Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has confirmed that Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America — the antisemitic book and accompanying film recently promoted by Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving — will remain for sale on the platform, Deadline reports.
Speaking at the New York Times DealBook conference this week, Jassy said that removing media on Amazon “whose primary purpose is not to espouse hate” can become a “very slippery slope,” and that moderating content for sale “is one of the trickiest issues they deal with.” But it couldn’t be much more obvious that Hebrews to Negroes, which Ronald Dalton Jr. first published as a book in 2014 and adapted to film in 2018, espouses hateful conspiracy theories.
“Some cases are more straightforward — if you have works that actively promote or incite violence, or teaches people how to do things like pedophilia, those are easy,” Jassy went on. “We don’t allow those. … When you have content whose primary purpose is not to espouse hate or ascribe negative characteristics to people, that is much trickier and a very slippery slope if we take a lot of those out of the store.”
Riddled with antisemitic tropes, Hebrews to Negroes promotes the debunked myth that Black people are among “the true descendants of the biblical Israelites” and spews the alarmist idea of an international Jewish conspiracy that aims to disparage Black people. What’s more, Hebrews to Negroes denies the Holocaust, and attributes fabricated quotes to Adolf Hitler.
Regardless, Jassy said that Amazon boasts “hundreds of millions of customers with lots of different viewpoints,” and the company must “be able to allow access to those viewpoints even if they are objectionable and even if they differ from our own personal viewpoints.”
He added that Amazon execs have considered adding a disclaimer to conspiracy theorist media like Hebrews to Negroes, but believe customer reviews are more effective at revealing such “objectionable” content. (Considering the hundreds of five-star customer reviews of Hebrews to Negroes, we’ll have to disagree.)
“I am worried about antisemitism and I find several parts of that work objectionable, but I think you have to have principles if you’re going to manage something as large as we are,” Jaffy said.
Hebrews to Negroes saw a spike in attention last month when Irving tweeted a link to the film, likely inspired in part by Kanye West’s most recent offenses in his long-running pattern of antisemitic comments. Irving was subsequently suspended from the team.
In more recent antisemitic nonsense, West claimed that he sees “good things about Hitler” on a December 1st episode of Alex Jones’ InfoWars. “Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler,” the rapper said.
