Showing posts with label Amazon censorship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Amazon censorship. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

USURY BOOK

I am continuing my work on my forthcoming book on the history of the rise of the Money Power in the West, "Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not."

This book was due to be sent to the printer right about now. We could not do that however, because, thinking the book was finished and just needed a final proofreading, God afforded me the grace to stumble upon an extensive body of original material related to early usury practices in the city-state of Florence, and I could not pass it by and maintain my faith with God -- I do not consider myself in charge of my writing or publishing -- that will strike some as mystification or self-delusion. Critics are free to call it what they choose (Matthew 5:11). I soldier on, in the belief, mistaken or otherwise, that God wants this book written and He wants it done right. Consequently, I am in the midst of adding a substantial section on the roots of usury in Florence in the period after Dante and before the ascendance of the Medicis. This research is doubly important from the point of view of my thesis of the Talmudic-Kabbalistic penetration of the Roman Catholic Church by Renaissance neo-Platonists who used Florence as their base of operations. The banking operations of the Florentine Money Power preceded the "Christian" Kabbalism which, in later decades, Medici-sponsored Catholic intellectuals would successfully seed inside the Vatican.

In the past couple of weeks we have had to spend hundreds of dollars to purchase rare texts containing primary documentation on usury in Florence (it also flourished in Venice). Some of these have arrived, others are in transit. I am working night and day to incorporate this material as quickly as I can so that we can get a page count for the book and offer it in a pre-publication sale while it is at the printers. We need to raise funds soon. A pre-publication sale is the most reliable means by which we can pay the printing bill and hopefully pay off some of the deficits incurred while I was writing and researching the book. You will be notified when the book is offered at a discounted price ahead of its publication date. In the meantime, if anyone can help us at present we would be most grateful.

ANOTHER BATTLE WITH AMAZON.com

In between writing the book, we have been battling harassment from Amazon.com. Readers who have been with us since 2008 will recall the embargo Amazon placed for months on the sale of our large hardcover book, Judaism Discovered, after a rabbi submitted a complaint. Now we have been battling Amazon in two areas. Since June 20 Amazon has prevented us from adding book reviews to the Amazon web page that offers our 2011 book, Judaism's Strange Gods. We contacted them immediately in June and they have replied by giving us a number of responses, such as, that the reviews are blocked because of a "legacy issue" (?), a "technical issue," or alternately, claiming that the problem is fixed and we could re-submit the reviews, which we have done repeatedly since June 20, to no effect. Obviously, having favorable book reviews by third party reviewers on the Amazon web page for Judaism's Strange Gods would increase our sales. As it is, sales of Judaism's Strange Gods are fairly robust without the reviews and despite the fact that Amazon will not sell the book at a discount, as it does for hundreds of thousands of other volumes it markets below retail.

Amazon has also been interdicting this writer's reviews of other people's books. In June of 2011 we posted what is, I think it is reasonable to say, a fairly devastating critique of the book Genocide Denials and the Law -- a tome authored by some of the Cryptocracy's most highly placed judges, attorneys and other inquisitors, dedicated to jailing those who doubt the homicidal dimensions of the most sacred relic of the otherwise agnostic West, the "gas chambers." Genocide Denials and the Law is intended to serve as a template for lesser fry among legal beagles worldwide, to guide them in instituting their own repressive laws and jaundice toward those skeptics who dare to cast doubt on some aspect of the enormous corpus of allegations made against the German people grouped under the Orwellian Newspeak term "The Holocaust." 

My June 2011 review of Genocide Denials and the Law was eventually taken down by Amazon. For quite a while I could not spare the time to address the issue, but on Sept. 2 I sent in the review of the book again. It was rejected on the basis that tipsters informed Amazon that I had used "excessive quotes" from the book to make my points, and "excessive quotes" were not permitted in a review. (Care to place a wager concerning the identity of these ever-vigilant tipsters?). Yesterday I submitted to Amazon another version of the review, with many of the quotes censored, as Amazon indicated. The review is now online here. (Readers who would like to read the entire, uncensored review as it first appeared in print can purchase a copy of Revisionist History newsletter no. 57 here [scroll to the issue titled “Criminalizing Doubt"). It is worthwhile to review books at Amazon, in so far as time permits. The potential audience is vast and one has the rare opportunity to directly challenge the buncombe of some of the grandest poobahs in the pantheon of political correctness; a forum afforded a revisionist gadfly nowhere else before so large a potential audience.

We're under constant attack from various quarters. The Amazon imbroglio is only one part of the adversary's offensive.

NEWS DIGEST

In the wake of the Republican Money Power gala in Tampa, we put together a digest of the news of the week and it's available for your perusal hereTopics include: Taxpayers foot the bill for Republican billionaires; Republican 'Patriots' for China; Romney's sister: "A ban on abortion is never going to happen in a Romney administration"; Mark Potok's Media Immunity; Feminist Shulamith Bath Shmuel Ben Ari Feuerstein - Prophetess of Artificial Insemination; and: Bernanke intends to print more money.

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Saturday, February 12, 2011

UPDATE AUG. 3, 2012: My review of Anthony Julius’s book Trials of the Diaspora was again censored by Amazon in the summer of 2012. I submitted the review (for the 4th time) to Amazon on Aug. 3, 2012.


UPDATE FEB. 12, 2011: Amazon.com has again removed my critical review of Trials of the Diaspora by the formidable British-Zionist attorney Anthony Julius (he was paid by Steven Spielberg to defend Deborah Lipstadt in David Irving’s libel suit). Here is my letter of inquiry to Amazon concerning the on-going censorship, followed by a copy of the episodic suppressed review.

To Amazon.com

Feb. 12, 2011 Re: ISBN 978-0199297054

For the second time, Amazon.com has removed my review of Anthony Julius’ book Trials of the Diaspora, even though the review in no way violates your "reviewer guidelines."

The title of my review is "Gentiles forever on trial in Anthony Julius's Beth Din.” It was published by Amazon in May, 2010 and then removed a few months later.

It was re-submitted and published by Amazon in January, 2011 and then Amazon removed it in February (sometime between Feb. 7 and Feb. 12).

On what basis are you banning the review? Everytime you ban it, the numerous favorable votes and comments it generates are lost forever. One such comment reads as follows:

Feb. 6, 2011 6:16 AM PST. Athanasius says: "Agree or disagree with Hoffman, as one sees fit, but be pleased that he's resubmitted his erudite review. As to why it had been deleted, well, one can only speculate. Did it contain four-letter words? Was it threatening? Violent? No, no, and no. Did it not attain the lofty standards of ‘correct' speech, and was therefore considered unworthy of protection?"

Why indeed?

I am submitting the review for a third time. How long will it last before your censor suppresses it yet again? Why is it deemed too hot to handle? What powerful person(s) does it offend?

Sincerely,
Michael Hoffman
HOFFMAN’S REVIEW OF "TRIALS OF THE DIASPORA"


Gentiles forever on trial in Anthony Julius's Beth Din

by Michael Hoffman | Amazon.com | published May 18, 2010 and Jan. 30, 2011

There are plenty of unintentionally funny bits in Harold Bloom’s fulsome review in the New York Times (May 7, 2010) of Anthony Julius’s tedious book, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Antisemitism in England. The theme of Mr. Julius is that “the Jews are always on trial” and after whining thus, in the familiar full-blown paranoiac pattern, Julius and Bloom proceed to conduct their own Beth din (rabbinic court) inquisition: “Julius casts this huge book as a series of trials, not of the Jews but of the English.” (Bloom).

No one may judge the Judaic people, but Julius and Bloom presume to judge the English people. This makes perfect Talmudic sense! Israeli leader Shimon Peres said something similar after the Israeli massacre of Palestinians in Jenin in 2002, when there was a call for a U.N. war crimes investigaton. “No one judges Israel!” Peres shrieked. But counterfeit “Israel” will put western civilization on trial, or at least three of its most eminent writers, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, along with the English nation as a whole. According to Bloom:
Trials of the Diaspora takes its title from its final epigraph, Philip Roth's pungent observation in his still undervalued novel Operation Shylock: ‘In the modern world, the Jew has perpetually been on trial; still today the Jew is on trial, in the person of the Israeli — and this modern trial of the Jew, this trial which never ends, begins with the trial of Shylock.’...The best chapter in Trials of the Diaspora concerns the cavalcade of anti-Semitism in English literature, with its monuments in Chaucer's Prioress's Tale, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist...

“As an old-fashioned bardolator, I am hurt when I contemplate the real harm Shakespeare has done to the Jews for some four centuries now. No representation of a Jew in literature ever will surpass Shylock in power, negative eloquence and persuasiveness....Shakespeare, still competing with the ghost of Christopher Marlowe, implicitly contrasts Shylock with Barabas, the Jew of Malta in Marlowe's tragic farce...It is Shakespeare's continuing triumph over Marlowe that such an exchange will not work. Shylock is darker and deeper forever. For Julius, The Merchant of Venice is both an anti-Semitic play and a representation of (attack on) anti-Semitism. I dispute the latter: the humanizing of Shylock only increases his monstrosity.”
If you attend Yale University and seek to plumb the depths of the literature of the West, Prof. Bloom will be your guide —the Prof. Bloom who loves Shakespeare but despises The Merchant of Venice. We can learn an instructive lesson from what Bloom hates about the play. He writes, “No representation of a Jew in literature ever will surpass Shylock in power, negative eloquence and persuasiveness....” Then he relates to us the secret of Shakespeare’s power: “... the humanizing of Shylock.”

Shakespeare does not make Shylock a stock character of utter revulsion. Shylock is not presented as wholly evil or completely unsympathetic. The Christians in The Merchant of Venice are not completely blameless. The Bard acknowledges Shylock’s humanity and presents him as a challenge to the flawed Christians.

Shylock’s final arguments are persuasive and almost carry the day, until Portia’s speech, wherein she contrasts the Judaic call for “justice” (i.e. vengeance, the “pound of flesh”), with Christ’s call for mercy, after which a chasm materializes that Harold Bloom, Anthony Julius and all the Zionist professors and lawyers in the world cannot traverse.

Shakespeare attacked Shylock’s ideals; lesser artists would have attacked Shylock himself. They hate the sinner. Shakespeare only hated the sin. Every drama, oration, book, movie or volume of history or theology that denies the humanity of Judaic persons and refuses to love them (Luke 6:27), cannot achieve what Shakespeare achieved: “...the humanizing of Shylock only increases his monstrosity.” Call it the Shakespeare Factor, this approach toward enemies, so radically different from the rabbinic mentality which paints enemies, as Bloom and Julius do, in hateful shades of pure evil, is what is missing from many writings that oppose Judaism.

Bloom: “Dickens created the second most memorable Jew in his superb Fagin. There is no third figure to compete with Shylock and Fagin....How does one estimate the lasting harm done by Shakespeare's and Dickens's egregious Jews?...nothing mitigates the destructiveness of the portraits of Shylock and Fagin. The greatness of Shakespeare and of Dickens renders their anti-Semitic masterpieces more troublesome than the litany of lesser but frequently estimable traducers...”

Charles Dickens based Fagin on a real-life receiver of stolen goods, the notorious Ikey Solomons. In a statement after the book’s publication, Dickens wrote, “Fagin in Oliver Twist is a Jew because it unfortunately was true of the time to which that story refers that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew.” Shylock and Fagin are truth-types, not stereotypes, something the Juliuses and Blooms of the world can’t accept. The efficacy of Dickens’ portrayal of Fagin rests on the Shakespeare Factor: Dickens portrayed Fagin as fully human, animated and lively. The scene of Fagin in prison awaiting execution is suffused with pathos. He is evil, but Dickens puts forth gentiles who are at least as evil (Bill Sikes) or more so (Monks).

Lawyer Julius and Prof. Bloom have a bone to pick with Chaucer (for his testimony about ritual murder in “The Prioress Tale,”), and with Shakespeare and Dickens, and they are not reluctant to demean them out of deference for the offense their attacks may give to western civilization by sullying the memory of its literary giants. This is the one-way prerogative of the Talmudic mentality: they feel entitled to bash in the faces of our heroes, but when we topple their cherished icons, we are guilty of filthy, stinking bigotry. There is no reciprocity or quid pro quo with imperious personalities like these. They assess our humanity and burnish or damn our reputation predicated upon the degree to which we are willing to succumb to their sense of entitlement.

Bloom engages in some stereotyping of his own: “Julius links anti-Semitism to sadism. He might have done even more with this, since sado-masochism is something of an English vice, and is so much a school-experience of the upper social class.”

An English vice. To say that usury or fencing stolen goods are Judaic vices is rabid Shakespearean and Dickensian antisemitism, yet Bloom feels entitled to stigmatize the English as sadomasochist, as people who derive pleasure from extreme cruelty. As one of the Holy People, Bloom can libel the English nation with impunity, while the profound insights of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens constitute an “immemorial stench” (Bloom), out of a “sewer” (Julius).

In his chapter on "The Mentality of Modern English Anti-Semitism," Mr. Julius presents what Prof. Bloom terms, “the puzzle of what appears to be an incessant prejudice, never to be dispelled.”

The concept of gentiles harboring never-to-be-dispelled prejudice toward Judaics is a troglodyte dogma taught to bochurim (yeshiva boys). They are indoctrinated from an early age to believe that any opposition to the religion of Judaism is irrational (based on no legitimate grievance) and ineradicable, the assumption being that all opposition to Judaism reflects a hereditary gentile predisposition toward hatred of the Holy People. This traditional rabbinic brainwash is expressed as follows: “Halacha hi beyoduah she’Eisav soneh l’Yaakov” (“It is a given law: it is known that Esau hates Jacob;” cf. Judaism Discovered, pp. 463-466).

It will come as a shock to the acolytes of Julius and Bloom that despite their morally superior liberal pretensions, they are steeped in 2,000 years of Talmudic anti-gentile darkness.


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