Jew Watch
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Jew Watch is a controversial anti-Semitic website. According to its supporters, Jew Watch "reports accurate information regarding Jewish ownership and control over mass media and politics." Jew Watch describes its objective as "Keeping a Close Watch on Jewish Communities & Organizations Worldwide." The website asserts that "Jew Watch is a Not-For-Profit Library for private study, scholarship, or research."
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Critics
Critics view it as a hate speech site. Much of the controversy which surrounds Jew Watch resulted from the discovery that Jew Watch came up as the first result in a Google search for the word Jew, a result which produced outrage in the Jewish community and opponents of neo-Nazism.
Content
Jew Watch features an archive of opinion, writings, articles and links, organized in the form of a Web directory. Its material is organized under topic heads such as "Jewish-Zionist-Soviet Anti-American Spies," "Jewish Communist Rulers & Killers," "Jewish Terrorists," "Jewish Controlled Press," "Jewish Entertainment," "Zionist Occupied Government," "Jewish Communists," "Jewish Atrocities," "Jewish Mind Control Mechanisms," "Jewish Banking & Financial Manipulations," "Jewish World Conspiracies" and many others.
Among many claims, Jew Watch claims that the United States is ruled by a "Zionist-Occupied Government," that Communism was invented by Jews and was a Jewish plot to enslave the world, that Jews control the world finance system and the media, that Jews have committed or are planning genocide against Christians (and against the Palestinian people), and that the Holocaust of World War II either never happened or was greatly exaggerated (Holocaust denial).
Jew Watch also has a large list of names of celebrities and historical figures which it claims are Jewish or of Jewish descent, although a number of these claims are false.
The site has a number of quotations which are purported to be from the Talmud or Jewish figures, however, most of them are posted without footnotes or proper citations making them difficult to independently check and verify as authentic.
Authorship
The identities of those behind Jew Watch are not known with certainty, but the site appears to be linked to known neo-Nazi groups in the United States. The Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights organization, says that the main author of Jew Watch is Frank Weltner, a retired librarian and activist in the National Alliance, neo-Nazi group. Weltner has also been known on WGNU radio as "Couch Potato" since 1992. In January 2005 Weltner's show was taken off WGNU by the management.
A Whois search lists Frank Weltner as Jew Watch's main administrative contact. [1] (http://www.whois.to/jewwatch.com) Weltner is also listed as the copyright holder and technical contact for several other racialist and anti-Semitic websites, including enslavementofmankind.com (http://www.enslavementofmankind.com) and ethnicsurvivialkit.com. (http://www.ethnicsurvivalkit.com) The site couchpower.com (http://www.couchpower.com) purports to contain a listing of all of Weltner's websites.
A website linked to the National Alliance appears to confirm Weltner's connection with Jew Watch, stating that: "National Alliance member Frank Weltner has operated Jew Watch since 1995 as a watchdog site and Internet resource for readers and scholars interested in researching Jewish issues." [2] (http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/04/04/Google_Jews.html)
Frank Weltner did not always have such extreme anti-Semitic views. For several years Weltner lived with an openly gay Jewish man named Jerry Rabushka. Rabushka and Mr Weltner each half owned the 3 bedroom home in which they lived. Despite Weltner's tirade against Jews and other minorities, homosexuals have never been one of Weltner's targets. Rabushka says their relationship dissolved when Weltner's views became more extreme.[3] (http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/story/DBCF9EA1AC694D2486256F8A002380E0?OpenDocument&Headline=Dogtown+man+is+the+face+of+white+power+here&tetl=1)
Another neo-Nazi figure linked to Jew Watch is Don Black, a former Ku Klux Klan activist in Alabama who now heads a group called Stormfront. Black describes himself at his personal website (http://www.stormfront.org/dblack/) as having been "active in the White patriot movement for 30 years." Some sources say that Black is, or until recently was, the technical contact of the domain name of both Jew Watch and the Stormfront website.
Jew Watch and Google
Jew Watch gained much publicity in 2004 when it became the first website listed in the Internet search engine Google under "Jew" in April 2004. A Google bomb campaign was, for a time, successful in placing Wikipedia's article "Jew" in the top spot. Jew Watch, in February 2005 is once again the first website listed on Google's American site, with Wikipedia's article coming second. On other Google sites this was not the case; for example, on Google's Canadian site (www.google.ca) Wikipedia's article was first, and Jew Watch is not in the top ten.
Google has researched this matter and believes that one reason for this result is that the word "Jew" is often used in an anti-Semitic context while Jewish people usually refer to each other as "Jewish" [4] (http://www.google.com/explanation.html), citing a couple of sites where usage of these words is discussed, see especially [5] (http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/jonah081500.asp).
The increasing publicity has resulted in many news sources, weblogs and general information sites to link to Jew Watch. This creates an unintentional (or intentional) Google bomb. In May 2004, Steven Weinstock launched an online petition to remove Jew Watch from Google. "When performing a search for the word 'Jew' on Google, the first Web site listed is Jewwatch.com, a site that has been notorious for being anti-Semitic," Weinstock wrote in a widely disseminated e-mail.
Weinstock said he had contacted Google three times about the site but had not received a response. "In order for Google to remove this, they would need a petition of over 50,000 requests," Weinstock said. He set up an online petition site called RemoveJewWatch.com. Within a few days 2,000 signatures had been added to the list. Google reportedly said that they would not remove Jew Watch from their search engine no matter what petitions were presented. By mid-2004 the site had collected over 125,000 signatures, mostly favorable [6] (http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?rjw23). The "removejewwatch" site went offline but can now be found at http://www.whynotmedia.com/removejewwatch.html Weinstock's attempts have been mocked at a site called "removejews.com".
National Vanguard writer Kevin Strom claimed that Weinstock's efforts resulted in a "censor-fest" of Jew Watch and insisted "Our race deserves to live in freedom, and no trickster, thug, or con man can stop us from achieving that goal. We are going to win".[7] (http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=2728) John Goth, in the same publication, described his "disgust" as a "loyal White man" at "the recent Jewish attacks on free speech and particularly, on JewWatch.com". [8] (http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=2712)
External links
- Jew Watch (http://www.JewWatch.com/)
- Google:Jew (http://www.google.com/search?as_q=Jew&num=100&hl=en&c2coff=1&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=&safe=off)
- Official letter of apology to Anti-Defamation League from Google's president (http://www.adl.org/internet/google_letter.asp)
- "Removejewwatch" site (http://www.whynotmedia.com/removejewwatch.html)
- Google's statement on the issue (http://www.google.com/explanation.html)
- National Vanguard article (http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=2627) by Kevin Alfred Strom of the National Alliance on Jew Watch and Google, providing a conspiracy theory.