After persuading America's two biggest Internet booksellers - Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble (bn.com) - late last year to stop selling Hitler's "Mein Kampf" online to Germans, the Simon Wiesenthal Center is now training its guns on a third, Borders.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the Los Angeles center's associate dean, told The Report in early January: "Borders sold 'Mein Kampf' to our researcher in Germany.
We are asking them to cease, and working with the German Justice Ministry to make sure they do."
Hitler's manifesto is banned in Germany under laws imposed by the Allies after World War II to prevent Germans identifying again with Nazism. But anyone with a credit card had been free to buy it from the Internet booksellers' German subsidiaries.
Barnes & Noble is partly owned by the German publishing conglomerate, Bertelsmann. As soon as he heard from Cooper, CEO Thomas Middlehoff agreed to stop selling "Mein Kampf" online.
Amazon responded more slowly. But when its founder Jeff Bezos, Time magazine's Man of 1999, finally called Cooper back, the rabbi recounts, "He said: 'Rabbi, we have no business selling hate literature online, and we're not going to do it any more.'"
Cooper stops short of accusing the booksellers of racism in offering "Mein Kampf," "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and the anti-Jewish and anti-U.S. government novel "The Turner Diaries" on the Net. "It's about making a buck," he says.
The Center is now also working to stop another online U.S. firm, the eBay auction site, taking orders from Germans for swastikas, SS daggers and other Nazi memorabilia.
/ Los Angeles