FBI Breakup Ends SPLC and ADL Direct Influence
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | October 5, 2025
The FBI has officially ended its partnership with both the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), following years of mounting concern over the influence of partisan organizations in shaping federal intelligence and domestic “extremism” policy, which has resulted in online censorship.
FBI Director Kash Patel condemned the SPLC’s direction, describing it as a “partisan smear machine” and calling its involvement in federal intelligence work unacceptable.
He pointed specifically to the group’s so-called “hate map,” which has long been used to label mainstream conservative and Christian organizations as equivalent to violent hate groups.
“Their so-called hate map has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence,” Patel stated. “That disgraceful record makes them unfit for any FBI partnership.”
The bureau confirmed it no longer shares information or maintains any intelligence products from the SPLC.
It has also cut off contact with the ADL, a group that, while ostensibly focused on combating antisemitism, has frequently advocated for censorship of speech it deems problematic, particularly online.
Both organizations were previously consulted by the FBI in identifying and monitoring alleged extremist threats.
That practice came under fire after the bureau’s Richmond office cited the SPLC in a controversial 2023 memo suggesting that traditional Catholics could be tied to radical activity.
The document called for agents to cultivate informants within Catholic churches.
The backlash led Patel to publicly reject the use of ideologically driven outside groups in FBI operations.
“I made it clear that the FBI will never rely on politicized or agenda-driven intelligence from outside groups—and certainly not from the SPLC,” Patel said. “All ties with the SPLC have officially been terminated.”
Originally known for battling white supremacist groups through litigation, the SPLC has since shifted its focus toward labeling conservative advocacy organizations as dangerous.
Over time, its “hate map” has become a blacklist used by corporations, financial services, and online platforms to restrict access and support for those groups.
More recently, the group listed Turning Point USA shortly before the assassination of its founder, free speech advocate Charlie Kirk.
The SPLC has maintained that not all Christian groups are included in its listings. For years, it pointed to Focus on the Family as an example of one that was not. That changed in 2024 when Focus was added to the map.
The ADL supported the STOP HATE Act, which seeks to pressure online platforms to remove “disinformation” and what it calls “hate speech.” The bill’s language raises obvious concerns about vague definitions and potential abuse.
Both organizations have held sway not just over federal agencies, but also over powerful private institutions.
Amazon, Eventbrite, Hyatt Hotels, and PayPal have all relied on the SPLC’s hate designations to determine which groups can use their services.
The now-discontinued AmazonSmile program excluded organizations listed by the SPLC, while major charitable foundations have blocked funding to those targeted by the group.
Federal agencies under the Biden administration have also shown a willingness to coordinate with the SPLC.
In a 2021 donor meeting, the group’s then-president said that many agencies had proactively reached out to solicit its input on shaping domestic terrorism policy.
That cooperation continued even after the SPLC labeled the parental rights group Moms for Liberty a hate group in 2023, followed by a briefing with the Department of Justice.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s New 2020 Hate Map Is Fake News
By Eric Striker – National Justice – February 3, 2021
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) seems to be enjoying a small resurgence of attention from the mainstream media since the January 6th Capitol protests.
Various scandals, both financial and moral, have largely discredited the SPLC across the political spectrum. Most of its most competent and high profile members like Richard Cohen, Heidi Beirich and Rhonda Brownstein have left the organization, while their “hate group” designations are largely dismissed as meaningless outside of very small circles of Antifa activists and tech censors.
Recently, it updated its infamous “Hate Map” for 2020. The map claims that there are 838 active “hate groups” operating in the United States as we speak.
Despite all the mockery the SPLC has endured throughout the years, its clear that they are impervious to criticism, even from liberal groups, about their blatant lack of interest in facts and low professional standards.
The “Hate Groups” That Don’t Exist
Setting aside the debate over what constitutes a “hate group,” the vast majority of organizations listed state-by-state are either religious congregations, online publications and e-shops, or in hundreds of cases, non-existent and dishonestly catalogued.
For example, the SPLC claims the National Reformation Party is an active “white nationalist” group currently operating in seven states. The only sign that they even exist is a single website, which on the very front of its page clearly states “Race is a social construct having no biological basis” — an opinion that at minimum precludes them from being classed as “white nationalist.”
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. A skinhead crew called the Vinlander’s Social Club (VSC) and its supporter faction, Firm 22, are listed on the 2020 map as having 11 chapters altogether. A simple search on Wikipedia reveals that VSC was officially disbanded in 2007, with its founder publicly condemning “racism.”
Then there’s White Aryan Resistance, which has for decades been composed of a website that hosted Tom Metzger’s radio program. Metzger is deceased.
How about the American Identity Movement (AIM), which they say is currently engaging in “hate” in 10 states. The organization was officially shut down months ago and there is no sign it ever had much of a presence to begin with.
The Base (5), AtomWaffen Division (6), Micetrap Records (1), Soldiers of Odin (6), Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights (6), and countless others are defunct, in some cases for years.
The most ridiculous entry on the list is the National Socialist German Workers Party. Just when we thought that the NSDAP was defeated in 1945, the SPLC reminds us that they in fact have a surviving chapter in Lincoln, Nebraska. Another page on the SPLC’s website claims the NSDAP’s Nebraska Gauleiter is Gary Lauck, who in truth runs a historical book store that sells translated writings by Third Reich authors. Lauck’s online shop itself is listed as a separate “hate group” in the state, just one county over.
The vast majority of non-religious groups on the map that do exist are book publishing houses like Arktos and Antelope Hill Books, personal blogs and podcasts belonging to individuals, or newspapers and news sites. The seemingly large, multi-state presence of the National Socialist Movement (NSM) and various Klan outfits should be taken with a massive grain of salt.
SPLC’s Lists Entire Religions as Hate Groups
The decision to include traditional interpretations of Catholicism, Protestantism, and folk religion is another trick used to pump numbers up.
According to the SPLC, traditionalist Catholics — nine entries overall (mostly just websites and publications) — are a hate group. If we take this logic at face value, every single Catholic who ever lived before the Second Vatican Council in 1962 was a member of a hate organization. Protestants who hold beliefs that dissent from modern “woke” factions are also included on the list.
A glaring double standard is evident in the decision to include adherents of British Israelism (Christian Identity) and Black Israelites on the list. These two groups believe they are the chosen people of the Old Testament, and live by a literal interpretation of its values. If blacks and whites are guilty of hate for preaching this doctrine, why aren’t adherents of Judaism also listed for hate?
Finally, the category of “Neo-Volkisch” is entered 32 times. The word appears to be a loaded, made up phrase to refer to those who pray to the old Gods or practice Asatru. The main culprit is the Asatru Folk Assembly, a 501(c)(3) religious organization that does not engage in political activity.
While other branded groups like the Nation of Islam engage in harsh discourse about white people, it isn’t any more extreme than what Charles Blow regularly writes in New York Times editorials or what SPLC’s more extreme employees believe. NOI’s main offense appears to be its stance on traditional family values and willingness to critique the supposed black-Jewish relationship.
The SPLC’s map is a low-effort piece of disinformation that is transparently and deliberately dishonest.
In spite of all the criticism they have received over their hate list, they are doubling down on a scam intended to provide ammo for leftist propaganda, as well as to extract donations from wealthy consumers of their fake news.
Banned by Amazon and Purged by the Neocons
By Ron Unz • Unz Review • March 26, 2019
Over the last decade, Amazon has gained a near-total monopoly over Internet book sales, and late last month, we saw the dangerous consequences of such intellectual control as the company suddenly banned dozens of books, many of them of excellent scholarly quality. Apparently, activist organizations such as the ADL and the SPLC had succeeded in pressuring the company to ban those works to avoid any risk that American readers might become “confused” on certain controversial historical matters.
In an extremely ironic twist, several outstanding works of black historiography were banned at the height of Black History Month, presumably because they provided a far more complex and nuanced view of the historical relations between blacks and Jews than the ADL and those in its orbit have long promoted. In particular, one of the volumes published by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, which I had only discovered and read last year, seemed to conclusively demonstrate that the circumstances of the ADL’s own establishment a century ago were almost exactly contrary to what I had long believed based upon my standard history books.
Clearly, the ADL was loath to have others discover these same facts, and must be pleased that Amazon has now banned the work in question. I covered this and the various other Amazon book banning in a lengthy article a couple of weeks ago.
Although various people have discussed plans aimed at pressuring Amazon to retract its policy and I have even provided them some suggestions in that regard, it is not at all clear whether a company with a market value of nearly $900 billion will be swayed by a few intellectual malcontents. Indeed, the far greater likelihood is that large numbers of additional books will eventually be “disappeared.”
This small webzine was founded with a mission of providing “interesting, important, and controversial perspectives largely excluded from the American mainstream media.” Therefore, it seems natural to extend this policy to cover books, and I have now added a new Bookstore Section, allowing interested readers to browse and order those texts that Amazon has banned, in most cases directly from the websites of the particular publisher. As a start, I have stocked it with the hundred-odd books banned by Amazon but still available elsewhere on the Internet.
A half-century ago in a totally different America, publishers sometimes trumpeted the fact that their books had been “Banned in Boston,” which vastly increased their sales in many other parts of the country. Since past sales of the banned books had hardly been great, it seems not impossible that the notoriety associated with their removal might actually boost their visibility and purchase sufficiently to render the policy counter-productive.
After all, Amazon eagerly sells many millions of books these days, including Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto, and how-to manuals for producing homemade explosives to be used in domestic terrorist attacks. Yet the hundred-odd books now provided in my new system are apparently believed to contain ideas so horrifically dangerous that Amazon has chosen to violate its longstanding policy of intellectual freedom and ban them. Perhaps you should consider purchasing a couple of them and deciding for yourself.
I’m only familiar with a small fraction of the banned books, but can highly recommend the following half dozen:
- The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man, by Nation of Islam Research Group, which I had discussed last year at considerable length in American Pravda: The ADL in American Society.
- The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One, by the same organization, on the Jewish role in black American slavery.
- The Culture of Critique, by Prof. Kevin MacDonald, on organized Jewish activist movements in America, originally published in 1998 by a leading academic press.
- Breaking the Spell: The Holocaust, Myth & Reality, by Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom, a British historian of science
- The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, by Prof. Arthur Butz, the seminal text of Holocaust Denial
- Stalin’s War of Extermination, by Dr. Joachim Hoffmann, a leading mainstream German military historian, presenting analysis that I had discussed last year in American Pravda: When Stalin Almost Conquered Europe.
The works provided in this Bookstore section may be filtered based on Topic, Author, or Period, and the first of these criteria may provide some intriguing clues as to why they were selected for elimination from among Amazon’s endless millions, along with suggestions of the source of the pressure. George Orwell famously observed that those who control the past control the future, and those who control the present control the past. Therefore, we should hardly be surprised that the overwhelming majority of the banned books fall into the category of scholarly texts dealing with important historical events.
More than two-thirds of the books focus on the subject of “Jews” and over half deal with the Holocaust in particular. Indeed, it appears that the Amazon ban now now encompasses virtually all Holocaust books that substantially deviate from the orthodox framework promoted by the ADL and its allies, which is currently enforced by the threat of fines and prison sentences throughout most of Europe. These include several of the texts I had relied upon for my long 2018 article American Pravda: Holocaust Denial, but which I had fortunately purchased at Amazon before they were banned.
Aside from now providing convenient access to what the Amazon Corporation officially ranks as the hundred most dangerous books in the history of the world, I’m also pleased to be able to resurrect the collected writings of a very prominent conservative writer and intellectual purged from National Review nearly thirty years ago, during the early stages of the Neocon takeover of the conservative movement.
Although the name of Joseph Sobran may be somewhat unfamiliar to younger conservatives, during the 1970s and 1980s he possibly ranked second only to founder William F. Buckley, Jr. in this influence in mainstream conservative circles, as partly suggested by the nearly 400 articles he published for NR during that period. By the late 1980s, he had grown increasingly concerned that growing Neocon influence would embroil America in future foreign wars, and his occasional sharp statements in that regard were branded “anti-Semitic” by his Neocon opponents, who eventually prevailed upon Buckley to purge him. The latter provided the particulars in a major section of his 1992 book-length essay In Search of Anti-Semitism.
Oddly enough, Sobran seems to have only very rarely discussed Jews, favorably or otherwise, across his decades of writing, but even just that handful of less than flattering mentions was apparently sufficient to draw their sustained destructive attacks on his career, and he eventually died in poverty in 2010 at the age of 64. Sobran had always been known for his literary wit, and his unfortunate ideological predicament eventually led him to coin the aphorism “An anti-Semite used to mean a man who hated Jews. Now it means a man who is hated by Jews.”
Following his defenestration from National Review, he spent about a dozen years as a syndicated columnist, while providing a small monthly conservative newsletter called Sobran’s. I’m very pleased to have now made arrangements to republish his complete archives of that period, currently totaling just nearly 650 columns and a half-million words, but probably due to rise as additional writings are located and added.
The obvious similarities between between the purge of a leading conservative writer thirty years ago and the banning of various books from Amazon thirty days ago provides an intriguing glimpse in the underlying nature of American political life, and the forces that can shape its trajectory. Writers, authors, and other intellectuals constitute a minuscule fraction of our society, yet removing or muzzling just a few of these can have enormous influence upon the social and political directions eventually taken by our country.
Fighting Poverty with a Hate Map?
By Eve Mykytyn | OffGuardian | January 23, 2019
The name, ‘The Southern Poverty Law Center’ (SPLC) is misleading. The SPLC does little to alleviate poverty, its own stated goals are: fighting hate, teaching tolerance and seeking justice. At the moment, the SPLC lists its top activity as attempting to remove confederate statues and symbols. This is consistent with the activity for which the SPLC is best known, its annual hate map in which it locates so-called ‘hate’ groups on a map of the United States. How is it that one of the best funded poverty law centers acts as an arbitrar of hate instead of as an advocate for the poor?
The term ‘Poverty Law’ usually refers to the more mundane practice of representing poor people who are often un or under represented. But the SPLC’s goals are more lofty, here’s how Mark Potok, a Senior Fellow at SPLC described his mission.
It’s not what most in the media think. Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate crimes…Our criteria for a ‘hate group’… have nothing to do with criminality or violence or any kind of guess we’re making about ‘this group could be dangerous.’ It’s strictly ideological. I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them”
Each year, the SPLC advertises over 900 hate groups on its hate map. Author Laird Wilcox says the SPLC “Has specialized [in] a highly developed and ritualized form of defamation … a way of harming and isolating people by denying their humanity and trying to convert them into something that deserves to be hated and eliminated. They accuse others of this but utilize their enormous resources to practice it on a mass scale themselves.”
To begin with, the SPLC uses a very loose definition of a hate group as:
an organization that – based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities – has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”
They bolster this with the false claim that the FBI uses a similar definition of hate crime:
[A] criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.”
But the FBI’s words do not refer to practices or beliefs, they characterize an actual crime which may have been inspired by bias.
Without advocating hate or prejudice I find the SPLC’s categories hilarious. They are: Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazi, White Nationalist, Racist Skinhead, Christian Identity, Neo-Confederate, Black Separatist, Anti-LGBT, Anti-Muslim, General Hate (Anti-Immigrant, Hate Music, Holocaust Denial and Radical Traditional Catholicism) and Other Hate (a grab bag of ‘hateful’ ideologies). Query, if a neo-nazi gets a haircut will he become a racist skinhead or a neo-confederate?
One ‘hate’ group, Radical Traditional Catholicism, are excoriated for blaming Jews for the killing of Christ and “They also embrace extremely conservative social ideals with respect to women.” Is this a hate group? Ultra Orthodox Jews have some pretty vile thoughts about non Jews and also adhere to extremely conservative social ideals for women. Why aren’t the Lubovitches, for instance, on the list?
Holocaust denial is the only hate group defined by simply questioning authority. SPLC claims such groups “only pretend to be interested in historical research.” Instead, even the claim that Jews may have died in ways other than the gas chambers form [hate groups] because they are used simply “to rehabilitate the German Nazis’ image as part of a bid to make the ideology of national socialism more acceptable.” A number of historians investigating World War II might find this assertion surprising.
“The SPLC’s list is wildly inflated,” said Mark Pitcavage, director of investigative research at the Anti-Defamation League. The National Socialist Movement, for example, was listed 49 times in the 2015 Hate Map, since the count included each of the NSM’s individual chapters. The SPLC also counts single individuals as a group or chapter. The result is a count totally at odds with Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics. Hate crimes plummeted 24% between 1998 and 2013, according to the FBI. Yet the SPLC claims the number of hate groups in the U.S. shot up by 75% during this same period.
The SPLC has so many categories of ‘hate’ and those categories are political as much as violent. So is there any actual harm from a listing on the hate map?
There was when Floyd Lee Corkins entered the Family Research Council intending to kill as many as possible because “he found us listed as a hate group on the SPLC website,” said executive vice president retired Gen. William Boykin.
We and others like us who are on this ‘hate map’ believe that this is very reckless behavior… The only thing that we have in common is that we are all conservative organizations…”
Gurnee IL is an unlikely location for a hate group. A prosperous suburb of 30,000, the town is careful with its reputation with tourists as it is home to Six Flags Great America amusement park, the Gurnee Mills indoor shopping mall and the water park, Great Wolf Lodge.
But the SPLC bestowed upon Gurnee the label that makes small-town officials sweat. Towns usually earn their reputations as harbors for hate groups in more public ways. They may be unlucky enough to be the place the Klan decides to march and someone later dies (Charlottesville) or be home to the media-trolling Westboro Baptist Church (Topeka, Kansas). But for towns like Gurnee, designation as one of the 917 locales on SPLC’s Hate Map comes without warning or explanation.
When the town asked the self appointed cartographers of hate to remedy the listing they were told, “I know it is disturbing to find hate groups in your community but I don’t think that should be seen as a reflection of what I am sure is a wonderful community.” Sorry, but the map is only updated once a year. “Call back in January.” The town protested that its police had searched and failed to find a hate group in Gurnee. SPLC Intelligence Chief Heidi Beirich would not budge. “Even though the police couldn’t locate them doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”
Given the low threshold for inclusion on the list, it is not surprising that other towns were included for questionable reasons. In 2004, Olathe, Colorado earned a white hood icon when a self-proclaimed “international imperial wizard” from Indiana told a Denver newspaper that a chapter in Olathe, “a little Klan klavern,” had asked him to come and speak. Neither he nor any of the town officials could name any of the members. Olathe stayed on SPLC’s list for three years.
Amana, Iowa, was placed on the hate map when someone at the SPLC spotted a chat thread on the Daily Stormer. Someone with the screen name “Concerned Troll” proposed a neo-Nazi “book club” meeting in an Amana café. No one in Amana was able to confirm to the SPLC whether or not the meeting actually took place, but that was enough to earn the corn-carpeted state its only swastika.
But still, Beidich worries more about undercounting than over inclusion. She thinks the undercount groups hide in shadows. She does not explain why listing what are ‘un’ hate groups, by her own criteria, will cause hate groups to emerge from the shadows. In fact, it is not clear why we are not all better off if a ‘hate’ group stays hidden.
On the Censorship of Michael Hoffman’s Books by Amazon
The Saker • Unz Review • September 13, 2018
A couple of months ago I did an interview with one of the foremost scholars of rabbinical Judaism, Michael Hoffman. The occasion was the release of his latest book “The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome”. At the time I did not expect to have to ask for a follow-up interview with him, but when I learned that Amazon had censored his books (please see Hoffman’s own account of this here). Specifically, the ban is on three of his books. A complete ban (Kindle + printed book) on Judaism’s Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded, as well as The Great Holocaust Trial: Revised and Expanded, while his textbook, Judaism Discovered, has been removed from the Kindle. I felt that I had to talk to him again and he kindly agreed to reply to my questions. I submit to you the full text of our Q&A which I will follow-up with a short commentary.
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The Saker: Please summarize what happened to your books and Amazon and tells us what specific explanations were given to you. Did Amazon ever offer you a “page and paragraph” list of “offending” passages? Do you have any means of knowing exactly what your book is being banned for?
Hoffman: Whether it is Facebook, Google or Amazon, the excuse most often cited for suppression is “content guidelines’ violation.” Amazon notified us on August 13 that two of our titles, which they have been selling for years and in thousands of copies, Judaism Discovered, our 1100 page textbook published in 2008, and Judaism’s Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded, published in 2010 — were being permanently removed after “review” by the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) unit of Amazon. A facsimile of the KDP notice can be viewed here:
In their e-mail they told us that “… we found that this content is in violation of content guidelines.” In studying their content guidelines one encounters a vague, generic statement about not permitting that which is “offensive.” There is no guidance as to what “offense” has suddenly arisen after these books were sold on Amazon for several years. Like the Red Queen in Wonderland who declared to Alice that, “A word is anything I say it is!” — that which “offends” is anything Amazon says it is. A third book, The Great Holocaust Trial: The Landmark Battle for the Right to Doubt the West’s Most Sacred Relic, was also forbidden.
Does Amazon have the chutzpah to publicly categorize these books as “hate speech” or some other alibi for censorship that could be contested? No, they do not. They leave authors and publishers twisting in the wind, making it more difficult to appeal the decision and report to the public on the tyranny. Although since they allow no appeal, it’s a moot point. Personally, I have no doubt concerning why my books were censored.
The Saker: What is, in your opinion, the true intent behind the ban on the sales of your book? What is Amazon’s interest in this?
Hoffman: I don’t believe Amazon has much interest in this. It is more likely that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is the interested party. Last August 7 the New York Times online published a revealing piece by David French in which he wrote: “We live in a world where the Southern Poverty Law Center, a formerly respected civil-rights organization, abuses its past trust to label a host of mainstream organizations (including my former employer, the Alliance Defending Freedom) and individuals as ‘hate groups,… based sometimes on… outright misreadings and misrepresentations of an individual’s beliefs and views… Amazon recently booted Alliance Defending Freedom from its AmazonSmile charity program because of the center’s designation.”
At around the time in 2017 that the SPLC was trying to interfere with the business operations of people such as myself, by intimidating banks and credit card processors into refusing to process payments for books, Paypal notified us that due to the contents of our website (www.RevisionistHistory.org) we were an embarrassment to their brand and they were terminating our account. As long as Paypal was owned by libertarians, all was well and we had a high customer satisfaction rating for our integrity and dependability. The original Paypal mainly cared about whether you were a responsible seller. A politicized administration eventually took over Paypal and in 2017 we were terminated, very likely on the “advice” of the SPLC.
To return to Amazon, CEO Jeff Bezos founded it in 1994. It was very much a libertarian book operation from the start. From 1994 until a year or two ago, Amazon only refused to sell hard core pornography and books that constituted direct appeals to violence or law-breaking, which is how it should be. Every other type of book was sold, without censorship, which is one reason for Amazon’s early success and increasing market share. Then last year, after Mr. Bezos had reached the status of one of the world’s wealthiest persons, and Amazon’s total value was beginning to approach that of Apple and Google, Amazon staged a huge purge and eliminated more than a hundred World War II revisionist history books published by Germar Rudolf’s CODOH organization (books smeared as “Holocaust denial”). This year it was my turn. Next year it might be any author not part of the university press syndicates or the major houses. Such is the heedless power and immunity of Amazon.
It’s important to note that the thought police who removed three of my books were based in the digital division of Amazon, where the electronic Kindle books are marketed and managed. A Kindle permits anyone connected to the Amazon website to read approximately the first thirty pages of any Kindle book free of charge. Consequently, my Judaica scholarship was on display around the world and therefore it was much harder to lie about me and mischaracterize my Talmud and Kabbalah research under those circumstances.
We were also beginning to sell ever increasing numbers of these Kindle books to people in Asia, particularly India and Japan. It’s my hunch that Big Brother is not half so worried about printed books as the digital kind. Removing the three books from the Kindle was the primary objective.
To be banned by Amazon is not equivalent to being banned by any other private business. Most publishers will admit that Amazon has replaced Bowker Books in Print as the industry’s authoritative guide to what books in English have been printed in the past and what is in print now. Amazon is currently the reference source. For a book to be forbidden by Amazon renders it largely invisible. It is equivalent to burning the book. So this is not a matter of Amazon exercising the prerogative of private enterprise. Amazon is a monopoly. It has no rival. If your book doesn’t exist on Amazon, then for most people who are not research specialists, your book doesn’t exist. The consequences for the pursuit of knowledge are ominous.
There is a problem here for Amazon as well. The more Amazon excludes books that embody facts and ideas that constitute radical dissent, the more it becomes a narrow censor’s aperture rather than a reliable bridge to the entire range of the Republic of Letters.
Apologists for censorship of radicals and authentic conservatives often claim that no First Amendment rights are violated when Amazon bans books, therefore it is not a civil rights issue, merely an inconvenience of the capitalist system. In the 1950s however, when the privately-owned movie studios banned certain directors, actors and screen-writers judged to be Leftists or Communists, that action on the part of private enterprise was inscribed in the rolls of the culture wars as the infamous “Blacklist,” and we are still reading and weeping over it sixty-five years later. So it depends on whose ox is being gored.
My Judaica studies are free of “Jew hate,” as anyone who peruses the sections in both books titled “To the Judaic Reader” knows. There we state that the books are dedicated to pidyon shevyuim (redemption of the captive), i.e. rescuing those Judaic persons who are in bondage to the Talmud and the Kabbalah.
Our enemies easily turn to their advantage books containing hatred of “The Jews.” What they absolutely have no credible answer to is a critique predicated, as our books are, on a sincere foundation of true Christian love. Boundary-breaking scholarship united to compassionate concern for the welfare of Judaic people is almost unprecedented in this field. This approach makes my studies of Judaism among the most powerful and effective because they are free of the “hate speech” which is the pivot upon which turns the machinery of liberal-approved censorship. For that reason, making Judaism’s Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded, and Judaism Discovered available on the Kindle undercut decades of hatred and libel. Therefore those volumes had to be suppressed.
The Saker: Since this ban was put in place – what reactions have you heard? who has spoken in defense of your scholarship and right to be heard? has anybody taken your defense or spoken up for you?
Hoffman: Ron Unz allowed me to publish a note on the ban at unz.com and you, the Saker, have taken an interest. Our many friends, readers and subscribers have expressed outrage on Twitter and in e-mail. Meanwhile we have contacted everyone from a columnist for Taki’s website to the legacy media, to no discernible effect thus far. The Washington Post, which is owned by Mr. Bezos, has as its motto, “Democracy dies in darkness.” Yet it is in that very darkness where Amazon’s book-banning dwells, due to the apathy of the media and the American Library Association. To ban books by a vulnerable independent scholar is not exactly a daring move in this age where “hate speech” is anything that offends someone’s cherished myth. The definition is so loose it functions as an inquisitor’s sword.
On the positive side, we have seen an uptick in orders to our own online store for the printed books which Amazon has banned [https://truthfulhistory.blogspot.com/2016/02/judaica-books-and-resources.html]. There is no replacement for the banned Kindle editions, however.
The Saker: What do you believe could be done to resist this state of affairs? What can we all do to put a stop to this kind of censorship?
Hoffman: In general, the supporters of the lies of the Overlords wage spiritual and psychological warfare with far more dedication, commitment and self-sacrifice than the purported allies of God’s truth. The Cryptocracy’s defenders are 24/7 militants resolved to contend with their perceived foes with every ounce of their being. Whereas on the side of Christian conservative renewal, with honorable exceptions, I find mainly armchair warriors and folks so enormously distracted by the choices offered by the Internet’s deluge of words and images, that they are nearly paralyzed by the spectacle.
Compare the reception Judge Kavanaugh received in the Senate hearings with that of recent Supreme Court nominees Kagan and Ginsburg. The Republicans were too cowed to seriously confront those ladies. Maintaining decorum was the chief concern of the timid GOP at the time, while Kavanaugh faced a near riot in the visitor’s gallery and extremes of withering interrogation and contempt from defiant Democratic senators.
When CODOH’s books were banned we reported the case extensively online and in our printed newsletter. We contacted an executive with the American Library Association to elicit his response and express our outrage. We did what we could even though we have almost no relationship with CODOH. We would do the same for any person of good will who is denied the right to advance human learning with suppressed facts and ideas. This was formerly a truism in America, up until the rise of the punks of social media who seem to be more like a branch of Antifa than an intellectual class invested in discovery and enlightenment.
Advances in human knowledge are achieved on the basis that “error has rights,” for the reason that enshrined dogmas are often wrong and demonized dissidents are sometimes the bearers of rare discoveries. But the epigram of our time is “Error has no rights,” which was the doctrine of the fiery Inquisition, of the head-chopping French Revolution and of the Bolsheviks and Maoists. If error has no rights then neither does truth, in that what is denounced as hateful error by the mob is sometimes a destabilizing, necessary and even cosmic truth.
* * *
Reading Hoffman’s words I thought that what happened to him is so typical of the Orwellian world we live in where the what I call the “Skripal rules of evidence” (aka “highly likely”) have replaced even basic evidentiary notions, a world in which false flag attacks are announced weeks in advance, a world in which the Planetary Hegemon has declared urbi et orbi that nothing in the body of international law applies to the “indispensable nation” (or to the parasitic host feeding off it) and where “might makes right” has become the motto by which everybody lives. Of course, the censorship of a book cannot be compared to the initiation of a war of aggression (which is the “supreme international crime” under international law: this was the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trial on this topic: To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole ). Still, there is something uniquely devious and evil about the censorship of Hoffman’s books by Amazon, several things in fact:
- What is attacked in not a person or even a group, but ideas, arguably the most precious attribute of mankind. This is therefore not only an attack on a human being, but an attack on the very notion of humanity as such
- While the method is different, the intention here is no different from the book burnings of the Nazis or the Papacy except that in these latter cases it was obvious who ordered the burning of putatively “degenerate” or “heretical” books. Thus the ideological motive of the Nazis and Papists was always clear whereas in the case of Hoffman this ideological motive is hidden (even if obvious with anybody with a modicum of intelligence).
- The ultimate hypocrisy lies in the fact that most so-called libertarians (from the Left to the Right) have nothing to say about this because this is not a case of censorship by government but the action of a corporation which has the “right” to do as it wishes, never mind that the result is still a clear de-facto infringement of Hoffman’s First Amendment rights and the freedom of academic scholarship.
- The US government and Congress, by allowing monopolistic corporations such as Amazon to have that kind of power are basically engaging in what I would call “censorship by proxy” which is to be expected from a deep state which now does almost everything by proxy in order to bypass fundamental US and international laws (“extraordinary renditions” anybody?).
- Unlike the government which does have to produce at least some evidence before it can censor an individual or organization, a US corporation does not even have to justify itself by a single word. This is viewed as a triumph of deregulation by mindless libertarians who would gladly surrender all their freedoms as long as it is not to the state. In the real world, of course, they still end up handing over their freedoms to the state, except that the state is hiding behind their beloved corporations.
It is also pretty obvious that those who might, at least in theory, have something to say about this kind of censorship by proxy remain silent because, at least according to them, Hoffman is an “anti-Semite” (which, having read many of his books, I can attest is a total falsehood; by way of evidence here are sample pages from his book:
Using hate speech accusations to suppress irrefutable facts, the troglodyte book-banning lobby pressured Amazon to suppress “Judaism’s Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded” containing documentation that advances human learning. Amazon complied, preferring censorship to knowledge. pic.twitter.com/YjHJxU9lAK
— Michael Hoffman (@HoffmanMichaelA) September 10, 2018
and thus he is undeserving of support. So-called “anti-Semites” are, along with the pedophiles, the “consensus villains” of the day (I explain that in detail here) but what the anti-anti-Semites fail to realize is that each time a “consensus villain” is deprived from his rights, this sets a precedent for everybody else. This is why Yehuda Bauer warned us when he wrote: “Thou shalt not be a victim, Thou shalt not be a perpetrator, And above all, Thou shalt not be a bystander”. To no avail, alas: we live in society of silent bystanders apparently! And when YouTube decides to silence all the Syrian state channels to better prepare for a false flag chemical attack, everybody looks away – “ain’t my problem”…
We all know that in Europe (and in Russia) you can be jailed and your books banned if a court finds them to be “revisionist” or “anti-Semitic” or “hateful” and the like. But at least in Europe (and in Russia), you get your day in court and you can defend yourself against accusations which the state has to prove. In Russia, just last week, a man accused of “rehabilitating National-Socialism” (for reprinting an article by another author!) was found non guilty by a majority of jurors (5 to 3) (the punishment he was facing was a fine and several years in jail). Thank God, in the “home of the brave” no such thing could happen, right?!
True, Hoffman does not risk jail (yet!). But in terms of crushing crimethink, I submit that the US system is much more effective because it allows the deep state to hide behind the veil of corporate malfeasance. There have been plenty of revolutions against a state, but I don’t know of any revolutions against the corporate dictatorship.
You tell me: which is worse, the absence of freedom or the illusion of freedom?
Personally, I find the latter much worse.
I never expected the corporate presstitutes to really care about our freedoms, ditto for the libertarians and the progressive Left. They are all too busy with their narrow ideological agenda. As for the US academic world, it has shown its true face when it allowed the persecution of Professor Norman Finkenstein. But I have to say that I am shocked by the fact that the blogosphere and the so-called “alternative media” has remained so silent in the face of such a blatant censorship by proxy by the deep state against one of the foremost US historians.
I urge all those reading these lines to speak up on Hoffman’s behalf and to support him by purchasing his superb and censored books. This is how every one of us can resist the Hegemon and his rule!
Revisionist History Books Banned by Amazon
By Michael Hoffman • Unz Review • August 25, 2018
On August 13, 2018 Amazon banned Judaism’s Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded, which was published in 2011 and sold by Amazon for the past seven years. Along with the much larger study, Judaism Discovered, (sold by Amazon since 2008), it has had an international impact both as a softcover volume as well as a digital book circulating on the Amazon Kindle.
Sales to India, Japan and the Middle East were rapidly growing. The digital Kindle format is particularly important for the free circulation of books because it bypasses borders and customs and hurdles over the prohibitive cost of shipping which the US Postal Service imposed on mail to overseas destinations several years ago (eliminating economical surface mail).
Amazon has also banned The Great Holocaust Trial: The Landmark Battle for the Right to Doubt the West’s Most Sacred Relic (sold by Amazon since 2010).
These volumes maintain a high standard of scholarly excellence, had a majority of favorable reviews by Amazon customers, are free of hatred and bigotry and have sold thousands of copies on Amazon. Out of the blue we were told that suddenly “Amazon KDP” discovered that the books are in violation of Amazon’s “content guidelines.” Asking for documentation of the charge results in no response. It is enough that the accusation has been tendered. The accused are guilty until proved innocent, although how proof of innocence is presented is anyone’s guess. There is no appeals process. This is what is known as “Tech Tyranny.”
There is a nationwide purge underway that amounts to a new McCarthyism — blacklisting and banning politically incorrect speech and history books under the rubric of “hate speech” accusations, initiated in part by two Zionist thought police organizations, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). It’s a flimsy pretext for censoring controversial scholarly books that can’t be refuted.
In addition to our books being hate-free, we note that there are hundreds of hate-filled Zionist and rabbinic books brimming with ferocious bigotry for Palestinians, Germans and goyim in general, which are sold by Amazon.
In 1997, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen wrote Hitler’s Willing Executioners, one of the most racist books of the modern age. In it he purported to demonstrate that the Nazi “holocaust” stemmed from an ingrained German predisposition to murder Jews. His book promulgating a theory of a genetic homicidal trait infecting an entire nation of people is proudly sold by Amazon and, if the current zeitgeist persists, it will never be banned by Amazon. The target of Mr. Goldhagen’s hatred are Germans. Consequently, his is the right kind of hate— the approved hate that does not offend the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Many dozens of books containing savage attacks on Christianity are sold by Amazon. These volumes are immune from removal and suppression.
Meanwhile, the censors demand for their own media (Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, owns the Washington Post newspaper) freedom of expression for the writers they employ and the speech of which they approve. In this two tiered ethical system we observe the familiar hallmark of revolutionary tyranny: the insiders demand and grant to themselves and their comrades the freedom they deny to outsiders, using the “hate” imputation as their excuse.
Our critique of Orthodox Judaism in our books constitutes a radical reassessment founded upon the depth of the documents and arguments we marshal in the course of advancing our thesis. Our powerful and original scholarship employed in our study of Orthodox Judaism is never “anti-Semitic” and never hateful. This would be easy to prove if there were an Amazon “tribunal” fair enough to consider a little something known as evidence.
Inside both Judaism Discovered (on p. 39) and Judaism’s Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded (on p. 25) there are statements addressed “to the Judaic reader,” explaining our love and concern for their welfare and liberation. No book of “anti-Semitic hate” would ever print any such charitable and compassionate statements!
To create a special category of informed theological criticism that is banned from the Amazon Kindle is a grave disservice to the advancement of learning. To make an exception for Orthodox Judaism forbidding the sale of the best scholarship critical of it, does no favors to Judaic people. Many Judaic persons don’t approve of this type of suppression and censorship of books and desire access to our information.
Our information is persuasive. It has the potential to liberate Judaic people from the bondage of the Talmudic micromanagement of their lives, and all people from the hatred and racism toward the goyim which problematic sacred rabbinic texts have fomented. If we are wrong, show us where we are wrong, don’t signal through censorship that our facts are too explosive to be handled by inquiring minds; that type of suppression will only blowback on the censors.
It’s time that someone, including multi-billionaire Bezos, had the fortitude to stand-up to the virulent book banning lobby that continues to engage in one of the lowest forms of ignorance and superstition known to history: silencing a writer who can’t be refuted by free and fair debate.
Amazon’s monopoly over the sale of books is so extensive that to be banned by Amazon is, in many cases, tantamount to a death sentence for a book. The public ought to know of the shameful tactics of the hypocrites who are so fearful of the radical scholarship for which they have no credible answer, that they must ban the books that contain irrefutable challenges to their sacred dogmas.
Diverse groups push for ‘Anti-Semitism Envoy’ who monitors criticism of Israel
Former Antisemitism Envoy Hannah Rosenthal promoting a “Walk for Israel” event in Milwaukee in 2017 (video below). As envoy, Rosenthal adopted a new, Israel-centric definition for antisemitism, and then used it to train U.S. diplomats. Now groups from the ADL to the Southern Poverty Law Center are disturbed that Trump isn’t filling the position.
By Alison Weir | If Americans Knew | July 6, 2017
The Trump administration has failed to appoint an antisemitism monitor or staff the State Department’s antisemitism monitoring office, drawing fire from diverse groups that range from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Israel lobbying organizations to Think Progress and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
But the State Department Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, and the “antisemitism envoy” who heads it, haven’t just been keeping tabs on anti-Jewish bigotry around the world. In reality, they have been monitoring international pro-Palestinian activism and promoting a crackdown on such activism in various countries.
Congress created the antisemitism monitoring office and envoy in 2004. Since then, the office has adopted a definition of antisemitism that includes many forms of criticism of Israel and it has pushed for that definition to be used worldwide to crack down on criticism of Israel. (Read more about who else has adopted the definition and how it is being used to curtail criticism of Israel and pro-Palestinian activism.)
Allan C. Brownfeld of the American Council for Judaism is disturbed by this trend, commenting: “The redefinition of antisemitism to mean criticism of Israel is clearly an effort to end freedom of speech and discussion when it comes to Israel and its policies. It has nothing to do with real antisemitism, which this effort trivializes and which, fortunately, is in retreat.”*
In 2015 Brownfeld wrote “What they seek to silence are criticisms of Israeli policies and efforts to call attention to them through such things as campaigns for academic boycotts or BDS. Whether one agrees with such campaigns or not, they are legitimate criticisms of a foreign government and of U.S. aid to that government. Only by changing the meaning of words entirely can this be called ‘antisemitism.’”
The organization Palestine Legal has similarly objected to the new definition, pointing out that the redefinition of antisemitism allows “virtually any criticism of Israel to be labeled as antisemitic.” It states: “The effect of blurring antisemitism with criticism of Israel is to censor speech. It aims to silence those who wish to criticize Israel’s well-documented human rights violations by making it unacceptable and taboo to do so. It silences the everyday observer of Israel’s actions who may wish to comment and draw parallels with other experiences, or do anything at all to oppose it.”
Meanwhile, the antisemitism envoy position has proved a revolving door to Israel lobbying organizations and activities.
State Department Antisemitism Office Monitors Criticism of Israel
The monitoring office’s 2016 report on global antisemitism included monitoring of pro-Palestinian activism. Below are a few quotes from the report:
♦ “50 Palestinian students protested and boycotted a conference presentation by an Israeli professor who was a guest speaker at the Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU). Approximately 50 Palestinian students opened banners during the conference reading, ‘Free Palestine,’ ‘Terrorist Israel,’ and held photos of suffering Palestinian children.”
♦ “Following the September 28 death of former Israeli president Shimon Peres, the FPDC [Palestinian Federation of Chile] labeled him a ‘war criminal’ on its official Twitter account.”
♦ “activists of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, spilled red paint on the facade of the restaurant and posted signs reading: ‘Free Palestine,’ ‘Avillez collaborates with Zionist occupation,’ and ‘Entree: A dose of white phosphorus.’ The attack followed picketing opposite the restaurant by BDS activists…”
In addition, the report cited statements that connected Israeli actions to all Jewish people, reporting, for example, that some Kuwaiti columnists “often conflated Israeli government actions or views with those of Jews more broadly,” and “Swedish Jews were at times blamed for Israeli policies.” While it is incorrect and unfair to associate Israeli actions with all Jewish people, the report entirely omitted reference to the many Israeli leaders and pro-Israel organizations who promote this view, claiming that Israel represents all the world’s Jewish people.
There were additional questionable listings of alleged antisemitism related to Israel, for example: “the RT channel’s June 27 airing of Palestinian allegations [by Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas in an address to the European Parliament] that an Israeli rabbi approved the poisoning of Palestinian wells.” Reporting allegations made by national leaders is what news media do, particularly when there is a context supporting the allegations. There is a documented record of Israeli settlers and, longer ago, the early Israeli military contaminating Palestinian water supply, cisterns, and wells, and of some extremist Israeli rabbis approving – and even calling for – the killing of civilians of all ages.**
Antisemitism Office Promotes Crackdown on Palestine Activism
When Congress created the antisemitism monitoring office and envoy in 2004, the legislation included criticism of Israel among the “antisemitism” to monitor (although that inclusion was buried and not obvious in a quick read of the main legislation).
At that time, the State Department declared publicly that such an office was unnecessary and would be a “bureaucratic nuisance” that would actually hinder the Department’s ongoing work against antisemitism. A State Department press release opposing the new office described the many actions the department was already taking against antisemitism.
After the office was in place, the conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism grew incrementally, until it became part of the office’s official definition.
The first antisemitism envoy, Gregg Rickman, endorsed an Israel-centric definition originally proposed by an Israeli government minister and disseminated by Israel partisans in Europe. After his term of office, Rickman went to work for the pro-Israel lobbying organization AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee).
The second antisemitism envoy, Hannah Rosenthal, officially adopted the new Israel-centric definition in 2010, making it “the State Department definition.” She then pushed through a training program about antisemitism for U.S. diplomats that used what she called the new “breakthrough definition.”
After she left the envoy position, Rosenthal headed up the Jewish Federation of Milwaukee, where she worked on numerous activities supporting Israel, including promoting a Stand with Israel event (see her promotional video for the event here and below).
The next envoy, Ira Foreman, also worked for AIPAC, and was instrumental in spreading the new Israel-centric definition to other nations. Indeed, Forman declared that “the United States pushed for a global definition of antisemitism” and that this “changed the global discourse on the issue” during an Anti-Defamation League press conference.
Pressure to Staff Antisemitism Monitoring Office
The administration has indicated it may not fill these positions as part of budget cutting; out of 13 Special Envoy positions in the State Department, 8 are currently vacant (there is no Special Envoy to monitor and combat other forms of racism, for example against African Americans)***. Trump’s failure to fill the antisemitism positions has provoked an escalating bipartisan outcry by Congressional representatives and advocacy groups, amplified by certain media coverage and commentary.
Among those pushing for Trump to fill the office are the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, various pro-Israel groups, diverse Congressional representatives supportive of Israel, and, more mildly, the liberal organizations Think Progress and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
♦ The Anti-Defamation League has long used an Israel-centric definition of antisemitism and is known for hardcore Israel advocacy that leans heavily towards blind promotion of the most extremist right-wing elements of Israel’s government. It has created a petition demanding that Trump fill the envoy position. Former ADL director Abe Foxman said: “The special Ambassador to combat antisemitism at the State Department is one of those things that ‘make America great.’”
♦ The American Jewish Committee says it engages in “pro-Israel advocacy at the highest levels.” It has also called for Trump to name an envoy and has created its own petition.
♦ Think Progress, a progressive organization close to the Democratic Party, featured an article critical of the failure to fill the post, announcing: “Attacks targeting Jews are at a record high at home, but the State Department doesn’t think special monitoring abroad is necessary.”
♦ The Southern Poverty Law Center then featured the Think Progress article about the State Department “abandoning the office” in its “Hate Watch Headlines.” The SPLC is often revered for its important work to oppose bigotry and hate, but it has praised Israel and been criticized for equating anti-zionism with antisemitism. Furthermore, its over $300 million operation has sometimes been brought into question as a cash cow that benefits from finding “hate” where it might not actually exist.
The various advocates, as well as the Think Progress article, have cited an Anti-Defamation League report that antisemitism is on the rise, and fast. On the face of it, this certainly should be disturbing to anyone who supports equality and human rights. However, a number of groups have questioned the ADL report, and an ADL official admits that it is “not a scientific study.” The ADL report does not include a spreadsheet of the incidents it has included for independent researchers to examine, and it is unknown how many of the incidents may have been actually pro-Palestinian activism, but we do know that the “rise” included 2,000 hoax threats made by a young Jewish Israeli reportedly suffering from mental problems.
♦ Members of the House of Representatives’ Bipartisan Task Force Against Anti-Semitism initiated a letter in March calling on Trump to fill the position, another bipartisan letter was sent in June, and Democratic Senator Ben Cardin implored Trump to fill the “critical” position. Legislation was introduced into both the Senate and the House that would elevate the envoy position to ambassadorial level and would require even more detailed reporting than it is already doing.
♦ Most recently, Katrina Lantos Swett, whose father Congressman Tom Lantos sponsored the legislation that created the position, sent a letter to Tillerson outraged that there hasn’t been “great eagerness to move swiftly to fill this post.” The Daily Caller reports her view that the special envoy is the “tip of the sword’ to focus on and combat antisemitism on a global scale.”
On June 26 the ADL organized a conference call with the media in which former envoys Hannah Rosenthal and Ira Forman called on Trump to fill the position, saying that “the envoy’s working definition of antisemitism helped U.S. personnel in foreign countries determine what is and is not antisemitism” — in other words, clarifying to them that they must consider various forms of criticism of Israel as antisemitism.
Rosenthal told NBC News: “This is another example of America losing its leadership role in the world.”
In arguing for the office, ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt pointed out: “These dedicated diplomats drove an exponential growth in U.S. reporting on antisemitism and mobilized a full arsenal of U.S. diplomatic tools and training.”
Prognosis
The next tactic may be for Congress to vote to fund the office. Since Israel lobby bills usually easily pass, often with overwhelmingly positive votes (most recently, 98-2), this will quite likely go through. The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism already has a petition telling Congress to “Fully Fund State Department Office for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism.”
Both Forman and Rosenthal say they expect Congress to fund the envoy’s office in the coming budget, and expect this will succeed in pushing Trump to appoint someone to the post.
Unfortunately, given Trump’s failure to failure to reign in bigotry and antisemitism among some of his supporters, it may be unlikely that the new envoy will turn a focused attention to real cases of anti-Jewish bigotry. In fact, given Middle East advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s support for rightwing Israeli settlers, as well as the Islamophobia embraced by elements of the Trump circle, the Trump administration could well move the office even more in the direction of suppressing support for Palestinian rights and criticism of Israel.
Meanwhile, on July 3rd alone, Israeli authorities forced a Palestinian family to demolish its own home, Israeli forces rounded up 18 Palestinians in predawn raids, prisoners in Israel’s notorious Ktziot prison faced life-threatening conditions (40 percent of Palestinian males have cycled through Israeli prisons), and the Israeli military invaded and bulldozed land in Gaza. A typical day in Palestine. But don’t let the special envoy hear you say that.
Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew, president of the Council for the National Interest, and author of Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel. Additional citations and information on this topic are in her recent report and timeline: “International campaign is criminalizing criticism of Israel as ‘antisemitism’”.
* Allan C. Brownfeld, Publications Editor of the American Council for Judaism, provided the comment below for inclusion in discussing the expanded definition of antisemitism:
The meaning of the term “anti/Semitism” has undergone dramatic change in recent years. It used to refer to hostility to Jews and Judaism. It has been redefined by some to mean criticism of Israel. In recent days, establishment Jewish organizations from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to the Simon Wiesenthal Center have called the BDS movement “anti-Semitic”—despite the fact that it is supported by groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace and such international groups as Jews for Palestinian Right of Return and the Israeli activist organization Boycott from Within.
The effort to redefine anti-Semitism as criticism of Israel has been going on for more than four decades. In 1974, Benjamin Epstein, the national director of the ADL co-authored “The New Anti-Semitism,” a book whose argument was repeated in 1982 by his successor at ADL, Nathan Perlmutter, in a book entitled “The Real Anti-Semitism In America.” After World War II, Epstein argued, guilt over the Holocaust kept anti-Semitism at bay, but as memories of the Holocaust faded, anti-Semitism had returned—this time in the form of hostility to Israel. The reason: Israel represented Jewish power. Jews are tolerable, acceptable in their particularity, only as victims,” wrote Epstein and his ADL colleague Arnold Forster, “and when their situation changed so that they are either no longer victims, or appear not to be,the non-Jewish world finds this so hard to take that the effort is begun to render them victims anew.”
Jewish critics of Israel are as likely to be denounced as “anti-Semites” as non-Jews. For example, columnist Caroline Glick, writing in the International Jerusalem Post (Dec. 23-39, 2011) found New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman guilty of employing “traditional anti-Semitic slurs” and “of channeling long-standing anti-Semitic charges.” In a February 2012 Commentary article, Ben Cohen writes that, “The list of flagrant Jew-baiters is growing; those with Jewish names provide an additional frisson.” Among those he names are M.J. Rosenberg, a former employee of AIPAC. Mondoweiss editor Philip Weiss, New Yorker correspondent Seymour Hersh, and Time Magazine columnist Joe Klein.
The redefinition of anti-Semitism to mean criticism of Israel is clearly an effort to end freedom of speech and discussion when it comes to Israel and its policies. It has nothing to do with real anti-Semitism, which this effort trivializes and which, fortunately, is in retreat.
** Abbas later apologized for and retracted his allegation that the rabbi had approved contaminating wells, which numerous media had compared to Medieval “blood libels” of Jews. The Western media and the antisemitism report did not mention the extensive evidence that Israeli settlers have contaminated wells and that the state of Israel did the same during the conquest of Palestine. The suggestion that evidence of human rights violations cannot be discussed if similar accusations have been unfairly made against other people at another time in history enables current violations to continue.
*** State Department Special Envoys (as of June 30, 2017)
Climate Change (Special Envoy): Vacant
Closure of the Guantanamo Detention Facility (Special Envoy): Vacant
Energy Resources (Special Envoy and Coordinator): Mary Warlick (Acting)
Holocaust Issues (Special Envoy): Thomas K. Yazdgerdi
Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations (Special Envoy): Frank Lowenstein
Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism (Special Envoy): Vacant
North Korean Human Rights Issues (Special Envoy): Vacant
Organization of Islamic Cooperation (Special Envoy): Vacant
Six-Party Talks (Special Envoy): Vacant
Special Envoy and Coordinator of the Global Engagement Center: Vacant
Special Envoy for Sudan and South Sudan: Vacant
Special Envoy for Syria: Michael Ratney
Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBT Persons: Randy Berry
Special Ambassadors (A similar but higher position)
Global Criminal Justice (Ambassador): Todd F. Buchwald
Global Women’s Issues (Ambassador-at-Large): Vacant
Office of International Religious Freedom (Ambassador-at-Large): Vacant
Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking In Persons (Ambassador-at-Large): Susan Coppedge
Below is a promotional video that the second anti-Semitism envoy, Hannah Rosenthal, made to promote a “Walk for Israel” event in Millwaukee in May, 2017 . The event was to celebrate the creation of Israel, “the world’s first Jewish state in 2,000 years.”
‘Jewish Power Never Sleeps’–Another Billboard Taken Down
Fig Trees and Vineyards | March 2, 2017
The following is an email sent out recently by Deir Yassin Remembered announcing the take-down of one of their billboards.
The taken-down DYR “America First” billboard, the Southern Poverty Law Centre and a quote from Elie Wiesel – what could they have in common? Henry Herskovitz tells us more:
Jewish Power Never Sleeps
Like Michigan rust on vehicles, Jewish Power remains relentless at getting its way. Just when Witness for Peace was to announce the installation of a local billboard – sponsored by sister organization Deir Yassin Remembered and carrying our message “America First, Not Israel” – we get “the call”. The billboard pictured was taken down by Adams Outdoor Advertising one week after installation, effectively terminating a three-month contract.
That’s how long it took for Jewish Power to pressure Adams’ executives into seeing things their way. The call came from General Manager Mike Cannon, who admitted to receiving phone calls asking that the billboard be taken down. Mike claimed he was not the one who made the decision, and provided the phone number of Vice President of Human Resources
Brian Grant to field my questions.Brian developed a mantra for the conversation we shared: “the decision to remove the billboard was a collective decision and was made because the message did not meet Adams’ company standards. We removed the billboard and refunded your money. And that’s all I can say.” Brian fell back on this mantra at least a half dozen times during our 20-minute discussion. And reminded me that, since a clause in the contract allowed Adams to terminate at any time, there was no “breach of contract”.
Q: What were the company standards?
A: [Brian was not going to go into that.]
Q: How do you square the fact that the message was initially approved by Adams?
A: It should not have been approved; due diligence was not applied.
Q: Who were the people complaining about the billboard?
A: [Would not answer that.]
Q: What were the organizations calling for the billboard to be taken down?
A: [See above.]
Q: Would the decision to pull the billboard have been the same had the message been simply America First?
A: Well, you’re asking a hypothetical.
Q: You mean Adams would NOT run a billboard saying America First?
A: [No answer.]And so it goes. By deception shall you make war. DYR and WfP lose the round; Jewish Power wins. We move on.
Ann Arbor placed on SPLC “Hate” Map
The Southern Poverty Law Center exercises its own brand of Jewish Power by placing Deir Yassin Remembered (and its satellite office in Ann Arbor) on its “hate” map. This information came to us, not by direct communication from the SPLC, but through an article appearing in the Rochester, NY Democrat and Chronicle, entitled: “Rochester area makes SPLC Hate Map”
Defining “hate” proves difficult. A friend asks if forming a group which hates “hate” groups is in itself a “hate” group? Hmmm. The only clear example of hate speech that has come across this writer’s desk belongs to Holocaust icon Elie Wiesel:
“Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate — healthy, virile hate — for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German.”
Henry Herskovitz
Deir Yassin Remembered / Witnesses for Peace
Castigated by the Southern Poverty Law Center
By Deir Yassin Remembered | Dissident Voice | February 24, 2017
The “public” that allegedly “protested” against this billboard in Ann Arbor, as reported by the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, were not the only folks watching DYR.
The SPLC has now included DYR on its Hate Map.
Dan McGowan responds:
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) recently criticized Deir Yassin Remembered (DYR) by including it on the so-called Hate Map, purportedly for the high crime of Holocaust denial.
Apparently if the SPLC disagrees with you, it will label you as a racist or a hatemonger. There is no discussion, no defense, and no chance of winning a defamation suit against it.
The SPLC is the cash cow of the civil rights movement. Last year it took in over $58 million, some of which was added to its bloated endowment of over $328 million held in questionable investments, some in off shore accounts.
Its two chief executives together received over $800,000. Of its nine top executives, none come from minorities.
The SPLC claims to reject hate, embrace diversity, and respect differences. But often the SPLC and the people who believe their fear mongering behave exactly the opposite. The SPLC campaigns to deny free speech and freedom of association to groups of Americans with whom they disagree, often doing so to pander to other groups for more contributions all in the name of promoting “tolerance.” For example, if the British historian David Irving plans a lecture in Syracuse, the SPLC will protest any venue he might select, leaflet cars at his hotel saying, “There is a Nazi staying here,” and photograph and shout at anyone who might try to attend.
SPLC slime is not reserved solely for skinheads and members of the KKK. Dr. Ben Carson got a dose for opposing same sex marriage. SPLC later apologized but the charge never completely goes away, leading Carson to say that fear of being on the SPLC’s list serves to shut people up.
The SPLC makes money out of fear mongering and promoting the idea that Americans are inundated with hateful people, particularly on the radical right. The favorite target is the KKK and white supremacists.
The Baltimore Sun characterizes SPLC operations this way: “Its business is fundraising, and its success at raking in the cash is based on its ability to sell gullible people on the idea that present-day America is awash in white racism and anti-Semitism, which it will fight tooth-and-nail as the public interest law firm it purports to be.”1
It is understandable that the SPLC will run out of rocks under which to look for old KKK members and skinheads, but why criticize Deir Yassin Remembered, a small not-for-profit organization of Jews and non-Jews working to build a memorial for Palestinians murdered in 1948 on the west side of Jerusalem? DYR is certainly not the radical right. DYR practices and preaches tolerance; it has agreed to the advice of none other than the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem that its memorial show the Christian tenet of forgiveness. Its advisory board boasts diversity; it is composed of half men, half women, half Jews, half non-Jews. It has worked continuously since 1994 for Palestinian human rights, including equal rights of citizenship, with no compensation for any executive and with less than $5,000 of reserves.
The answer lies in the writings of some of the DYR members who have questioned the use of the Holocaust as both the sword and shield of Israel. The Holocaust has been used to justify the need for a Jewish state and its expropriation of Palestinian land; the Holocaust is used to monopolize victimhood and defend Israel from criticism of its brutal and unending occupation.
But it is more than that. The Holocaust has morphed from a historical event to a religion, which must not be contradicted for fear of being branded an apostate or a hater or a denier or an anti-Semite. Religious faith is self-validating, impervious to reason, and regards proposals to scientifically validate its claims as profane in all senses of the word.
So, anyone who is skeptical about the number “six million,” about mass extermination in gas chambers, or about Nazi orders for extermination is to be named and shamed and hated. For this topic, there can be no diversity of opinion and no respect for inquiry or debate.
Don’t tell us that the United States government claimed Hitler murdered over 20 million people until the late 1970s when that number was officially revised downwards and carved in stone at 11 million. Don’t tell us that Jewish historians today claim the 5 million number of non-Jewish victims is overstated. Don’t remind us that the lampshade and the soap-from-human-fat stories were simple gruel propaganda and have no historical significance. Don’t remind us that Elie Wiesel took his violin to Auschwitz and that none of his family was gassed. Don’t remind us that Elie chose to retreat with the Nazis rather than be liberated from Auschwitz as was the father of Anne Frank.
Fear mongering and sliming little organizations like DYR is fake news. It is ridiculous disinformation to keep SPLC campaign money coming in. It foments hate and bigotry and intolerance by the very hypocrites who claim the opposite.
- “The truth about ʻhate crimesʼ and the racial justice racket” by Ron Smith, Baltimore Sun, December 3, 2008.
Deir Yassin Remembered seeks progress on behalf of the over 100 Palestinian men, women, and children who were victims of the Deir Yassin Massacre. Read other articles by Deir Yassin Remembered, or visit Deir Yassin Remembered’s website.
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From the Archives
The lies about the 1967 war are still more powerful than the truth
By Alan Hart | June 4, 2012
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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