Scandinavia's Largest Online Bookshop Caught Purveying Anti-Semitic Literature

Among other things, the infamous anti-Semitic hoax "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was available online at Ablibris for at least the fourth time. Adlibris Information Officer Linnea Wiklund once again alluded to the defective procedures and stressed the fact that anti-Semitic literature is not included in the company's sphere of interests.

"We have decided not to offer the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and we check every now and then if the book is on our list. However, we happen to work with distributors worldwide, and there are many self-publishers. This means we get up to 75,000 titles a month, and books registered with Amazon automatically get registered on our site too. We need to remove them afterwards and do it manually," Linnea Wiklund told the Swedish anti-racist magazine Expo.

"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is an influential anti-Semitic pamphlet that was spread worldwide starting in the early 1900s, and played an important role in Nazi German propaganda in the 1930s and 1940s. The fictional document is purported to be a transcript of a speech that Zionist activist Theodor Herzl delivered at the Zionist Congress in Basel and describes Jews planning a worldwide conspiracy.

After Expo had highlighted the sales of the book, Adlibris removed it from the site. However, a number of other extremist and racist books are still available on there. The most notable examples include "The International Jew" by Henry Ford, which made a great impact on the rise of Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, as well as numerous edition of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf." Incidentally, the very same Henry Ford funded the printing of 500,000 copies of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" that were distributed throughout the US in the 1920s.

According to Expo, Adlibris, which was founded in 1997, has a long history of marketing anti-Semitic works, extremist and hate-mongering literature and terror manuals. The company has responded in various ways. Sometimes it reported sales by mistake and at other times claimed the sales were intentional and cited freedom of speech. On each occasion, though, Adlibris eventually backed down and removed the one or more criticized works from its range — only to later sell them again.

In December 2016, a statement from Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström denouncing Israel's "extrajudicial executions" was ranked as the world's eighth worst anti-Semitic commentary by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. In recent years, Swedish-Israeli relations soured dramatically following Sweden's recognition of Palestine as a state. During a recent visit to the Middle East, Wallström requested to meet Israeli officials, but was refused.

In November, Sweden's largest daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, which is in effect the government's mouthpiece, came under fire for anti-Semitism when it published a caricature of US President-elect Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu being carried in a palanquin by Klansmen together with Orthodox Jews. According to Rabbi Abrahan Cooper, Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the 'anti-Semitic evil' that screamed out from this cartoon "would bring tears of joy to the eyes of Julius Streicher, Nazi Propaganda Chief."