Among her critics, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten is not exactly known for being truthful.
It’s not uncommon to see her get Community Noted on the Twitter machine for playing fast and loose with the facts, as was the case after her incredible claim in April during a House Select Subcommittee hearing on the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic that she fought to reopen schools.
It was, of course, untrue.
Fast forward a few months, and Weingarten is at it again. This time around, her insinuations revolve around alleged book banning and anti-Semitism.
She saw a story from the Houston Chronicle about a Texas teacher fired for presenting a controversial illustrated version of Anne Frank’s diary to her 8th-grade classroom and posted the link to Twitter.
The problem, however, came in Weingarten’s sensationalistic description of what happened:
In reality, that is not how things reportedly went down at all, according to the story:
A Texas middle school teacher has been fired after assigning an unapproved illustrated version of Anne Frank’s Diary to her eighth grade reading class. Per a report from KFDM, a spokesperson for Hamshire-Fannett ISD, located south of Beaumont, released a statement confirming the teacher was sent home on Wednesday after reading a passage from Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation in which Frank wrote about male and female genitalia. An investigation into the incident has since ensued.
[…]While previous versions of Frank’s diary omitted sections in which she wrote about sexuality, the 2018 graphic novel adapted by Ari Folman and illustrated by David Polonsky, remains faithful to the original text. Folman’s parents are Holocaust survivors.
In other words, this wasn’t about a teacher getting fired for assigning the Diary of Anne Frank to her students. She was let go because she allegedly assigned an unapproved version of it that contained passages and illustrated images of a sexual nature to eighth graders.
Legal Insurrection wrote earlier this year about how the Graphic Adaptation version was, after a complaint, removed from one Florida high school’s library on grounds that it minimized the Holocaust and depicted Frank as a young lesbian girl who fantasized about seeing women’s breasts.
Upon further reading from the original source, KFDM, for the Texas teacher story, we also learned that according to at least one parent, the teacher not only assigned the book to her class but also had them read the sexually explicit parts out loud in front of other classmates:
One Hamshire-Fannett ISD parent, Amy Manuel, said her twin eighth grade sons told her about what the teacher was doing in class with the book. Manuel said, “I mean it’s bad enough, she’s having them read this for an assignment, but then she also is making them read it aloud and making a little girl talk about feeling each other’s breasts and when she sees a female she goes into ecstasy, that’s not ok.”
KFDM also reported that “district officials claim the adaptation of Anne Frank’s Diary has never been approved, yet it was on a reading list sent to parents at the start of the school year,” which is why the school district is conducting an investigation (that and the fact that the teacher in question has hired an attorney).
Though the Community Note is not currently visible on Weingarten’s tweet (it still appears to be under review via Birdwatch), others copied the Birdwatch notes and posted them to her:
I should point out for the record that there is no molestation shown in the illustrated book images contained in the Holly Briden tweet noted above (and see below), which may be why the Community Note as of this writing is pending review:
But the point is that Weingarten’s claim that the teacher was fired for merely reading the commonly known version of Anne Frank’s diary is utterly false, and that she also left out what the adaptation in question contained:
“Why” indeed.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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