Anne Frank was the German-born Jewish girl whose family left Germany for the Netherlands in 1934 to escape the Nazis. After Germany invaded Holland, the family went into hiding in Amsterdam, and where Frank kept a diary which documented her life in hiding from 1942 until 1944, at which point the family was discovered, sent to concentration camps (Auschwitz and then Anne and her sister to Bergen-Belsen) where they would all perish—Anne in early 1945.

The Diary of Anne Frank was published in 1947 and has been a bestseller ever since.

Recently, Anne Frank’s Amsterdam statue was vandalized with “Gaza” spraypainted on it. In response, I wrote the post reproduced below on LinkedIn which was viewed by 20,000 people—before LinkedIn pulled it and banned it.

LinkedIn banned my defense of Anne Frank

LinkedIn tells me that what I wrote below along with the picture of Frank’s vandalized statue was “removed for hateful speech.”

The banned post:

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My pushback

We live in an age where too many people—including apparently social media monitors at corporations like LinkedIn—equate reasonable distinctions and arguments about who is to blame for tragedies as “offensive” or “hateful” if they disagree. In this case:

• It is more than reasonable to point out that the ultimate cause of German civilian suffering in the Second World War was the Nazis given that tyrannical Germany, Adolf Hitler, and the Nazis needed to be defeated, and tragically, civilian casualties are inevitable.

• It is more than reasonable today to point out that Hamas—whose charter calls for the genocidal destruction of Israel—is the core problem and the reason Gazans civilians suffer today, especially given the genocidal attack on Israel’s on October 7, 2023.

• It is more than reasonable to point out that the late Yasser Arafat, the PLO leader who was allowed back into the West Bank and Gaza in the early 1990s after a peace treaty with Isarel, continually supported terror attacks on Israel after that return, and also turned down a 2000 peace treaty that would have given Arafat 97% of what the Palestinian leadership was demanding.

I wrote a chapter about Arafat in my book The Victim Cult, where I also noted how former American president Bill Clinton wrote in his autobiography of how he told Arafat that he was wrong to have turned down that 2000 proposed peace treaty—something younger staff around Arafat also believed at the time and also told Clinton and other Americans directly.

• All of the above is why it is more than reasonable to make distinctions and offer an argument that the ultimate cause of Gazan civilian (and more broadly Palestinian) suffering today is Hamas, and other Palestinian leadership, past and present.
• It is why LinkedIn is in error—grossly in error—to have banned and removed below for alleged “hateful speech.”
• I have appealed the LinkedIn ban of this post. I’ll keep you informed.
  

–Mark Milke, president and founder of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy.

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