The other night in NY Bill Kristol said that delegitimization of Israel is an existential threat up there with Iran. Actually it may be the principal threat to the endurance of the Jewish state. There is a worldwide campaign to delegitimize Israel-- and a worldwide campaign to breathe new life into the brand. Marc Tracy at Tablet wonders whether Google also will become a BDS target because it's gone in with Israel's Technion for the new Cornell campus in New York. Bloomberg's brainchild...
The search engine giant announced today that the company is donating 22,000 square feet in its New York City headquarters in Chelsea (a truly enormous building that, in fact, used to be what the Port Authority bus terminal is now) to the Cornell school for up to five-and-a-half years, so that classes may begin immediately. Cornell will cover most operating costs (no word on whether students will be able to eat in Google’s famous free cafeteria). This is actually a crucial donation—with an estimated worth of $12 million—because Cornell won the bid in part by pledging to start classes in New York this fall.
And Technion is fully involved in this endeavor, Tablet Magazine learned today. “The Cornell/Technion partnership will be launched in this space,” a spokesperson emailed on behalf of Google.
If you’ll notice, Google also bought Motorola.
Motorola split into two companies in January 2011. The one Google bought was Motorola Mobility, which makes cell phones and is not on any BDS list I know of. The company that provides surveillance and communication systems for the settlements and the Israeli military, and that is the target of various divestment campaigns, is called Motorola Solutions and remains an independent company.
Not to defend Google. but we need to be accurate.
Do you think it is more accurate to say that Google bought the portion of Motorola that was a target of a consumer boycott efforts?
>Do you think it is more accurate to say that Google bought the
>portion of Motorola that was a target of a consumer boycott efforts?
Before Motorola split into two companies, there were some efforts – see for example hanguponmotorola.org – to organize a consumer boycott of their phones, though as far as I know that never got very far. Since the split, the BDS campaigns I’m aware of, such as JVP’s campaign around TIAA-CREF and the organizing efforts within the Presbyterian and Methodist churches, have focused specifically on encouraging divestment from Motorola Solutions, because that’s the half of the former company that has continued the activities that were the grounds for the campaign in the first place – that is, the sale of communications and surveillance gear to the settlements and the Israeli military. The fact sheet about Motorola at JVP’s “We Divest” site, for example, now carries the following introduction:
If you know of any organizations that are continuing to encourage a boycott of Motorola-labeled phones and/or divestment from Motorola Mobility Inc., please share, and I’ll stand corrected. If there are such campaigns, I’m curious about the case they make, because I haven’t seen any evidence that Motorola Mobility has any involvement with the occupation, beyond selling phones in Israel, just as Apple, RIM, HTC, Samsung, and all the other phone manufacturers do.
Believe me, I’m not saying any of this to defend Motorola Mobility or Google – they’re all pigs to me. But for BDS purposes we have to be strategic about which pigs we target, and for now that seems to mean Motorola Solutions, not Motorola Mobility (now known in some circles as Googorola).
Maybe someday we’ll get to the point of calling for boycott and divestment of all companies that sell their products in Israel, in which case Googorola will be an appropriate target. It’s a little hard to imagine such a campaign, though, since not only all phones, but also virtually everything else Americans buy is also sold in Israel.
I appreciate this type of detail and I don’t want to be inaccurate or articulate a position that is not helpful. But you are talking about stock divestment and I guess I was thinking about citizen decisions on their consumer spending.
I did boycott the Motorola phone offered to me for free in September 2010 when I switched from iPhone to Android and I told the Verizon salespeople why I was doing it. I quit my Israeli hairdresser cold turkey because he was spending my money in Israel. I won’t buy anything from any musicians who perform in Israel.
My spidey sense on the Google/Motorola deal was that the consumer products were being subsumed under the Google brand , which is golden, and that this was at least in part related to heading off the effects of a consumer boycott on Motorola phones. I could be wrong. And this Technion thing gives me the same feeling. It feels like googlewashing.
I do know that if and/or when I ever have to quit Google, it’s going to be really hard, especially their search and their browser. Google just won the browser wars, after entering the market so late, and that was an amazing accomplishment, among so many others. As to search, Duck Duck Go just doesn’t do it for me. Regardless of how hard it would be for me though, I will quit Google as soon as I am convinced of the case. This Technion thing is certainly helping to make the case.
I understand your perspective, dalybean, and I admire your rejection of the Motorola phone. I obviously can’t say for sure that the threat of a boycott played no part in the Motorola split and in Google’s acquisition of the phone group, and I don’t want to be argumentative. I’ll just say my own sense is that the analysis you suggest enormously exaggerates our power. Motorola started planning the break-up in 2008. The conventional analysis at the time, as I recall, was that it was a move to “unlock shareholder value,” as they say – i.e., they expected that the combined (stock) market value of the two companies after separation would be more than that of the old single company. The underlying problem, I believe, is that the stock price was getting dragged down by the phone business, which is both very visible and very volatile, whereas the other group of businesses – what are now Motorola Solutions – was quite profitable but not so visible to investors.
As for Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility, Google supposedly wanted their patent portfolio as a bargaining chip to use against the several companies who are attacking them over alleged patent violations in Android. Some people say they also want the ability to design, manufacture, and market their own hardware (tablets as well as phones) in order to boost Android.
On the whole, those conventional business explanations seem more plausible to me than the idea that they were trying to avoid a consumer boycott, but who knows?
Could we, please, delegitimize the horrible phrase “existential threat” (“ET”) when used to mean something that does not threaten something’s existence? Please?
If Iran gets the bomb, it may to a slight (very slight) extent be able to counter Israel’s political/military power — but it could never threaten Israel’s existence, so it is not and could not be a ET. (Can anyone imagine a Muslim country using a nuke against Israel in a manner to threaten the Haram ash-Sharif?) Israel has submarines now to threaten retaliation (“Solomon Option”) and lots of nukes (by common agreement).
Even BDS, even “made in territory occupied by Israel in 1967″ labeling, even removal of foreign diplomats from Israel, even requiring Israel to remove all the 650,000 settlers, dismantle the wall and the settlements, end the siege — would not threaten Israel’s existence. they are simply not ETs. (They would all be salutary, in fact, leading to peace, reconciliation, normality, and the end of the nightmare (dream/trauma) of Greater Israel.)
We should make fun of the ET-usage. In short, ET-go-home.
Let’s invert the discourse, a little bit:
Israel, with over 200 nukes, is the real existential threat to 400 million people that lives on the territory of its enemies.
400 million people can be vaporized with the a few minutes after the press of a button within a millionth of a second.
Israel’s government is dominated by insane terrorists with a racial-tribal supremacist ideology, which can run out of control at any second.
Israel is not a tiny country surrounded by enemies, but the biggest and best equipped military base of the world, located within the geographic center of ill equipped armies and that can barely defend populations full of poor, innocent, hard working people.
So many things to BDS… Will we end naked and starving?
BTW, do mondoweiss’ servers run on Intel chips?
Yes but i am sure that the writers only use
Mac’s .
An important vote is coming up in the European Parliament on 24th May 2012, regarding the possible upgrade in the Association trade agreement with Israel, on hold since 2008 because of Israels abuses. Some MEP’s have written saying Europe needs Israels generic pharmaceuticals and they will support an upgrade, Teva, HQ’d in Israel is the worlds largest producer of generic drugs. However it should be noted that article 2 of that agreement states,—— ‘ Relations between the parties, as well as all the provisions of the agreement itself, shall be based on respect for human rights and democratic principles, which guides their internal and International policy and constitutes an essential element of their agreement.’ The question is, after all the breaches of International Law and its continuing ethnic cleansing how would Israel interpret an upgrade, it doesn’t bare thinking about.
Google may want to get their hands on that much-touted Technion UAV technology. How long will it be before Google drones are a common sight in the skies, adding SkyView real-time video overlays to Google Maps?
Indeed it might be a must-have feature in order to spot snarl ups ahead after yet another Google driverless car has ploughed into the back of a truck.
so what’s the best alternate search engine? i have no loyalty to google.
That’s the point about being left naked. All of these big companies have big investments or at least use patents for inventions from companies that deal with Israel. Intel and IBM has cross licences with every other big hardware company. That means you would just had to stop using computers altogether…
Try Yahoo or Bing.
Lots of options:
link to lifehacker.com
http://lifehacker.com/143293/seek-and-ye-shall-find–top-ten-alternative-search-engines
link to gizmodo.com
link to readwriteweb.com
But none will circumvent what MTd2 says.
> best alternate search engine?
DuckDuckGo – no tracking, good results, clean interface, and not part of any giant corporation.
A blogger at Time.com last fall compared DDG to In-N-Out Burger:
While you are at it try not to wear or buy anything made in china.
BTW i am surprised that there is no angry article here
about the 60 minutes piece on Tel Aviv
that aired a few days ago.
BDS and one step sideways: Paul Simon was interviewed by the BBC programme “Today” about his Graceland album. link to news.bbc.co.uk
First question by Rebecca Jones: Paul Simon, why did you go to South Africa under the apartheid regime?
Paul Simon: I went to South Africa because that’s where the musicians were. That’s where the music was. [...]
Q: … 1985 … high struggle against an oppressive regime … cultural boycott … it looked as if you were validating apartheid.
PS: That’s not the way it was. If there was a cultural boycott I was not aware of it other then I knew that performing was frowned upon, nobody said anything about recording. [...] Recording with black South African musicians wasn’t doing any harm to the black population and it wasn’t reinforcing anything about apartheid. It was in fact the opposite of apartheid. But at the time, nobody said anything.
Q: So were you naive?
PS: I don’t think I was naive. I think I was uninformed. And also, if the album hadn’t been a gigantic hit it would not have invited this kind of attack. … [Sex Pistols manager] Malcolm McLaren [did the same a year before].
Q: With the benefit of hindsight, should you have gone?
PS: I think if anyone had said to me “The ANC is insistent that you not go” I probably wouldn’t have gone.
The second half of the interview gives an insight of his attitude, especially wrt recording with Art Garfunkel (who asked for a psychiatrist to be there too then!). [I] would just as soon not go back and visit the past says the man who tours for the 25th birthday of Graceland.
Are Sergey Brin and Larry Page emotionally involved in Israeli politics at all? It would be interesting and important to know. At the moment, I don’t know the answer to that question and am certainly not jumping to any conclusions.
In some ways, Google could be described as the most powerful surveillance tool yet devised by the human race — a kind of KGB/Stasi wet dream. The potential for abuse of this instrument is enormous. We need to know a great deal indeed about the people who control leading Internet companies. We need to possess more information on them than they possess on us.
(Let me add that so far I have been a huge fan of Google — the company, the culture and its visionary founders.)
What if one could exhaustively data mine all private Google data (including searches, email, contact lists and calendars) and use it to run ops against political opponents?
That scenario is what the world needs to be thinking about in terms of worrying about potential abuses by the owners, controllers and employees of leading Internet companies.
The possibilities for abusing this data are endless. It is a certainty that leading global intel agencies (including Mossad) have been thinking about how to exploit the Internet in sophisticated ways for decades.
RE: “Marc Tracy at Tablet wonders whether Google also will become a BDS target because it’s gone in with Israel’s Technion for the new Cornell campus in New York.” ~ Weiss
MY COMMENT: Generally I like Google, but I can get by without it just like I get by without Intel “blood processors” (by buying computers with AMD processors).
SEE: Intel chip plant located on disputed Israeli land, by Henry Norr, San Francisco Chronicle, 7/08/02
ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to sfgate.com
Hey, Dickerson3870, I asked once before but you didn’t respond (maybe you didn’t see it): what’s your system for keeping track of all these articles you cite? Do you keep a full-text database? If so, what software do you use?
BTW, in case you don’t know, that column you quote from was pretty clearly the key factor in my getting fired by the SF Chron, even though that didn’t happen until eight months later.
You might be interested in a follow-up, entitled “The Nakba, Intel, and Kiryat Gat,” that I did for the Electronic Intifada in 2008.
Moment, a Jewish magazine, on the Jewishness of Google’s founders. (Per usual, Jewish publications are much more interested in delving into this kind of topic than non-Jewish publications.)
My takeaway from the article: I’m not sure to what degree Brin and Page are emotionally and politically involved with Israel and Israeli politics. Certainly they are not religious or Likud Zionists. They may be liberal Zionists, but that would be just a speculation based on the information in this article.
BEGIN ARTICLE
AUTHOR Mark Malseed
TITLE The Story of Sergey Brin
SUBTITLE How the Moscow-born entrepreneur cofounded Google and changed the way the world searches
MAGAZINE Moment
DATE February 2007
URL link to momentmag.com
BEGIN QUOTES
The Brins were no different from their fellow immigrants in that being Jewish was an ethnic, not a religious experience. “We felt our Jewishness in different ways, not by keeping kosher or going to synagogue. It is genetic,” explains Michael. “We were not very religious. My wife doesn’t eat on Yom Kippur; I do.” Genia interjects: “We always have a Passover dinner. We have a seder. I have the recipe for gefilte fish from my grandmother.”
Religious or not, on arriving in the suburbs of Washington, the Brins were adopted by a synagogue, Mishkan Torah of Greenbelt, Maryland, which helped them acquire furnishings for their home. “We didn’t need that much, but we saw how much the community helped other families,” Genia says.
Sergey attended Hebrew school at Mishkan Torah for the better part of three years but hated the language instruction and everything else, too. “He was teased there by other kids and he begged us not to send him any more,” his mother remembers. “Eventually, it worked.” The Conservative congregation turned out to be too religious for the Brins and they drifted. When a three-week trip to Israel awakened 11-year-old Sergey’s interest in all things Jewish, the family inquired at another synagogue about restarting studies to prepare for a bar mitzvah. But the rabbi said it would take more than a year to catch up and Sergey, who didn’t want to wait past his 13th birthday, abandoned the pursuit.
…
Like Sergey, Larry is the son of high-powered intellects steeped in computer science. His father, Carl Victor Page, a computer science professor at Michigan State University until his death in 1996, received one of the first Ph.D.s awarded in the field. His mother, Gloria, holds a master’s degree in computer science and has taught college programming classes. The two young graduate students also shared a Jewish background. Larry’s maternal grandfather made aliyah and lived in the desert town of Arad near the Dead Sea, working as a tool and die maker, and his mother was raised Jewish. Larry, however, brought up in the mold of his father, whose religion was technology, does not readily identify as a Jew. He, too, never had a bar mitzvah.
…
One malevolent practice, in Google’s view, is tampering with or otherwise censoring the list of results produced by a Google search. An early test of the Google founders’ commitment to providing unfiltered information struck very close to home. The anti-Semitic web site “Jew Watch” appeared prominently in Google results for searches on the term “Jew,” prompting some Jewish groups to demand that Google remove the defamatory site from the top of its listings. Google refused. Sergey said at the time, “I certainly am very offended by the site, but the objectivity of our rankings is one of our very important principles.” As a compromise, Google displays a warning at the top of questionable pages entitled “Offensive Search Results,” which links to a fuller explanation of Google’s policy: “Our search results are generated completely objectively and are independent of the beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google.”
…
Does any company founded by two Jews, no matter how assimilated, necessarily retain some defining Jewish characteristics? The Google masterminds’ penchant for pushing boundaries—without asking permission—might as well be called chutzpah. However you label it, it’s an attitude that runs deeply through Google and may help explain why the company is embroiled in lawsuits over many of its new projects: the aggressive scanning of library books it doesn’t own; display of copyrighted material; and copyright issues connected to its acquisition of YouTube, the online video site whose popularity rests in part on the availability of pirated television and movie clips.
Google’s first employee and a number of other early hires were Jewish and, when the initial winter holiday season rolled around, a menorah rather than a Christmas tree graced the lobby. (The next year, there was a tree wrapped in Hanukkah lights.) Google’s former chef, Charlie Ayers, cooked up latkes, brisket, tzimmes and matzah ball soup for Hanukkah meals and turned the Passover seder into a Google tradition. To some, Google’s emphasis on academic achievement—hiring only the best and the brightest and employing hundreds of Ph.D.s—could be considered Jewish. So, perhaps, could “Don’t Be Evil.” With its hint of tikkun olam, the Kabbalistic concept of “repairing the world” is evident in the company’s commitment to aggressive philanthropy. Sergey and Larry have pledged $1 billion of Google’s profits to the company’s philanthropic arm, known as Google.org, which will funnel money both to nonprofit charities and companies that deal with global poverty, environmental issues and renewable energy.
…
I’m curious as to whether Sergey has been a target of anti-Semitism since he left the Soviet Union. “I’ve experienced it,” he tells me. “Usually it is fairly subtle. People harp on all media companies being run by Jewish executives, with the implication of a conspiracy.” As an example, he cites the entry about him in Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that famously accepts submissions and edits from anyone. “The Wikipedia page about me will be subtly edited in an anti-Semitic way,” he says.
He doesn’t elaborate, so I later take a look myself. Wikipedia retains the old versions of each of its pages and in that archive I find a number of occasions where people have added, moved or deleted references to Sergey’s Jewishness. Most seem harmless or ambiguous, but one jumps out. Several months ago, someone anonymously deleted a long-standing reference to the reason his parents had left Russia: “anti-Semitism.”
“I think I’m fortunate that it doesn’t really affect me personally,” Sergey says of anti-Semitism. “But there are hints of it all around. That’s why I think it is worth noting.”
…
Several years ago, Sergey and Larry visited a high school for gifted math students near Tel Aviv. When they came onto the stage of the darkened auditorium, the audience roared, as if they were rock stars. Every student there, many of them immigrants like Sergey from the former Soviet Union, knew of Google.
END QUOTES
END ARTICLE
Self victimization is a sad trait of Zionists. Even if those people are raised in great upbringing, achieve the highest standards of living in the world, they still try to portray themselves as being discriminated as India’s Dalits!
How is it possible to discuss rationally with these people about the Palestinian’s segregation if they will always think like this?
One of the more interesting quotes from this article:
“One of his advisers, Rajeev Motwani, recalls, “He was the brash young man. But he was so smart, it just oozed out of him.” His abiding interest was computer science, specifically the field of “data mining,” or how to extract meaningful patterns from mountains of information.”
Data mining. Google is sitting on an immensely valuable pile of raw material for data mining on politics, organizations, people and social networks. Israelis are the world leaders on this research front. So many temptations, opportunities and motives in play in this situation.