Amazon.com's Mideast turmoil

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"Jimmy Carter’s troubles are now spreading to Jeff Bezos. Ten thousand people have signed a petition urging a boycott of Bezos’ Amazon.com over a review of the former President’s controversial book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”

Fourteen members of the Carter Center advisory board resigned last week over the tome, which is critical of Israeli policy on the Palestinians. Carter has said his purpose was to “present facts about the Middle East that are largely unknown in America.” Henry Norr, a former San Francisco Chronicle technology columnist, who urged the Jan. 22 boycott on petitiononline.com, claims Amazon purposely gave unusually prominent placement to a highly critical Washington Post review.

And, he adds: “You have refused to add the fact that the reviewer, Jeffrey Goldberg, is a citizen of Israel as well as the United States, and that he volunteered to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces, for which he worked as a guard at a prison for Palestinian detainees.” Amazon rep Patty Smith told us: “We sell millions of products on our Web site, and some may be found to be controversial. On this book, we have a review from Publishers Weekly, from Booklist and The Washington Post. We also have 429 customer reviews and 148 separate discussions for this book. It is our goal as a retailer to let the customer decide.”

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/489453p-412184c.html


Link to petition:

http://www.petitiononline.com/Amazon07/petition.html

Link to amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Palestine-Peace-Apartheid-Jimmy-Carter/dp/0743285026/sr=1-1/qid=1169188861/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-0024407-8513577?ie=UTF8&s=books

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

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[Tom Joad]

2. A 1,600+ word prison guard editorial. Is there another book where such a lengthy

editorial is featured that suggest people stay away from the book Amazon is supposedly selling (don't they want people to buy the book?)

Why not feature for a time a 1,000 word editorial suggesting that Carter brings up many good points? While they have many customer reviews, they are not featured like the Goldberg hit piece.

[ContraCommando]

3. Not surprising

"In other words, Carter's title notwithstanding, Israel is not actually an apartheid state."

"Why is Carter so hard on Israeli settlements and so easy on Arab aggression and Palestinian terror? Because a specific agenda appears to be at work here."

This hit piece is just a way for Amazon to state its opinion (or Jeff Bezos’s opinion). They just got someone else to say it for them.