Must Amazon Sell Antisemitism?
I hope the day will not arrive when I must say goodbye to the emperor of all bookstores...
This post is the twenty-seventh in an ongoing series on antisemitism and culture. See the previous installments here:
What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites
When & Why Conspiracy Theorists Sometimes Stumble Onto the Truth
The JFK Conspiracy Theory Which Makes the Most Sense & Why It Matters Today
An Open Letter to Elon Musk Thanking Him for the Correct Decision Shutting Down Neo-Nazi Kanye West
4 Stupid Reasons People Don't Take Antisemitism as Seriously as They Should
Obsessing Over 'the Left' Sabotages the Fight Against Antisemitism
Elon Musk Brings Onboard 'How to Fight Anti-Semitism' Author Bari Weiss to Twitter 2.0
Even the Smartest Brains Can Become Infected with Antisemitism
Is Qatar the Most Terrible State in the Middle East? Or Is Iran Worse?
Indifferent to Racist Hate in America, Indifferent to Genocidal Hate in Ukraine
Please, My Jewish Friends: We Desperately Need You Here in America
7 Reasons This Christian Hippie Became a Zealot Against Jew Hatred
Bipolar Disorder Is Not an Excuse for Kanye West's Jew Hatred
Why This Bible Thumper Is Going to Keep Using Plenty of Profanity
Kevin McCarthy Makes a Deal with the Devilish Far Right Allies of Antisemitism and Genocide
How Multi-Faith Mysticism & Maimonides Can Bring Peace to Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Everyone
These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.
I noticed this story earlier this week at Jewish News Syndicate, the lovely publication which has been publishing my articles lately, so I’m reading it much more closely, and added the piece to my list of polemics to draft in this series: Canadian Jewish groups demand that Amazon remove Holocaust denial and Nazi-themed items:
Canadian Jewish groups dedicated to preserving the sanctity of the Holocaust issued a joint statement calling on Amazon to stop the sale of “hateful and appalling items” on its website.
The statement comes after B’nai Brith Canada discovered last month that the multinational e-commerce company was facilitating the sale of hateful material, despite its own guidelines of not tolerating such items.
“[Amazon] has been facilitating the sales of deeply offensive items such as Hitler and Nazi images, Holocaust-themed prints and Jewish ritual items presented as beachwear,” said B’nai Brith Canada in the statement. “There are even wall stickers, canvas prints and posters featuring images of emaciated concentration-camp victims and the Auschwitz death camp—items that unpardonably commercialize deplorable acts of genocide and hate.”
This was just one of the items on my to-write about list until earlier today I read this fantastic further write-up about the campaign by
at her wonderful Substack which I follow. Sadie-Rae’s write-up was so strong and effective it spurred on my own commitment to write on the subject today after finishing with my editorial duties at Algemeiner. Check it out:After summarizing her own Jewish Amazon searching and the offensive discoveries she found, Sadie-Rae introduced the campaign and highlighted that all these Jewish organizations were doing was asking Amazon to enforce its own policy against the selling of hate-speech related products. She then called out a common excuse in our tech age for this kind of irresponsible corporate behavior:
It is easy to lean in to providing Amazon with slack on this issue. After all, they are a massive company with millions of products available for sale and countless new listings being posted daily. This is the same excuse we so often hear applied to social media companies and other online platforms when they fail to address hateful and even violent content on their platforms. But we shouldn’t be letting them off this easily.
Amazon averages a net revenue of over $11 billion annually (this more than doubled at the height of the pandemic but appears to have since returned to normal). Given the amount the company earns, I personally find it difficult to let them off the hook for not doing more, be it improving their scraping algorithms or hiring more staff, to address and remove products that directly violate their own guidelines.
Hear, hear!
Amazon and wealthy tech-companies could provide greater resources to oppose antisemitism and other hate speech on their platforms. They simply know that doing so would impact their bottom line deeper than they’d prefer. As I’ve highlighted before in this series, the “antisemitic market” is huge. A fact that needs to be repeated regularly: according to the ADL’s Global 100 Study, over 1 billion adults on the planet can be characterized as antisemites for the depth of their animus against the Jewish people. That’s 26% of the people in the countries surveyed. So there is much money to be paid globally to Amazon and other merchants in supplying these people with products of all sorts.
Sadie-Rae then notes how antisemitism has been on the rise and cites a slew of statistics on the subject, particularly ones about the sad state of affairs on Holocaust education in both the United States and Canada. Hers are worth checking out in her post but I’ll highlight another recent batch in mine that I came across just today over at the Israeli news site I24: Over 85% of Americans believe in antisemitic tropes, conspiracies - survey. Here are a few highlights, my emphases added:
The number of people in the United States who believe in antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories doubled since 2019, according to a new survey published by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Thursday.
Over 85 percent of the respondents believe at least one anti-Jewish trope, compared to 61 percent in 2019, the poll revealed. About 20 percent of Americans believe in six or more tropes, rising from 11 percent in 2019 - the highest level measured in decades. […]
About 39 percent of the respondents also believed Jews were more loyal to Israel than the U.S. […]
Earlier in December, the ADL reported a 68 percent increase in antisemitic incidents across the U.S. in 2022. […]
It added that young adults between the ages of 18 and 30 “hold significantly more anti-Israel sentiment” than older respondents, with 21 percent and 11 percent agreeing with five or more anti-Israel statements, respectively. However, young adults are less likely to believe in anti-Jewish tropes - only 18 percent believe in six or more tropes compared to 20 percent among older respondents.
The number which most concerns me above is the rise in the number of Americans believing in at least 6 antisemitic tropes - shooting up from 11 to 20%. However, the fact that young adults embrace that many at a rate of 18% is also fairly disturbing to me. As tolerant and “woke” as the Gen-Z generation and their younger Millennial cohort often get credit, it appears that sympathy for the Jewish people wasn’t included in their ideological indoctrination.
That 20% concerns me much more than the more headline-grabbing 85% number because my first inclination is to give the latter the benefit of the doubt. If someone just harbors a single anti-Jewish trope then chances are it’s more due to ignorance than outright malice against all Jews. It’s at the 6-or-more-tropes level then when one really hits a pathological level and it would be reasonable to count them as a genuine antisemite.
Now, regarding Amazon, perhaps an obvious question: if I advocated boycotting Netflix just a few days ago for its various anti-Jewish offenses, why not Amazon now too?
Well, it comes down to the same principle of the 20%-85% distinction. Netflix’s decision to pay Dave Chappelle tens of millions to spread his bigotry, to feature a slate of anti-Israel films, and its founder’s choice to invest his money in an anti-Israel foundation which funds Islamists, are all distinct choices which it didn’t have to make and it has yet to offer any plans to apologies for and remedy. Amazon’s error here is more out of ignorance than malice.
Amazon already has a policy in place to prevent the selling of hate items - it’s just simply not being enforced at the level it needs to be done. It may take some time, but enough sustained activism to raise awareness from more and more Zionist groups and we’re likely to see the necessary change. Amazon, like most tech companies I’ve researched on issues relating to Israel and antisemitism, is likely just naive out to save money. It doesn’t know how serious the problem actually is.
At least that’s my more charitable reading based on the facts so far. I reserve the right to update it should more disturbing realities come to light. Amazon is an important venue for book publishing and I plan for us to utilize it once we start publishing our titles this year. It would be really unfortunate if we had to forego doing so in order to be true to our Zionist principles as a publisher. I’m optimistic it won’t come to that.
In the meantime, while we keep on eye on how Amazon is going to respond to this new campaign and the issue of hate products on its speech down the line, I really urge you to check out
's substack. Here are a few more pieces by her that I read today and really liked. She's a skilled writer with moral clarity and solid research. I anticipate she's going to have a great career as a writer. Give her writing a shot:
Thank you for adding your voice and perspective to this issue and calling attention to. I'm so happy that my piece from this afternoon was able to help you in adding more context and thoughts to this.