Revisionist History Books Banned by Amazon
Revisionist History Books Banned by Amazon
On August 13, 2018 Amazon banned Michael Hoffman's Judaism’s Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded, which was published in 2011 and sold by Amazon for the past seven years. Along with his much larger study, Judaism Discovered (sold by Amazon since 2008), this book 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 circulation of books because it bypasses borders and customs and hurdles over the prohibitive cost of shipping which the US Postal Service imposed on books sent to overseas destinations several years ago (the Post Office eliminated economical surface mail sent by sea; all books now must be shipped to Canada and overseas by very costly Priority Air Mail rates).
Amazon has also banned Hoffman's The Great Holocaust Trial: The Landmark Battle for the Right to Doubt the West’s Most Sacred Relic (sold by Amazon since 2010), an important eye-witness account of the historic trial of a dissident publisher in Toronto, which has been cited as a source of information even by the Zionist organizations in Canada. Now this primacy source material on a civil liberties milestone is down the Orwwellian memory hole, at least as far as "earth's biggest bookstore" is concerned. Researchers, students and the public who wish to read it must now take the time and trouble to resort to a rare book search service.
The three banned volumes maintain a high standard of scholarly excellence, had a majority of favorable reviews from Amazon customers, are free of hatred and bigotryand have sold thousands of copies on Amazon.
Out of the blue the author was told that “Amazon KDP” had decided that these three history books were 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 the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
It’s a flimsy pretext for censoring controversial, scholarly books that cannot otherwise be discredited. Therefore, Amazon’s readers must no longer be allowed to view them on the Kindle, and Amazon will not sell them. We consider this censorship of our books a badge of honor. The disgrace is on Amazon for submitting to the appeals of organizations that operate as thought police in "The Land of the Free.”
The August 7 New York Times online confirmed the outsize influence which the SPLC possesses at Amazon. The Timespublished 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.”
Banning and censorship were not part of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ public philosophy when he founded the company in 1994. Amazon experienced explosive growth in part because it functioned as an intrepid gateway to authentic works of scholarship, however much they were demonized, reviled or condemned by infuriated political or religious factions and pressure groups; that libertarian philosophy of freedom changed beginning in 2017, when Amazon gained a virtual monopoly over the sale of books in the United States.
In addition to our work being hate-free, we note that Amazon sells dozens of hateful Zionist and rabbinic volumes brimming with ferocious bigotry for Palestinians, Germans and goyim in general. For example, in 1997, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen wrote and Amzon began to offer, Hitler's Willing Executioners, one of the most racist books of the modern era. In it, Prof. Goldhagen purported to demonstrate that Nazi mass murder stemmed from an innate German predisposition to kill Jews. His book promulgates a theory of a genetic homicidal trait infecting the entire German nation. This bigoted trash has a right to be sold. We uphold that right because exposure of its thesis is the most effective indictment of its author. We note that Hitler's Willing Executioners 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 is the German people who he collectively defames as a racially tainted ethncity. Consequently, his book constitutes a righteous type of hate— the approved hate that does not offend the Southern Poverty Law Center or the ADL.
Many dozens of books containing savage attacks on Christianity are also sold by Amazon. These volumes seem to be immune from removal and suppression. Meanwhile, the censors demand for their own media — Mr. Bezos 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 demonized outsiders, using the phony “hate” imputation as their excuse.
The Washington Post 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 timidity of the American Bookseller's Association and the American Library Association. To ban books by a vulnerable independent scholar is not exactly a daring move in an age when “hate speech” is any scholarship which challenges someone’s sacred traditions or cherished folklore. The definition is so loose it functions as a one-size-fits-all inquisitor’s sword, and the non-persons who are the victims of this new inquisition are expected to descend quietly into sheol.
Michael Hoffman's critique of Orthodox Judaism constitutes a radical reassessment founded upon the depth of the documents and arguments he marshals in the course of advancing his thesis. The compelling and original scholarship employed in his study of Orthodox Judaism is never “anti-Semitic” or hateful. This would be easy to prove if there were an Amazon “tribunal” fair enough to consider a little something known as evidence.
In both Judaism Discovered (p. 39) and Judaism’s Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded there are statements addressed “To the Judaic Reader”(photographically reproduced here: pp. 18-19, and here: p. 25), expounding our love and concern for their welfare and liberation. No book of “anti-Semitic hate” would ever print any such charitable and compassionate statements, and these are representative of the entire tenor of the volumes under consideration.
Enemies of truth can easily turn to their advantage books containing hatred of “The Jews.” What they 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 Michael Hoffman's 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.
A Kindle permits anyone connected to the Amazon website to read approximately the first thirty pages of any Kindle book free of charge. Consequently, Hoffman's Judaica research was on display around the world and therefore it was much harder to lie about him and mischaracterize his Talmud and Kabbalah research under those circumstances.
Moreover, Judaic people are harmed by this book-banning which creates a special category of informed theological criticism that is banned from the Amazon Kindle and thereby obstructs 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. We have received letters and e-mail from Judaics who were appreciative of our books and surprised by their evident compassion and concern for “Jews."
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.
Furthermore, 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.
The public should be informed of the disgraceful tactics of the hypocrites who are so fearful of the radical scholarship for which they have no credible answer, that they pressure booksellers to ban the books that contain irrefutable challenges to their sacred dogmas. Human learning is often advanced by means of suppressed facts and ideas. This was formerly a truism in America, up until the rise of the Overlords of social media who seem to be more like a branch of Antifa than an intellectual class invested in discovery and enlightenment.
Knowledge is advanced on the basis that “Error has rights,” for the reason that demonized dissidents banned for supposedly spreading error, are sometimes in fact the bearers of rare discoveries that undercut enshrined dogmas, which appear credible through repetition by the dominant media empire.
But the epigram of our time is “Error has no rights.” This was the doctrine of the fiery Inquisition, of the head-chopping French Revolution and of the Bolsheviks, Nazis 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.
The ban on these three books of ours, particularly the complete ban (Kindle + printed book) on Judaism’s Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded, as well asJudaism Discovered banned from the Kindle, represents a signifcant loss to us of revenue. If we don’t somehow make up for this serious shortfall it will imperil our entire enterprise.
This is in God’s hands. Our prayer is that He inspires benefactors to assist us in this our time of need, as well as in the weeks and months ahead as we search for a replacement for what was regular monthly sales income upon which we depended for our Truth Mission.
The greatest loss of course is to minds hungry for knowledge, whether in India, Japan, the Middle East, Europe or here at home. Learning is a right which the book-banning antediluvians have now denied to readers and students throughout the world. God help us all.
Enemies of truth can easily turn to their advantage books containing hatred of “The Jews.” What they 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 Michael Hoffman's 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.
A Kindle permits anyone connected to the Amazon website to read approximately the first thirty pages of any Kindle book free of charge. Consequently, Hoffman's Judaica research was on display around the world and therefore it was much harder to lie about him and mischaracterize his Talmud and Kabbalah research under those circumstances.
Moreover, Judaic people are harmed by this book-banning which creates a special category of informed theological criticism that is banned from the Amazon Kindle and thereby obstructs 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. We have received letters and e-mail from Judaics who were appreciative of our books and surprised by their evident compassion and concern for “Jews."
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.
Furthermore, 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.
The public should be informed of the disgraceful tactics of the hypocrites who are so fearful of the radical scholarship for which they have no credible answer, that they pressure booksellers to ban the books that contain irrefutable challenges to their sacred dogmas. Human learning is often advanced by means of suppressed facts and ideas. This was formerly a truism in America, up until the rise of the Overlords of social media who seem to be more like a branch of Antifa than an intellectual class invested in discovery and enlightenment.
Knowledge is advanced on the basis that “Error has rights,” for the reason that demonized dissidents banned for supposedly spreading error, are sometimes in fact the bearers of rare discoveries that undercut enshrined dogmas, which appear credible through repetition by the dominant media empire.
But the epigram of our time is “Error has no rights.” This was the doctrine of the fiery Inquisition, of the head-chopping French Revolution and of the Bolsheviks, Nazis 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.
The ban on these three books of ours, particularly the complete ban (Kindle + printed book) on Judaism’s Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded, as well asJudaism Discovered banned from the Kindle, represents a signifcant loss to us of revenue. If we don’t somehow make up for this serious shortfall it will imperil our entire enterprise.
This is in God’s hands. Our prayer is that He inspires benefactors to assist us in this our time of need, as well as in the weeks and months ahead as we search for a replacement for what was regular monthly sales income upon which we depended for our Truth Mission.
The greatest loss of course is to minds hungry for knowledge, whether in India, Japan, the Middle East, Europe or here at home. Learning is a right which the book-banning antediluvians have now denied to readers and students throughout the world. God help us all.
Order these banned books from the publisher: here and here
Revisionist historian Michael Hoffman is one of the most controversial scholars of the 21st century. The Southern Poverty Law Center and the ADL seek to shut him down and ban his books because they can’trefute his research.
New questions about the Southern Poverty Law Center's irresponsible smears and libel
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is a hate-mongering scam
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