Amazon Bans More Books by Respected Scholars

One suggestion for dealing with Amazon’s book-burning spree is to nationalize the company, which has a “monopoly in the digital public sphere,” and put Jeff Bezos on trial for treason.

By Dr. Kevin Barrett

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America—and American tradition—enshrines freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Nowhere is this more evident than in the book publishing industry. Historically, few books have been banned or restricted in America for any reason other than obscenity or indecency, and even those restrictions have largely collapsed. Since the mid-1960s, a book can only be banned if a reasonable person would consider it prurient, in violation of contemporary community standards, and completely devoid of literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

But since 2017 our tradition of freedom from book censorship has been annihilated. We are living through the worst-ever assault on the Bill of Rights. This crime is being committed by a monopoly in service to an organized crime syndicate. Amazon, under pressure from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and allied groups, has “kindled” the biggest book-burning bonfire ever. And the books Amazon is burning are not those brimming with obscenity. You can still buy the Marquis de Sade’s pornographic incitements to rape, torture, and murder, alongside thousands of similar abominations, on Amazon. What you can’t buy are scholarly books that carefully and dispassionately document facts that pose a threat to the continued reign of what certain hotheads have (not entirely inaccurately) called ZOG, the Zionist Occupation Government.

On March 11, Amazon—which holds an effective monopoly on book sales in the United States—notified professor Kevin MacDonald that two of his scholarly books, The Culture of Critique and Separation and Its Discontents, had been banned: “During our review process, we found that this content is in violation of our content guidelines. As a result, we cannot offer this book for sale.”

What content, specifically? Which guidelines did it violate, and how?

MacDonald reports: “In subsequent emails, they just keep repeating that these books were found to violate ‘content guidelines,’ even though I pointed out that they were published 21 years ago by a respected academic publisher. No specifics. No appeal process.”

Amazon doesn’t just ban scholarly works by professors who advocate for white people. America’s leading pro-black-people historical research team, the Nation of Islam (NOI) Research Group, has also been the victim of an Amazon book-burning bonfire. In his article “American Pravda: Amazon Book Censorship: Banning Black Historiography During Black History Month” Ron Unz discusses Amazon’s scandalous banning of the NOI Research Group’s multi-volume series The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. Volume 3 of that series convincingly exposes the ADL as an organized crime syndicate founded to protect the Jewish rapist and murderer Leo Frank.

Though I do not agree with MacDonald or NOI about everything, I cannot help but recognize that their banned books feature high-quality scholarship. The same cannot be said of the rabidly Islamophobic books of Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, and a long list of other Zionist-funded propagandists who together make up the $50-million-per-year Islamophobia industry. Though almost uniformly characterized by poor scholarship and reckless animosity to the people they write about, these authors are not only allowed to sell their deceptive and hateful wares on Amazon but are relentlessly promoted by Zionist big money. In other words, essentially the same organized crime syndicate is forcing Amazon to ban dispassionate scholarly works as “hate,” while simultaneously spending hundreds of millions of dollars promoting actual hate propaganda sold by the boatload on Amazon.

Spencer, the Zionist-paid hate propagandist who inspired child-murderer Anders Breivik, is peddling 37 very bad books on Amazon. At least nine editions of Hitler’s Mein Kampf are likewise being sold there. Thousands of books that offend modern liberal sensibilities are equally available. So are books that offend traditional conservative sensibilities. And that is as it should be! Two-bit hate hacks like Spencer, as well as important historical figures like Hitler, should be refuted, not silenced.

And speaking of Hitler: The current wave of Amazon censorship began two years ago with the wholesale banning of revisionist books about World War II. On March 6, 2017, Amazon banned 68 titles from Castle Hill Publishers, which specializes in scientific and forensic historical investigations. Germar Rudolf of Castle Hill asserts that his company was not the only one targeted, and that, in fact, hundreds of revisionist history books were banned that day.

Our Constitution, and the tradition of liberty it enshrines, is being shredded. But there is a simple solution: Force Amazon to respect the Bill of Rights. Like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, Amazon has a monopoly in the digital public square. It is a de facto public utility not a private company. If Jeff Bezos keeps spitting on our Constitution, we must nationalize Amazon—and try Bezos for treason.

Kevin Barrett, Ph.D., is an Arabist-Islamologist scholar and one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror. From 1991 through 2006, Dr. Barrett taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin. In 2006, however, he was attacked by Republican state legislators who called for him to be fired from his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison due to his political opinions.