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Amazon will not pull antisemitic movie promoted by Kyrie Irving, says Jewish CEO
(JTA) – Bucking weeks of public pressure from Jewish groups, celebrities and the Brooklyn Nets, Amazon will not stop selling an antisemitic documentary on its service that was promoted by NBA star Kyrie Irving.
The company’s CEO Andy Jassy, who is Jewish, said Wednesday that Amazon had no plans to remove or add a disclaimer to “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America,” whose Amazon link Irving ignited a firestorm by tweeting about it earlier this month. Amazon had previously considered whether to add a disclaimer.
“As a retailer of content to hundreds of millions of customers with a lot of different viewpoints, we have to allow access to those viewpoints, even if they are objectionable — objectionable and they differ from our particular viewpoints,” Jassy told the audience at the New York Times DealBook Summit.
Jassy drew a distinction between the film, which promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories about the relationship between Jews and Black people, and content that he said “actively incites or promotes violence or teaches people how to do things like pedophilia.” With the latter, he said, decisions to remove content are “more straightforward.”
The e-commerce giant had been internally debating whether to remove the film for weeks, according to reports in Variety. It had been uploaded to the site independently via a program called Prime Direct, which allows user-generated content to be sold on the site’s streaming services.
Irving’s tweet — which shared an Amazon link to the documentary without further comment — came on the heels of more explicitly antisemitic behavior from rapper Kanye West and sparked the ire of the Anti-Defamation League and the Nets, who eventually solicited an apology from the athlete. Nike ended a sponsorship deal with Irving following the tweet. Black Hebrew Israelites, a group whose ideology is promoted in the film, rallied to Irving’s defense.
But critics ranging from ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith to Spotify podcaster Joe Rogan questioned why Amazon was escaping scrutiny for providing the film on its platform.
The ADL has since called on Amazon to do so, and was joined by the American Jewish Committee and a chorus of entertainment figures including Jewish celebrities like Mila Kunis and Mayim Bialik and Jewish studio managers like Haim Saban and Ben Silverman.
According to the Variety report, the ADL’s activism may have been one reason why Amazon declined to take action, as it would be “difficult from an optics perspective,” the outlet wrote, to bow to the demands of a Jewish group amid so many public figures declaring that Jews control the media.
Amazon has in the past removed books promoting pedophilia from its site after news reports, and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol it removed the white-supremacist novel “The Turner Diaries,” which contains violent antisemitic fantasies and is often used as a hate-group recruiting tool.
After briefly banning Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” in 2020, the site then reinstated it while adding a disclaimer to the version sold on its site reading, “As a bookseller, we think it is important to offer this infamous work because of its historical significance and educational role in the understanding and prevention of anti-Semitism.” This version of the manifesto also includes an introduction written in the 1990s by the ADL.
Jassy’s position on the film is the latest example of major tech leaders debating their hands-off stances when it comes to moderating antisemitic content on their sites. In 2020, Meta’s Jewish CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged to remove Holocaust denial from Facebook, reversing an earlier stance that said it wasn’t the company’s place to do so. More recently, newly minted Twitter CEO Elon Musk has taken steps to loosen previous restrictions of antisemitic content on the social media site, including by reinstating Kanye West’s account.
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The post Amazon will not pull antisemitic movie promoted by Kyrie Irving, says Jewish CEO appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Israel’s Netanyahu Hopes to ‘Taper’ Israel Off US Military Aid in Next Decade
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the press on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, July 8, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview published on Friday that he hopes to “taper off” Israeli dependence on US military aid in the next decade.
Netanyahu has said Israel should not be reliant on foreign military aid but has stopped short of declaring a firm timeline for when Israel would be fully independent from Washington.
“I want to taper off the military within the next 10 years,” Netanyahu told The Economist. Asked if that meant a tapering “down to zero,” he said: “Yes.”
Netanyahu said he told President Donald Trump during a recent visit that Israel “very deeply” appreciates “the military aid that America has given us over the years, but here too we’ve come of age and we’ve developed incredible capacities.”
In December, Netanyahu said Israel would spend 350 billion shekels ($110 billion) on developing an independent arms industry to reduce dependency on other countries.
In 2016, the US and Israeli governments signed a memorandum of understanding for the 10 years through September 2028 that provides $38 billion in military aid, $33 billion in grants to buy military equipment and $5 billion for missile defense systems.
Israeli defense exports rose 13 percent last year, with major contracts signed for Israeli defense technology including its advanced multi-layered aerial defense systems.
US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch Israel supporter and close ally of Trump, said on X that “we need not wait ten years” to begin scaling back military aid to Israel.
“The billions in taxpayer dollars that would be saved by expediting the termination of military aid to Israel will and should be plowed back into the US military,” Graham said. “I will be presenting a proposal to Israel and the Trump administration to dramatically expedite the timetable.”
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In Rare Messages from Iran, Protesters ask West for Help, Speak of ‘Very High’ Death Toll
Protests in Tehran. Photo: Iran Photo from social media used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law, via i24 News
i24 News – Speaking to Western media from beyond the nationwide internet blackout imposed by the Islamic regime, Iranian protesters said they needed support amid a brutal crackdown.
“We’re standing up for a revolution, but we need help. Snipers have been stationed behind the Tajrish Arg area [a neighborhood in Tehran],” said a protester in Tehran speaking to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity. He added that “We saw hundreds of bodies.”
Another activist in Tehran spoke of witnessing security forces firing live ammunition at protesters resulting in a “very high” number killed.
On Friday, TIME magazine cited a Tehran doctor speaking on condition of anonymity that just six hospitals in the capital recorded at least 217 killed protesters, “most by live ammunition.”
Speaking to Reuters on Saturday, Setare Ghorbani, a French-Iranian national living in the suburbs of Paris, said that she became ill from worry for her friends inside Iran. She read out one of her friends’ last messages before losing contact: “I saw two government agents and they grabbed people, they fought so much, and I don’t know if they died or not.”
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Report: US Increasingly Regards Iran Protests as Having Potential to Overthrow Regime
United States President Donald J Trump in White House in Washington, DC, USA, on Thursday, December 18, 2025. Photo: Aaron Schwartz via Reuters Connect.
i24 News – The assessment in Washington of the strength and scope of the Iran protests has shifted after Thursday’s turnout, with US officials now inclined to grant the possibility that this could be a game changer, Axios reported on Friday.
“The protests are serious, and we will continue to monitor them,” an unnamed senior US official was quoted as saying in the report.
Iran was largely cut off from the outside world on Friday after the Islamic regime blacked out the internet to curb growing unrest, as videos circulating on social media showed buildings ablaze in anti-government protests raging across the country.
US President Donald Trump warned the Ayatollahs of a strong response if security forces escalate violence against protesters.
“We’re watching it very closely. If they start killing people like they have in the past, I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the United States,” Trump told reporters when asked about the unrest in Iran.
The latest reported death toll is at 51 protesters, including nine children.