\n<\/p>\n
Eighty years after her death, a teenage girl still strikes terror into the hearts of bigots, haters and the fools who follow them.<\/p>\n
In July, in an incident called an<\/a> \u201cunbelievable disgrace\u201d by the city\u2019s mayor, a monument to Anne Frank in the Amsterdam neighborhood where she made her home was vandalized with anti-Israel graffiti.<\/p>\n City workers and police cleaned off the red paint.<\/p>\n Gert-Jan Jammink, who initiated the project to install the monument, which was unveiled in 2005, called the vandalism \u201cscandalous.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt represents the 14,000 Jews from this district who were murdered. It is not about a current situation,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you want to draw attention to something, you can go to another location. I have previously advocated for a camera and light source at this location. It makes us think again that we have to do something to protect this defenseless image.\u201d<\/p>\n The World Jewish Congress posted that \u201cvandalizing a statue commemorating Anne Frank, a teenage girl murdered in the Holocaust, will not help \u2018free Palestine,\u2019 or end the war. This is unacceptable. The only thing it will help is further normalize antisemitism and dehumanize victims of the Holocaust.\u201d<\/p>\n Anne Frank, whose diary is the most widely read nonfiction book<\/a> in the world (#2 if one counts the Bible as nonfiction), died in a concentration camp toward the end of a war that saw six million of her fellow Jews and uncounted millions more civilians perish.<\/p>\n This is not the first, nor unfortunately, the last time a statue of the most recognizable victim of the Holocaust has been or will be marred by hate.<\/p>\n In 2020, the only Anne Frank memorial in the U.S.\u2014a bronze statue depicting her holding her diary and peering out the window of the secret annex where she and her family hid for over two years\u2014was covered by swastika stickers, again, under cover of darkness, at the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights in Boise, Idaho.<\/p>\n At the time, Dan Prinzig, the center\u2019s director, said<\/a>, \u201cIs this what we\u2019re becoming?\u201d<\/p>\n Image credits: Anne Frank Diary, St Nicholas Church, Kiel, Germany<\/a> by Diego Delso<\/a>, delso.photo<\/a>. CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a> via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
![Anne Frank Diary, St Nicholas Church, Kiel, Germany<\/a> by](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Diario_de_Anne_Frank,_Iglesia_de_San_Nicol%C3%A1s,_Kiel,_Alemania,_2019-09-10,_DD_22.jpg\"){kind=link}