Most decent people writing on the internet take care not to link to hate sites, such as those promoting antisemitism or Holocaust denial, if they can possibly help it. When they do have to link to them, for instance in order to illustrate a point about the hate-promoting ideologies themselves, they accompany the link with a warning of the evil that lies at the other end.

Adhering to such a policy is important for several reasons, one of which is that one does not want to become a source of publicity for hate sites, either directly or by increasing their score in search engines. Another is that one has a responsibility to readers, a proportion of whom must be young, or newly interested in the field in which one is writing, not to seem to endorse false claims such as Holocaust denial, antisemitism, and the associated conspiracy theories.

Wretchard of Belmont Club has not been adhering to such a policy. As we noted here, he recently linked to a major Holocaust-denying site, without comment. Today he has linked to an extreme antisemitic site (National Journal), again without comment.

On the first occasion, the passage that he quoted contained nothing directly hateful: it was merely a rather strained interpretation of George Orwell's writings, which compared Western media today with totalitarian ones, and also happened to contain the mistaken opinion that the Allied bombing campaign in World War 2 was genocidal. But one does not have to look far to see the role that such ideas play on that site, and the rest of the essay from which the quote is taken contains explicit Holocaust denial. On this occasion, again, the page that Wretchard links to contains explicit antisemitism and Holocaust denial, and the main content of the page is a deranged attempt to deny that anywhere near six million Jews could have been murdered, apparently on the basis of a misprint in a copy of the Daily Mail in 2003. Again, the passage that he quotes contains none of the hateful material.

We have seen no trace in Wretchard's own writings of any ideology of hate. Quite the contrary, he seems to be a passionate supporter of Western values. But his policy (or carelessness?) in this regard is not right. We urge him to be more careful about the sites he chooses to link to in future.