amazon hearts apartheid

It does seem a bit strange - a deviation from standard operating procedure - that Amazon threw an extremely caustic review from the Washington Post up under "editorial reviews" on the page listing Jimmy Carter's (tremendously brave, from the title on) Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. Neither, if I recall correctly, does amazon usually cite newspaper reviews in this section nor do they allow reviews that run to such a great length above the fold. Go take a look... Here's a snippet from the review.

This is a cynical book, its cynicism embedded in its bait-and-switch title. Much of the book consists of an argument against the barrier that Israel is building to separate Israelis from the Palestinians on the West Bank. The "imprisonment wall" is an early symptom of Israel's descent into apartheid, according to Carter. But late in the book, he concedes that "the driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa -- not racism, but the acquisition of land."

In other words, Carter's title notwithstanding, Israel is not actually an apartheid state. True, some Israeli leaders have used the security fence as cover for a land-grab, but Carter does not acknowledge the actual raison d'etre for the fence: to prevent the murder of Jews. The security barrier is a desperate, deeply imperfect and, God willing, temporary attempt to stop Palestinian suicide bombers from detonating themselves amid crowds of Israeli civilians. And it works; many recent attempts to infiltrate bombers into Israel have failed, thanks to the barrier.

That the WP gave the review to Jeffrey Goldberg in the first place was a questionable decision. He is, in case you weren't following the league tables, one of the runners up in the contest Judith Miller eventually won to see could deliver the most agitprop via "respected news sources" to the American people. (Here's a Cockburn takedown from early 2003).

There's an on-line petition to sign here.

Comments

I dont feel that your objections to Amazon publishing Jeffrey Goldberg's article are quite fair.
People are entitled to express their views and comments, and by using Goldbergs views to provide an alternative view to Carter's is allowing room for discussion and debate. His comment would not discourage me from reading the book, but rather show that the situation is a complex one that required further study, and therefore I would be encouraged to read Carter's book to find out more.

This is important for the Israeli/ Palestine debate since so much of what we here is biased towards an anti-semitic position. Pro-Israeli comments rarely feature in the media or on the news and hearinbg from both sides can never be a bad thing - regardless of what your own beliefs are.

I think your over-reaction to Goldberg's comment, reveals an anti-semitic assumptions which is commonly shared by intellectuals and the political left which are often unjustified and based on the propeganda we here on the news which does not provide fair reporting of the situation in Israel.

Furthermore, the idea that you feel such opinions should be censored, and removed from public arenas is quite worrying! Whatever your views are, I cant see why you would object to there being dialogue and diversity.

[CR]

I should have updated this post to register the fact that the situation has grown ever more confusing as Amazon has (apparently) reacted to these criticisms, added other reviews, slid things around, etc...

The fact remains that in general - and I can't find a counter-example, flipping through all sorts of "controversial" book listings there - that Amazon generally refrains from posting harsh reviews above the fold, and certainly not as the first (which it was at one point) in the list. Generally, they lead with anodyne stuff like Publishers Weekly / library journals mini-reviews, etc...

And, of course, the secondary question remains why those journals who did the dirty work of the administration in disseminating the al - qaeda / iraq connections can still find work. "Bias" indeed.

On to "on":

This is important for the Israeli/ Palestine debate since so much of what we here is biased towards an anti-semitic position. Pro-Israeli comments rarely feature in the media or on the news and hearinbg from both sides can never be a bad thing - regardless of what your own beliefs are.

You're American, right? If so, you must be kidding... No, you know what, never mind... Thanks for raising the critic of Israeli policy = anti-semite triple illogicism though. Comforting to know that the counter-arguments are as rote as ever.

[CR]

Sorry:

"And, of course, the secondary question remains why those journalists who did the dirty work..."

It's so cold in my office (heat turned off for MLK day) that I can hardly type...

[Swifty]

Yes, you know that someone has absolutely zero intellectual credibility when they raise the notion that criticizing Israel is like criticizing Jews. That would be like saying that if someone criticized Hitler and the Nazi regime, they were anti-German. I went and signed the petition.

[Matt]

Ditto. (The history of the German national anthem is interesting, though.)

[Alain]

Thank you CR. I signed as well.

[Kenneth Rufo]

I signed as well, and while my politics here are in the same vein, my actual objection here is what CR points out - the uniqueness of this particular practice, something I also verified by looking around for reviews on a similar series of books (by Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Krugman). I like Amazon, and I appreciate the power of social media to build aggregate reactions, but they function best when not overdetermined by some political direction or force (unless the entire point of a particular social media installation is that political direction), and the thought of Amazon ruining itself, and doing it selectively, pisses me off, politically and technologically.

some kerfluffle over maps?