In a statement released in Paris, Aladdin Project's President Anne-Marie Revcolevschi praised the Lebanese, Arab and Muslim intellectuals, politicians and journalists who have condemned the campaign of intimidation and censorship launched by Lebanon's Hezbollah against the Diary of Anne Frank, calling it "a cry of conscience on the part of those who cannot accept that the diary of a Jewish girl who died in a Nazi death camp at the age of fifteen be treated in this vile manner."
The Aladdin Project's press statement was the first to bring to the attention of the world media the campaign of Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV against Anne Frank's Diary. "Tens of millions of copies of the Diary sold around the world have turned Anne Frank, the teenage girl who perished in the Nazi death camp of Bergen Belsen, into a universal voice of humanity destroyed by the worst barbarity man has shown himself capable of: the Holocaust. Reading her Diary is a way towards the rejection of hatred, anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia. Reading the Diary must be one of the basic rights of every human being in any society," the Aladdin Project's statement read.
The statement, which strongly condemned Hezbollah's campaign of intimidation and censorship, was reported by the Associated Press and AFP in their English-language and Arabic wires, and subsequently published by hundreds of newspapers around the globe, including many in the Arab world.
"As some Lebanese media have pointed out, this censorship serves no purpose, as the Arabic translation of Anne Frank is available online and thousands of people across the Muslim world, including Lebanon, have downloaded it from our online library," she said. "It's only made people are more curious and we have noted a significant rise in the number of visits to our multilingual Web site (www.projetaladin.org) and our online library (www.aladdinlibrary.org) in the past few days," Mrs. Revcolevschi said.