The Daily Mail, one of the main drivers of the recent media panic that led to mass shutdowns of ebookstores in the UK and beyond, has predictably enough picked up on the hate speech accusations leveled against Amazon by The Kernel, which now seems to be acting as its running dog.
“Amazon revealed to sell Holocaust denial, anti-Semitic and white supremacist books,” crows the Daily Mail headline, illustrating the point with screen grabs and covers of the anti-Semitic literature from the Amazon bookstore.
I verified that Did Six Million Really Die, by Richard Harwood, one of the most notorious Holocaust denial titles, is in fact available through Amazon’s bookstore in the UK, with prices quoted in UK pounds. Titles by David Irving, the controversial right-wing revisionist historian, are also on sale via Amazon – though I’ve yet to find an ebook of these titles. The United Kingdom does not have a specific law against Holocaust denial, but the Daily Mail insists that: “some of the Holocaust denial books are even on sale in Austria, France and Germany, according to The Kernel, countries whose laws ban such literature. The texts are also illegal in Liechtenstein, where Amazon maintains a European headquarters to reduce tax burden, The Kernel noted.”
All quite legitimate so far. The debate on hate speech and the availability of Holocaust denial literature is at least a live one – even though, as the Daily Mail notes, Amazon was previously sued for carrying Holocaust denial literature in Germany in 2009, so this is hardly fresh news. And wow, The Kernel and the Daily Mail do seem to be working together practically hand in glove – “Multiple requests to Amazon for comment from both The Kernel and MailOnline seeking comment were not returned.” Though I guess, on an issue of such burning national importance, they’re entitled.
But take a look at where these alarmist reports are coming from. The Daily Mail itself is currently under fire in the UK for anti-Semitic reporting. The Jerusalem Post, no less, carried coverage of the Daily Mail‘s denials of anti-Semitic bias over its feature on Ralph Miliband, father of current Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, described in its article as “The man who hated Britain.”
“Daily Mail on Ralph Miliband is the classical age old anti semitic smear about disloyal jews,” John Mann, chairman of the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism, tweeted about the report. “As used by the Nazis supported by the Mail.”
The Daily Mail has a long past association with anti-Semitism and pro-Nazi leanings. Its co-founder, and owner in the 1930s, Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, great-grandfather of the newspaper’s current proprietor, Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere, was notoriously a supporter of the British Union of Fascists for a time, and even wrote a front-page article “Hurrah for the Blackshirts,” which appeared in the Daily Mail in 1934. “The Blackshirts, like the Daily Mail, appeal to people unaccustomed to thinking,” The Spectator, another right-wing English journal, concluded at the time. “The average Daily Mail reader is a potential Blackshirt ready made.
Rothermere also met and corresponded with Hitler, and as late as 1938 was still writing to him in glowing terms, describing his work as “great and superhuman.”
This isn’t to follow Nazi-style doctrine and claim that anti-Semitism is genetic. For all I know, everyone in the modern Daily Mail may be totally innocent of it. But recent news reports rather suggest otherwise. And anyone tempted to jump on a bandwaggon with the Daily Mail and The Kernel might want to take a close look at the kind of company they’re keeping.
Many of Britain’s “leading” papers are anti-Semitic. Most try to cloak their Jew-hating as anti-Israel, but the constant Israel-bashing is a very thin excuse. The Guardian, for example, is constantly running the most vile and often outright fabricated bigoted articles.
Anti-Jewish bigotry has been a mainstay of the British press for a long time.