TOP RECRUITS REFUSE TO WORK FOR GOOGLE OR AMAZON OVER INVOLVEMENT IN ISRAELI WAR CRIMES

AUGUST 2ND, 2022

Source

By Jessica Buxbaum

As Google and Amazon employees fight back against the tech giants’ Israeli military contract, college graduates have also joined the resistance.

Amid Israel’s assault on Gaza and occupied East Jerusalem in May 2021, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google signed a $1.22 billion contract to provide cloud technology to Israel’s public sector and its military, known as Project Nimbus.

In response, Google and Amazon workers formed a coalition opposing Project Nimbus as well as strategizing against the technology’s implementation.

While just over a year old, Google and Amazon have not addressed the Workers Against Nimbus and #NoTechForApartheid campaigns publicly, but the activist network has had success in cutting the corporations’ power —  even if only slightly.

“The students who are graduating from university and who have applied to Amazon and Google are turning down all of these interview requests,” an anonymous Amazon employee told MintPress News, describing how it makes them hopeful to see that kind of community support. “They’re specifically telling Amazon and Google, ‘We’re not going to these interviews because of Project Nimbus.’’’

Earlier this month, activists disrupted the keynote speech at an AWS summit in New York City, drawing attention to the tech behemoth’s controversial contract with the Israeli government.

“By doing business with Israeli apartheid, Amazon and Google will make it easier for the Israeli government to surveil Palestinians and force them off their land,” a website for the #NoTechForApartheid campaign says.

ICYMI—Human rights activists confronted leaders at #AWSsummit to demand an end to @Amazon's surveillance empire—which enables state violence at home and abroad and powers Israeli apartheid.

Take action: https://t.co/vIJnIs4vxV#NoTechForApartheidpic.twitter.com/QvVIgtFTRR

— MPower Change (@MPower_Change) July 26, 2022

Outside the summit’s venue, Google employee Gabriel Schubiner addressed protesters. “As tech workers we need to ask ourselves: do we want a world where militaries around the world are training AI [artificial intelligence] for surveillance and targeting on our hardware?” Schubiner said. “Do we want to give nationalist armies of the world our technology?”

.@Google tech worker Gabi speaks out against @amazon @google powering state violence:

"As tech workers we must ask ourselves: do we want militaries around the world training AI for surveillance on our hardware? Do we want to give nationalist armies of the world our tech?" pic.twitter.com/aBJJWNCuCE

— MPower Change (@MPower_Change) July 12, 2022

Google and AWS beat out IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft for an Israeli government tender last year to jointly build and provide cloud-based regional data centers within Israel’s borders and under Israeli law. Project Nimbus will allow Israeli ministries and other public entities to transfer servers and services into the cloud. Local data centers are expected to be completed within two years. Until then, cloud services will be provided by Google and AWS data centers in Ireland, the Netherlands, and Germany.

The contract also includes a provision stipulating Amazon and Google cannot shut down operations and deny services to certain government entities, effectively barring the tech firms from engaging in a boycott of Israel or stopping the technology from being used to enact human rights abuses.

The Workers Against Project Nimbus campaign described how they felt during the Israeli 2021 attacks and why they were compelled to join together.

“[W]e had to face the fact that those of us Palestinian tech workers with family and loved ones in Gaza or the West Bank, those of us living in diaspora, would now be enabling violence and oppression against our own communities – all while professing the importance of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,”  The Workers Against Project Nimbus said in a July 26 Tech Workers Coalition (TWC) newsletter.

Google and Amazon did not respond to requests for comment on Project Nimbus or the worker-led campaign against it.

BOLSTERING A DATA-DRIVEN OCCUPATION

Little is known about Project Nimbus as Google and Amazon employees have been kept in the dark about the project’s activities and what the Israeli government may use the technology for.

The Palestinian Amazon worker spoke to MintPress News under the condition of anonymity to avoid workplace retaliation that the corporations have not disclosed any details about Project Nimbus to employees. “We are completely alienated from what our labor bills and the effect it has, all while being the ones who are putting in the work for it,” they said.

However, newly-unveiled documents first reported by The Intercept showcase the tools provided to the Israeli government and may offer a glimpse into how Project Nimbus may be used.

According to training slides and videos accessed through a public educational portal for Nimbus users, Google is offering Israel its full suite of machine learning and advanced artificial intelligence tools on its Google Cloud Platform. These services include facial detection, computer vision, automated image categorization, object tracking, and sentiment detection, a controversial form of machine learning claiming to determine a person’s feelings through their face and statements.

“Even though these training materials are fairly standard, it shows that Google is actively trying to help the Israeli government, including Israeli Defense Forces, to train their own AI systems on top of Google’s Cloud systems,” Jack Poulson, executive director of watchdog group, Tech Inquiry, told MintPress News.

Poulson expressed concerns over training documents detailing an Edge model of Google’s Tensor Processing Unit, an AI application designed to accelerate machine learning workloads.

“Edge is often a codeword for when it’s deployed outside of a traditional location, usually in the field,” Poulson said. “That in many cases include drones, surveillance cameras, cell phones, and places where you would directly be performing measurements or surveillance.”

Poulson is also wary of speech-to-text and language translation capabilities mentioned in the training materials.

“Hypothetically speaking, suppose the Israeli government built a system that had access to the conversations with Palestinians or a lot of footage on Palestinians, then any sort of large collection of audio could be transcribed directly from speech-to-text,” Poulson said. “The text could be translated into another language if needed, and surveillance camera footage could be used to track people of interest.”

A Palestinian man uses a biometric gate at the Qalandia checkpoint in Jerusalem on July 11, 2019. Sebastian Scheiner | AP

The anonymous Amazon employee reiterated how the training materials appear harmless, but with Israel’s criminal track record, these resources can easily be turned into something nefarious.

“There’s a darker side to these things,” they said. “In the American reality, these tools are putting an end to privacy, but in occupied Palestine, it’s enabling the war crimes.”

In the TWC newsletter, workers described how the technology may be used to entrench Israel’s occupation of Palestine:

The cloud technology we build, market, and research would now be used to host an apartheid identification system – one that determines individuals’ freedom of movement and rights based on their identity and where they are born. Such tech would be used to store massive amounts of information collected about Palestinians – from capturing CCTV footage and taking photos at checkpoints and even biometric data – that could be used to surveil and criminalize civilians. 

The newsletter warned that:

Apartheid Israeli government ministries such as the Israeli Land Authority, which systematically segregates and confines Palestinians while allowing for illegal settlement expansion for Jewish Israelis, would use this tech.

Data-driven technology is the backbone of Israel’s military occupation of Palestine. Numerous reports have revealed how Israel is using digital surveillance tools to spy, monitor, and cement control over Palestinians. This technology is deployed on social media, at checkpoints, and through neighborhood CCTV footage. It comes in the form of data collection and analysis, call monitoring, and facial recognition. This mass system of surveillance gives Palestinians the perpetual feeling of being watched, erasing their privacy and autonomy.

NOT JUST PROJECT NIMBUS

While Project Nimbus is in the spotlight due to the worker-led campaign against it, other U.S. tech corporations are also supporting Israel’s occupation.

Israel’s Ministry of Defense adopted Palo-Alto-based Anjuna’s Confidential Cloud software that trains AI models so tech firm employees will not be able to access any of that data. Tech giant Cisco has been involved in growing Israel’s visual surveillance apparatus in Jerusalem. Motorola Solutions Israel, a subsidiary of the U.S.-based Motorola Solutions, has been providing the Israeli Defense Ministry with surveillance system technology for Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and the Apartheid Wall, the barrier separating the West Bank and 1948-occupied Palestine or modern-day Israel.

While there have been employee resignations over Project Nimbus, the anonymous worker told MintPress News that they remain with Amazon as a way to implement change from the inside, especially since most corporations are guilty of similar atrocities to Amazon and Google.

Censoring Palestine: Swarms of Israeli Bots Are Crippling Pro-Palestinian Twitter Accounts

While there have been employee resignations over Project Nimbus, the anonymous worker told MintPress News that they remain with Amazon as a way to implement change from the inside, especially since most corporations are guilty of similar atrocities to Amazon and Google.

“It’s more important to try to change things instead of just running,” the employee said. “It’s similar to what the Palestinians are doing; they’re not running. They’re staying and fighting and resisting.”

Amazon, Google Employees: Crimes against Palestinians to Get ’Deadlier’ After Tech Giants Contract with ’Israel

October 13, 2021

By Staff, Agencies

Over 1,600 employees at tech giants Amazon and Google have urged their employers to pull out of a contract under which they will sell “dangerous technology” to the Zionist entity and its military and cut all ties with the regime over its atrocities against the Palestinian people.

Initially, more than 90 workers at Google and more than 300 at Amazon anonymously signed an open letter published by the Guardian newspaper on Tuesday, demanding the termination of Project Nimbus, which will provide cloud services for the Tel Aviv regime.

“The technology our companies have contracted to build will make the systematic discrimination and displacement carried out by the ‘Israeli’ military and government even crueler and deadlier for Palestinians,” the employees said in the letter.

“We condemn Amazon and Google’s decision to sign the Project Nimbus contract with the ‘Israeli’ military and government, and ask them to reject this contract and future contracts that will harm our users,” they said.

They underlined the need for the two companies to stop contracting with any militarized organization in the US and beyond.

Project Nimbus is a $1.2bn contract awarded last April to Google and Amazon, which succeeded in beating out bids from Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM, to provide cloud services for the ‘Israeli’ occupation regime and its military.

There are fears that the technology would allow for further illegal surveillance of Palestinians and facilitate the expansion of the Zionist regime’s illegal settlements across the occupied territories.

“This contract was signed the same week that the ‘Israeli’ military attacked Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, killing nearly 250 people, including more than 60 children,” said the “employees of conscience,” referring to the ‘Israeli’ regime’s latest war on Gaza which occurred in May and lasted for 11 consecutive days.

“We cannot look the other way, as the products we build are used to deny Palestinians their basic rights, force Palestinians out of their homes and attack Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, actions that have prompted war crime investigations by the international criminal court.”

In another opinion piece posted hours later on NBC, two workers at the tech giants updated the number of signatories, saying that nearly 1,000 anonymous signatories at Amazon and more than 600 at Google have joined the campaign.

“Since we have no ability to guarantee that the technology we build won’t be used to commit human rights abuses against Palestinians, cutting the contracts entirely is the only ethical option left for our companies,” Gabriel Schubiner, software engineer and researcher at Google, and Bathool Syed, content strategist at Amazon, wrote in the article.

The two employees said they agree with the two companies’ stated commitment to ethics, but also pointed to their hypocrisy. “We want to work for companies that do more than pay lip service to ethical business practices,” they noted.

“Instead, our companies signed contracts that they knew would be highly controversial, yet relinquishes their ability to enforce their own publicly stated principles while attempting to deny workers our say in how our labor is used.”

What kind of “popular revolution” is this?!

Source

THE SAKER • JUNE 16, 2020

Jamie Dimon and JP Morgan Chase

I have to say that I am amazed that so many folks on the Left seem to think that the current riots in the US are a spontaneous rebellion against police violence, systemic racism, and history of persecution and exploitation of Blacks and Indians, etc. As for the violence, looting and riots – they are either excused as a result of some kind of righteous wrath or blamed on “infiltrators”. In my previous article I tried to show how the Democrats and the US media tried to instrumentalize these riots and to use them against Trump’s bid for reelection. I accompanied the article with a carefully staged photo-op of US Democrats “taking a knee” in solidarity (as if the leaders of the Democratic Party gave a hoot about Blacks or poor US Americans!).

What I did not mention was how the US (and even trans-national) corporate world backed these riots to the hilt. Here are just a few examples of this:

YouTube:

Amazon, Bank of America & Sephora:

And it is not only in the USA. Check out what Adidas in Germany has been up to:

and finally, my personal super-favorite:

Jamie Dimon and the JP Morgan Chase Bank:

All those of us who thought that the corporate world was all about money, that the corporate “culture” had all the signs of severe psychopathy and that billionaires did not give a damn about the poor and the oppressed, but now we know better: we thought of them as evil 1%ers, and it turns out that there are kind, highly principled people, who care about injustice and freedom and who truly feel bad, very very bad, for all the injustices done to Blacks!

Do you really buy this?

I sure don’t!

These are not small mom-and-pop stores where ethics and kindness still exist. These are the very corporations who benefited most from all the inequalities, injustice, violence and imperial wars of aggression and it would be truly pollyannish to think that these corporations and their CEOs suddenly grew a conscience (the exact same applies to the leadership of the Democratic Party, of course!).

So let’s go back to the basics: corporations are about money, that is a truism. Yes, sometimes corporations try to present a “human face”, but this is nothing more than a marketing trick destined to create consumer loyalty. Now I don’t believe for one second that the mega-corporations listed above expect to make much money from supporting the riots, at least not in a direct way. Nor do I believe that these corporations are trying to impersonate a conscience because they fear a Black consumer boycott (what was true in Tuskegee in the late 1950s is not true today, if only because of the completely different scale of the protests).

So if not money – what is at stake here?

Power.

Specifically, the US deep state – at a major faction within that deep state – is clearly desperate to get rid of Trump (and not for the right reasons, of which there are plenty).

Another victory of the “coalition of minorities” and another defeat for Trump

There are plenty of signs that illustrate that Trump is even losing control of the Executive, including Secretary Esper contradicting Trump on what is a key issue – restoring law and order – or the US Ambassador to South Korea voicing support for BLM (I consider that these actions by top officials against their own Commander in Chief border on treason). Needless to say, the pro-Dems neo-libs at Slate immediately began dreaming about, and calling for, a military revolt against Trump.

Last but not least, we now have a “free zone” in Seattle, the notorious Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, “CHAZ” aka “CHOP” where, among other “curiosities”, Whites are told to give 10 bucks to a Black person. This means that until law and order are restored to what is now the CHAZ, the United States has lost its sovereignty over a part of one of its cities. That is a “black eye” for any US President who, after all, is the leader of the Executive branch of government and the Commander in Chief of a military supposed (in theory only, of course) to defend the United States against all enemies.

What do all of these developments have in common?

They are designed to show that Trump has lost control of the country and that all good and decent people now stand united against him.

There are several major problems with this plan.

For one thing, this is all completely illegal. What began as a typical race riot is now openly turning into sedition.

The second major problem of this plan is that it relies on what I call a “coalition of minorities” to achieve its goal, it is therefore ignoring the will of the majority of the people. This can backfire, especially if the chaos and violence continue to spread.

Will he take orders from Pelosi?

Next, there is the “Golem/Frankenstein” issue: it is much easier to launch a wildfire than to contain or suppress it. Nancy Pelosi might be dumb enough to think that she and her gang can control the likes of Raz Simone, but history shows that when the state abdicates its monopoly on violence, anarchy ensues.

By the way, it is important to note here that Trump, at least so far, has not taken the bait and has not used federal forces to reimpose law and order in Seattle, Atlanta or elsewhere.

He must realize that liberating the so-called CHAZ might result in a bloodbath (there appear to be plenty of weapons inside the CHAZ) and that the Democrats are dreaming about blaming him for a bloodbath. Trump’s strategy, at least so far, appears to let the lawlessness continue and blame the Democrats for it.

While Trump’s strategy makes sense, it also is inherently very dangerous because if the state cannot reimpose law and order, then all sorts of “volunteers” might decide to give it a shot (literally). Check out this headline “Bikers For Trump Organizing to Retake Seattle On July 4th“. Whether these bikers will actually try to take over the CHAZ or not, even the fact that they are preparing to do so shows, yet again, that the state has lost its monopoly on violence.

Finally, this strategy to oust Trump by means of lawlessness and anarchy could greatly contribute to the breakup of the United States, if not de jure, then at least de facto. How?

For one thing, the United States is a big country, not only in terms of geographical size, but also in socio-economic and even cultural terms. Some US states have a large Black population, others much less. But they all mostly watch the same news media. Which means that when there are race riots in, say, Los Angeles or Baltimore, the people who live in states like Montana or the Dakotas feel that it is their country which is threatened. Coincidentally (or not?), these mostly White states happen to have a large part of their population as, Hillary’s famous “deplorables”. Some liberals call these states “flyover states”. It also happens that civilians in these states own a large number of firearms and know how to use them.

The same applies to different locations within any one state. Take California for example, which many view as being very liberal, progressive. Well, that might be true for many cities in California, but as soon as you enter rural California, the prevailing culture changes rather dramatically. The same urban vs rural dichotomy also exists in many other states, including Florida.

The risk here is the following one: some parts of the United States can collapse and become zones of total lawlessness while others will “circle the wagons” and take whatever measures are needed to protect themselves and their way of life.

This does not mean that the US, as a country, will break-up into several successor states. That could only happen much further down the road, but it does mean that different areas of the country could start facing the crisis autonomously and even possibly in direct violation of US laws. When that happens, poverty and violence typically sharply rise. There are already reports of vigilantism in New Mexico(interestingly, in this case the authorities did send in the cops).

In his seminal article “Race and Crime in America” (an absolute MUST READfor any person wanting to understand what is taking place today!) Ron Unz makes a very interesting observation:

“The empirical fact is that presence or absence of large numbers of Hispanics or Asians in a given state seems to have virtually no impact upon white voting patterns. Meanwhile, there exists a strong relationship between the size of a state’s black population and the likelihood that local whites will favor the Republicans”.

In other words, the larger the Black minority, the more likely Whites will vote Republican. Of course, one can dismiss this by saying that these Whites are all racists, but that does not help either because it begs the question of why Whites do not become racists when living next to Hispanics and Asians, but do so when they live near Blacks. The explanation is in Ron’s article: “local urban crime rates in America seem to be almost entirely explained by the local racial distribution” (please see the charts in Ron’s article for the data supporting this conclusion).

This makes for a potentially very explosive mix, especially in a time when police officers now risk a reprimand, a demotion. being fired or even criminal charges for using “excessive force” against any Black suspect (yes, US cops often do use excessive force, but the solution here is not to paralyze the police forces, lest the civilians feel like they need to defend themselves.

As I have said it many times, I don’t believe that the term “race” has a scientific basis, nor do concepts such as “Black” or “White”. This does not mean that they don’t have a political meaning, especially in a country which is obsessed by race issues (yes, one can obsess about non-existing things). In the US most people self-identify with a color, thus to them this is something very real. For example, the figures used in Ron Unz’ article are based upon these concepts understood sociologically, not biologically, and this is the only reason why I use them too, though somewhat reluctantly, I will admit.

Conclusion: this is no popular revolution at all

It is undeniable that a major chuck of the US ruling classes have decided to support the BLM movement and the riots it instigates. Furthermore, these US ruling classes have instrumentalized these riots in a transparent attempt to prevent a Trump reelection in November. And just like the Republicans have been destroying the AngloZionist empire on the international scene, the Democrats have been destroying the United States from within. Far from being a real popular protest movement, the BLM movement is a tool in the hands of one faction of the US deep state against another faction. A lot of Trump nominees/appointees are now seeing the writing on the wall and are betraying their boss in order to switch sides and abandon what they see as a sinking ship.

My personal feeling is that Trump is too weak and too much of a coward to fight his political enemies (if he had any spine, it would have shown at the time when Trump betrayed Flynn only a month into his presidency). History, however, shows that a political vacuum cannot last very long. In Russia the chaos lasted from February to November 1917, at which point the Bolsheviks (who were a relatively small party) easily seized power and, following a bloody civil war, restored their version of law and order. I still don’t see a civil war taking place in the USA, but some kind of coup is, I think, a very real possibility. This is especially true considering that most Democrats will never accept a Trump reelection while most Republicans will never accept a Biden presidency. This is a case of “not my president” powerfully backfiring on its creators.

Those of us who live in the US better prepare for a very dangerous and difficult year!

On the censorship of Michael Hoffman’s books by Amazon

The Saker

September 13, 2018

[This article was written for the Unz Review]

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.

*******

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:

https://www.revisionisthistory.org/page8/page8.html

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 (SLC) 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 at stop to this kind of censorship?

Hoffman: In a 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:

1. 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
2. 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).
3. 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, nevermind that the result is still a clear de-facto infringement of Hoffman’s First Amendment rights and the freedom of academic scholarship.
4. 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?).
5. 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: https://twitter.com/HoffmanMichaelA/status/1039159686233088000) 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!

The Saker