{"id":905618,"date":"2021-10-21T11:29:19","date_gmt":"2021-10-21T15:29:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=905618"},"modified":"2021-10-21T11:29:20","modified_gmt":"2021-10-21T15:29:20","slug":"anti-israel-groups-are-spearheading-the-grassroots-campaign-pushing-amazon-and-google-to-cut-business-ties-with-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/anti-israel-groups-are-spearheading-the-grassroots-campaign-pushing-amazon-and-google-to-cut-business-ties-with-israel\/","title":{"rendered":"Anti-Israel Groups Are Spearheading the \u2018Grassroots\u2019 Campaign Pushing Amazon and Google to Cut Business Ties With Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">34<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fanti-israel-groups-are-spearheading-the-grassroots-campaign-pushing-amazon-and-google-to-cut-business-ties-with-israel%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=905618&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/fb_image-1137.jpeg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" \/><\/div>\n<p>A coalition of longtime anti-Israel activists and groups is spearheading a &#8220;grassroots&#8221; campaign by Google and Amazon employees calling on the companies to cut business ties with Israel, drawing accusations that it&#8217;s an astroturf operation.<\/p>\n<p>On Oct. 12, a group of &#8220;anonymous Google and Amazon employees&#8221; published an open <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2021\/oct\/12\/google-amazon-workers-condemn-project-nimbus-israeli-military-contract\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">letter<\/a> in the <em>Guardian<\/em> calling on their employers to pull out of a project with the Israeli government to develop a cloud data system\u2014called Project Nimbus\u2014and &#8220;cut all ties with the Israeli military.&#8221; The authors said they were withholding their identities &#8220;because we fear retaliation&#8221; and claimed &#8220;more than 90 workers at Google and more than 300 at Amazon&#8221; had signed on to the letter.<\/p>\n<p>The next day, a group calling itself No Tech for Apartheid launched a website. The group claimed it was created in response to the employee letter, saying it was &#8220;heeding the call from hundreds of Google and Amazon workers to rise up against&#8221; Project Nimbus, and linking to the <em>Guardian<\/em> article.<\/p>\n<p>The group registered the website\u2014<a href=\"http:\/\/notechforapartheid.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NoTechForApartheid.com<\/a>\u2014nearly two months prior to the Google and Amazon letter&#8217;s publication, and it sat dormant until the day after the &#8220;anonymous&#8221; letter was published, according to domain respiration data. The fine print at the bottom of the website notes that it is a &#8220;joint project&#8221; of Jewish Voice for Peace and MPower Change, two prominent anti-Israel groups that are active in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.<\/p>\n<p>While the No Tech for Apartheid campaign bills itself as an organic effort, the two anti-Israel groups\u2014Jewish Voice for Peace and MPower\u2014leading the project have no significant ties to the tech industry but lengthy backgrounds supporting boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. MPower&#8217;s leadership role in particular could become a credibility problem for the campaign due to its controversial executive director. The group is run by Linda Sarsour, a prominent BDS activist who was kicked off the Women&#8217;s March board and denounced by President Joe Biden due to her affiliation with anti-Semitic preacher Louis Farrakhan. Sarsour, who has claimed that Israel is &#8220;built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everyone else,&#8221; spoke at a 2015 rally organized by Farrakhan, who has called Jews &#8220;termites&#8221; and &#8220;satanic.&#8221; Last year, Biden issued a statement saying he &#8220;condemns [Sarsour&#8217;s] views and opposes BDS&#8221; after Sarsour participated in a conference call for his supporters.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;MPower Change has been caught up in numerous controversies, including advertising events under the slogan, \u2018Open to all, minus cops and Zionists,'&#8221; said Joseph Cohen, executive director of the Israel Advocacy Movement.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It is particularly concerning that this organization was co-founded by Linda Sarsour,&#8221; Cohen said. &#8220;An activist with a history of anti-Semitism and extremist views, including repeatedly expressing support for convicted terrorist, Rasmea Odeh.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>No Tech for Apartheid did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n<p>Israel advocates said the timeline of the campaign and the group&#8217;s formation as well as the involvement of the two anti-Israel groups raise questions about the grassroots origins of the campaign.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t believe for a second this is a grassroots effort,&#8221; said Emily Schrader, a columnist for the <em>Jerusalem Post<\/em> who has examined the campaign. &#8220;JVP and MPower intentionally misled the public on this campaign to appear as if there&#8217;s a great deal of debate over Israel. There isn&#8217;t.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Generally, it&#8217;s not a problem that these organizations worked together for a common cause or that they collaborated on a petition, but to purposely obfuscate who is behind the campaign, and to intentionally misrepresent it as grassroots is reprehensible and goes to show how dishonest they are in the first place,&#8221; said Schrader.<\/p>\n<p>The three public faces of the campaign\u2014Google employees Gabriel Schubiner and Ariel Koren, and Amazon employee Bathool Syed\u2014also have long histories of anti-Israel activism. Koren and Schubiner are organizers with Jewish Diaspora in Tech, a group that has a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.israelhayom.com\/2021\/05\/20\/group-of-jewish-google-employees-demand-ceo-sever-ties-with-israeli-business-idf\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">history<\/a> of calling for Google to boycott Israel. Jewish Diaspora in Tech is a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.notechforapartheid.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">partner<\/a> on the No Tech for Apartheid project, according to the website.<\/p>\n<p>Bathool Syed has also been involved in BDS activism for years, according to her Twitter feed, which she made private earlier this week. &#8220;I don&#8217;t get why Zionists always plead for dialogue but literally walk out on dialogue. Typical hypocrisy #UCDavisDivest,&#8221; she wrote in a Jan. 29, 2015, post advocating for the University of California Davis to divest from Israel.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The letter claims to represent hundreds of workers, yet only three people can be verified,&#8221; said Cohen. &#8220;Everyone else is anonymous, making it impossible to verify if they even exist.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This obviously raises serious questions about the genesis of this campaign and the involvement of these BDS groups,&#8221; he added.<\/p>\n<p>Google did not respond to a request for comment. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A coalition of longtime anti-Israel activists and groups is spearheading a &#8220;grassroots&#8221; campaign by Google and Amazon employees calling on the companies to cut business ties with Israel, drawing accusations &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-905618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/905618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=905618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/905618\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=905618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=905618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=905618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}