech policing garnered little scrutiny.

Rep. Michael Cloud's (R-Tex.) questioning of Easterly on her agency's role in the Disinformation-Industrial Complex was an exception. To Cloud's questions, Easterly responded that "We don't censor anything...we don't flag anything to social media organizations." She added: "We are focused on building resilience to foreign influence and disinformation."

By contrast, as Benz's organization summarized its extensive findings about CISA, this "agency in charge of securing elections is also in charge of censoring elections."

Two days later, before the Weaponization subcommittee, Louisiana Attorney General Landry would testify that CISA "aims to protect our collective consciousness from independent thought and inquiry at the individual level."

Neither CISA nor any government agency should be in this business whatsoever.

Nor should any government agency be weaponized against the public, in violation of our most fundamental rights.

Some House Republicans have acknowledged this in raising the threat of withholding funding for the FBI's new glitzy headquarters.

But efforts to leverage the power of the purse must extend far beyond any one agency, because our liberties are under virtually government-wide assault.

Why should Americans pay a single cent more for our own subjugation?

Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He also contributes to The Federalist, the New York Post, The Epoch Times, and other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

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Taxpayer Dollars Must Not Fund the Government-Led Censorship Regime | Opinion - Newsweek

At a recent event, Salman Khan shared that he believed OTT should be checked and content that includes vulgarity, swearing and nudity should be removed. The actor believed that the OTT content should be monitored properly. Actor Vardhan Puri, who is the grandson of veteran actor Amrish Puri, had an opposing view to Salman. He believed that creativity would be hindered through censorship on OTT platforms. The younger actor also felt that adults should be able to choose what they would like to see. (Also read: All the vulgarity, gaali galauj should stop: Salman Khan wants 'clean content' and censorship for OTT)

Salman, who was recently named as the host of the upcoming Filmfare Awards, felt that having 'clean' content would be safer if young children and teenagers were to watch it. He also believed that the viewership would increase after the films and shows were censored. The actor's next film, Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan, will be released later this month on the occasion of Eid on April 21. The Hindi film is directed by Farhad Samji.

Vardhan told IndiaToday TV, I respect everyones opinion. I personally would beg to differ. I feel creativity is dead if there is any censorship. I am anti-censorship. I do believe in certification, there can be guidelines put, there can be labels drawn. But as adults, everyone should have the power to choose what they want to watch. I do not stand for any kind of censorship, especially on OTT.

He went on to add, Certification is fine but cutting portions out, not allowing something to release because of language or nudity or vulgarity makes no sense to me. Regulation is fine, but censorship is not. You have to regulate who is able to watch the content because there are also minors who do consume this kind of content. But, deciding for people what is okay for them to watch is, I think, kind of ridiculous.

Vardhan made his acting debut opposite Shivaleeka Oberoi in Yeh Saali Aashiqui. Directed by Cherag Ruparel, the romantic thriller had him play a double role. Before his acting debut, Vardhan had worked as an assistant director on the films Daawat-e-Ishq, Shuddh Desi Romance and Ishaqzaade.

Dedicated professionals who write about cinema and television in all their vibrancy. Expect views, reviews and news.

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Vardhan Puri disagrees with Salman on OTT censorship: Creativity is dead if - Hindustan Times

Bollywoods bhai Salman Khan was truly in his element at the Filmfare Awards launch on Wednesday evening. From taking a dig at award shows to saying how the five superstars in Bollywood will continue to give the younger generation a run for their money, the Bollywood star kept the audience entertained. The actor also took the opportunity to bat for censorship on OTT, mentioning how clean content always works better. He also added that actors who do not want to do bold scenes are left behind.

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He dismissed the idea that OTT is the cooler version of TV. He shared how he has been in the business since 1989, and he never had to do it. I really think there should be censorship on the medium. All these.. vulgarity, nudity, gaali galauch (swearing) should stop.

Salman further added that now everyone is watching content on the phone and can be accessible to even young kids. Ab 15-16 saal ka bacche dekh sakte hai. Apko acha lagega apki choti se beti ye sab dekhe padhne ke bahane (15-16-year-olds can now watch this content on their phone. Would you like it if your young daughter watches it giving an excuse she is using the device to study). I just think the content should be checked on OTT. Jitna clean hoga content, utna behtar hoga, viewership uski zyada hogi (the cleaner the content, it will be better and will also have a larger viewership).

Taking a dig at actors, who have shed their inhibitions on screen, he mentioned how the guard at your building may also be watching the content. Apne sab kuch kar lia love making, kissing, expose kar lia aur aap apne building mein ghus rahe hai aur apka watchman aapka content dekh raha hai (You have done it all love making, kissing and expose in scenes. And when you enter your buiding, your watchman is watching the same). So, I just dont think thats right for security reasons. Also, we dont need to do that. Hindustan mein rehte hai, thoda boht theek hai lekin itna zyada beech mein ho gya tha. Ab jake thoda control mein aya hai (You dont need to cross the boundary. We live in India. It was way too much before, finally, it has been curbed). Now, people have started working on a lot of good and decent content.

The Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan actor added that some people who are talented manage to do it but actors, who are not comfortable with it, are left behind in the OTT race. He wondered if films and TV can have censorship, why not OTT.

During the launch, he also shed light on the film industries shooting in smaller cities, citing the rebate they get from these places. Salman Khan said that Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and even Haryana pay a rebate to producers, and for small-budget films, that makes a lot of difference. He hoped that Maharashtra too would start the process which could help more people in the business.

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First published on: 06-04-2023 at 11:43 IST

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Salman Khan bats for censorship on OTT: Vulgarity, nudity, abuse need to stop we live in India - The Indian Express