HolocaustJew Watch, a bigoted group “Keeping a Close Watch on Jewish Communities & Organizations Worldwide,” is the first site that comes up when you type the word “Jew” into the Google search engine. This is not a recommendation by Google, just a reflection of the hate site’s popularity rank as determined by the usual algorithms.

Photos like the one above make the truth of the Holocaust evident–the very event that organizations like Jew Watch love to deny or minimize in import. Alas, if I wanted, I could come up with a far more graphic photograph to show the fruits of hatred in the JW vein.

Two lessons

Two lessons emerge here, as I see it.

First, however distasteful the Jew Watch site is, I don’t think that Google should play into the hands of the “Jewish conspiracy” nuts by engaging in censorship. A forum on the server of the reborn Pravda, interestingly, has carried a reproduction of a rather balanced account of the controversy, as published in the Jerusalem Post.

Second, we need to drive down the cost of factual information, especially on matters as important as the Holocaust. Alas, U.S. copyright law has been moving in the opposite direction. That is why Americans can read hate literature for free on the Net but must pay to read an e-book of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, assuming that a legal edition exists. As best I can determine, it does not.

A word for search engine neutrality–however painful it can be

Google, meanwhile, just might want to see if some manipulation has gone on outside its link-optimization rules. If, however, none has, then nothing should be changed. Search engines are not libraries or magazines and should be neutral in presentation of site rankings. If the hate site has enough links to it and if no cheating has taken place, then the Rank One should be allowed. I arrive at this conclusion reluctantly. I am not in favor of child porn sites being included in featured Google listings, but as I’ll say in the next paragraph, I actually can see a positive reason for allowing the hate site to maintain its rank, even if it is pornographic in its own way.

Some personal perspective: At least one of Google’s founders is Jewish, and I am, too (went to a family seder last night to commemorate Passover). I’m not religious, but to the bigots we’re all the same. If I were a history teacher, I would point my students to the hate site as a reminder that holocausts can and will go on, whether against Jews or others, including Muslims. The operative word here is “context.”

The best ways for Jewish groups to respond

The best response from Jewish groups themselves? The truth. And plenty of legitimate links! In fact, Jews have mounted a “Google bombing” campaign to link to a free Web encyclopedia article and boost its ranking past the anti-Semitic site’s.

For people unfamiliar with Jews, a good place to start would in fact be the item in the Wikipedia, especially the related essays on the Holocaust and the Jewish community today.

Reading the Diary of Holocaust victim Anne Frank would also help. Too bad the Diary isn’t free on the Net for schoolchildren in every country. Here in the States, you can’t post the book legally; thank the wonderful Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. It is not just a congressional act. Bono is an act of anti-history–a suggestion, however unwitting, that the copyright elite counts more than the wisdom learned from the diary and other revealing books.

Hatred and the need for balanced copyright law

Anne FrankI favor copyright within bounds. But what starker illustration of the need to repeal or mitigate Bono than the fact that the Frank diary isn’t free on the Net, which so many young people in the States and elsewhere use to supplement or even replace actual libraries? Imprisoned by the Nazis in a concentration camp, its young author died of typhus in March 1945. It is time that today’s adolescents be able to learn, without charge, from the terrors she experienced as a Jew in Europe during World War II. Anne Frank would have written her diary with or without the copyright extension that happened in the twilight of the 20th century. I haven’t the least doubt how she would have thought. While some money from the book presumably went toward Holocoast education, surely her diary could have been so much more useful in the hands of actual readers without the ability and inclination to pay.

I found no e-book of the Diary at ISBN.nu. So far, within Amazon.com, I haven’t spotted the book among the very first listings. You can find study guides in electronic format at Amazon, eBooks.com, Fictionwise, but apparently not the actual book by Ms. Frank.

More likely to read the diary if it’s free

Rather than lobbying Google to change the site ranking if it’s legitimate, Jewish groups would be better off fighting the Bono Act to help keep alive the memory of the Holocaust–along with other history and culture from which cash-strapped people in the States and all over the world could benefit. TeleRead-style national digital libraries to reduce the cost of factual information would help as well. Teachers and students, especially in developing countries, so often hotbeds of anti-Semitic sentiments, are far more likely to read Anne Frank’s diary if it is free. Even the poorest countries should at least be planning for such libraries, ideally with help from the U.S. and other well-off countries, which could help finance them and along the way nurture local publishers. Eventually–not immediately–e-book readers will be as affordable and usable as portable radios, given the spread of wireless.

Details: Sample links within Jew Watch: Jewish-Zionist-Soviet Anti-American Spies and Jewish Communist Rulers & Killers and Jewish Terrorists and Jewish Controlled Press.

(Holocaust photo from Wikipedia.)

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