ANTI-SEMITISM AND A QUESTION FOR PENGUIN BOOKS

THE American neo-Nazi group called National Vanguard has a new favourite author. He is a Spanish colonel by the name of Pedro Banos, whose book, How They Rule The World, claims the Rothschilds are pulling the strings of the global economy (and who has previously suggested that Israel was implicated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy).

Last week, National Vanguard came to the defence of Colonel Banos’s British publishers, who are under pressure to stop distributing his book (its cover depicts the tentacles of a giant octopus, a classic image of anti-Semitic tracts).

So far, so unsurprising. What is surprising — shocking, in fact — is the identity of Banos’s English publishers: Ebury, an imprint of Penguin Books.

A number of Penguin’s distinguished authors are outraged. Their fury is not assuaged by the fact that Penguin had cut out the references to Jewish world domination from the English version of the book: it remains a mish-mash of tired old conspiracy theories favoured by the hard-Left.

Indeed, Penguin defends itself by claiming that the ‘octopus’ image on the book’s cover is not anti-Semitic but ‘anti-Imperialist’.

This might help explain why the Corbynite Labour MP, Chris Williamson, belatedly suspended from the party for his trolling of the British Jewish community, had previously defended Colonel Banos, a Spanish socialist, in the House of Commons.

But if we are talking about control, Penguin is 75 per cent owned by the German publisher Bertelsmann. And Bertelsmann is publishing the book in Germany (though, after pressure from the German Jewish community, it removed the octopus image from the book’s cover).

It was only in 2002 that Bertelsmann revealed the company’s legend that it opposed the Nazis had been a convenient fiction. It had actually been responsible for many Nazi publications, including The Christmas Book Of The Hitler Youth.

Bertelsmann’s then boss, Heinrich Mohn, was a member of the SS patrons’ group, thus funding those responsible for implementing the mass extermination of European Jewry.

You’d think Bertelsmann might have passed up on the opportunity to promote the author of conspiracy theories about ‘the Rothschilds’, given that the same family was the target of Nazi propaganda about Jewish ‘ tentacles’ enmeshing the world.

Bertelsmann/Penguin are being urged by National Vanguard to stand by their man. The Neo-Nazi group declared: ‘Does anyone doubt that the super-wealthy Rothschilds wield incalculable power? What an Alice-in-Wonderland-style prison the Jews have built for us.’

Question for Penguin Books and its German owners: how do you like your new friends?