Type the question “Did the Holocaust really happen?” into Google and the first answer you get (the one you take to be the most authoritative) is headlined: “Top ten reasons why the Holocaust didn’t happen.” The origin is so-called Stormfront Radio, featuring Don Black, Paul Fromm and David Duke.
The second entry refers to “the Holocaust hoax”. In fact, seven of the top ten all insist the murder of six million Jews is a made-up story. Yet such malign outcomes are by no means a one-off. So proficient have far-right groups become at colonising the internet, they’ve been able to game the Google algorithm and hijack its search results. Google, however, is so wedded to the image of itself as a neutral platform, it will “hand-tweak” the worst cases, but refuses to take a moral stand and eliminate hate speech in all contexts, together with deliberately bogus news. (this post originated with an article by Carole Cadwalladr of The Observer)
My father was the front line liaison officer between the RAF and the Polish Air Force in Northern Germany in 1945, and was the first to enter one of the Nazi death camps. I have a leather whip he took from an SS officer and gave to me in memory of the piles of bodies marked with the Star of David. “Never forget,” he said to me. I haven’t. The thongs of the whip are disintegrating, but not the meaning of what is left.
To allow these racists free rein on the internet under the bogus rubric of “free speech” is utterly immoral. Google should be held to account. They invented this system and should be answerable for its mis- use. Too much is justified in the name of ” free speech”. Free speech isn’t free ; it has consequencies.
Meanwhile Trump right-hand man, Steve Bannon, at the very least a sympathizer with people like Fromm, Black and Duke, is esconced in the White House, working alongside Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, an champion of Israel and all that it does. Intriguing. How long will it last?
I’m not sure if Google are personally responsible for this. After all, they don’t choose the exact order of result for all possible searches. An algorithm determines which results are the most relevant. This reflects far worse on the people than Google, if Holocaust denial sites are seen as more relevant than sites proving it actually happened. In this particular instance, I would hope Google amends their search results, but it would be impossible to do so for all of them.
Questioning the holocaust doesn’t equate with hate. Even some Jews question the holocaust.
My Life as a Holocaust Denier
http://www.righteousjews.org/article27a.html
Jewish Scholar Refutes The Holocaust
http://www.realjewnews.com/?p=943
“Paul Eisen is a Jew born ca. 1958, living in the United
Kingdom. Eisen is – using the Jewish word- a “holocaust denier”, here
with his own words, why.
For my money, a child of six can see that something’s not right about
the Holocaust narrative, and the science simply confirms what I already
suspect. But I differ from the Holocaust
Revisionists. They are scholars – historians and scientists who apply
‘truth and exactitude’ to determine the truth or otherwise of the
Holocaust narrative. I’m no scholar. I care nothing for the chemical
traces in brickwork or the topological evidence for mass graves. But
I’ve read the literature, and it just doesn’t add up.
That Jews suffered greatly from 1933-1945 is not in question, but the notion of a premeditated, planned and industrial extermination of Europe’s Jews
with its iconic gas-chambers and magical six million are all used to
make the Holocaust not only special but also sacred. We are faced with a
new, secular religion, a false god with astonishing power to command
worship. And, like the Crucifixion with its Cross, Resurrection etc, the
Holocaust has key and sacred elements – the exterminationist
imperative, the gas chambers and the sacred six million. It is these
that comprise the holy Holocaust which Jews, Zionists and others worship and which the revisionists refuse.
Nor is this a small matter. If it was, why the fuss, why the witch-hunt, why the imprisonment of David Irving, Ernst Zündel and Germar Rudolf?
And it’s not just them. What may be a massive lie is being used to
oppress pretty much all of humankind. The German and Austrian peoples
who, we are told, conceived and perpetrated the slaughter; the Russian,
Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Rumanian, Hungarian,
peoples etc. who supposedly hosted, assisted in and cheered on the
slaughter; the Americans, the British, the French, the Dutch, the
Belgians, the Italians (but not the Danes and the Bulgarians) etc. who
apparently didn’t do enough to stop the slaughter; the Swiss who earned
out of the slaughter, and the entire Christian world who, it seems,
created the faith-traditions and ideologies in which the slaughter could
take place, and now the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim peoples who
seemingly want to perpetrate a new slaughter – in fact, the Holocaust
oppresses the entire non-Jewish world and indeed much of the Jewish
world as well. Stand up and have done with it.
So here’s something else. The Holocaust revisionist scholars and
researchers are dedicated and skilled students of historical evidence,
and for them‘Holocaust denier’ is but a term of abuse to be hurled as
‘witch’ might have been hurled in the Middle Ages. But for me,
‘Holocaust Denier’ is a label I accept. This is not because I don’t
think anything bad happened to Jews at the hands of the National Socialists
– for what it’s worth the real story of brutal ethnic cleansing moves
me far more than any ‘Holocaust’ – and it’s certainly not because I
think any such assault is right and proper. No, I deny the Holocaust because, as constituted, exploited and enforced, the Holocaust narrative is a false and abusive god, and I wish to put as much moral distance between it and myself as I can.”
http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Paul_Eisen
Are you presenting “alternative facts”? If so, it is a waste of time discussing this. I clearly stated that my own father, who was entirely trustworthy, witnessed the ovens and the piles of bodies and brought back a memento of it all, and gave me it. Either you haven’t read what I wrote or you treat it as a lie. I am averse to that treatment on this blog. So you are welcome to put your views but not to infer that I am a liar. Is that clear? Write politely or go elsewhere.
Once again, questioning the holocaust does make one a racist or one who hates.
Hasty generalizations and all that…
Smells like fake news.
Google is not responsible, but it is making money on all the traffic to the Right to the Alt-Righters. And there’s no reason Google couldn’t create an algorithm that targets every search that prioritizes links to brain-dead blogs in response to searches like “Is the Holocaust Real.”