They Lived Together, Worked Together and Lost Billions Together: Inside Sam Bankman-Fried's Doomed FTX Empire

At the Wall Street Journal, "The emerging picture of what went wrong suggests the crypto empire was a mess almost from the start, with few boundaries, financial or personal":

NASSAU, Bahamas—Sam Bankman-Fried’s $32 billion crypto-trading empire collapsed in an incandescent bankruptcy last week, prompting irate customers, crypto acolytes and Silicon Valley bigwigs to ask how something that seemed so promising could have imploded so fast.

The emerging picture suggests FTX wasn’t simply felled by a rival, or undone by a bad trade or the relentless fall this year in the value of cryptocurrencies. Instead, it had long been a chaotic mess. From its earliest days, the firm was an unruly agglomeration of corporate entities, customer assets and Mr. Bankman-Fried himself, according to court papers, company balance sheets shown to bankers and interviews with employees and investors. No one could say exactly what belonged to whom. Prosecutors are now investigating its collapse.

Mr. Bankman-Fried’s companies had neither accounting nor functioning human-resources departments, according to a filing in federal court by the executive brought in to shepherd FTX through bankruptcy. Corporate money was used to buy real estate, but records weren’t kept. There wasn’t even a roster of employees, to say nothing of the terms of their employment. Bankruptcy filings say one entity’s outstanding loans include at least $1 billion to Mr. Bankman-Fried personally and $543 million to a top lieutenant.

The lives of the people who ran FTX and its related companies were similarly blurred. Ten of them lived and worked together in a $30 million penthouse at an upscale resort in the Bahamas. The hours were punishing, and the lines between work and play were hard to discern. Romantic relationships among Mr. Bankman-Fried’s upper echelon were common, as was use of stimulants, according to former employees.

Mr. Bankman-Fried, 30 years old, kept a hectic schedule, toggling between six screens and getting by on a few hours of sleep a day. He was at times romantically involved with Caroline Ellison, the 28-year-old CEO of his trading firm, Alameda Research, according to former employees.

“Nothing like regular amphetamine use to make you appreciate how dumb a lot of normal, non-medicated human experience is,” Ms. Ellison once tweeted. A lawyer for Ms. Ellison declined to comment. To the outside world, Mr. Bankman-Fried was the mayor of cryptoland, the man charged with convincing lawmakers, investors and enthusiasts that he’d built a new kind of finance. He urged Congress and regulators to approve his model for crypto trading. On his cryptocurrency trading exchange, FTX, positions and risk were cross-checked by computers, and algorithms would react within milliseconds to protect bad trades from spilling over to hurt other customers, he said. On Twitter, he admonished competitors for practices he called unsafe.

But behind the scenes, Mr. Bankman-Fried was taking huge risks himself. Though he said publicly that Alameda was just a regular user on the exchange, the firm ran up a bill of $8 billion buying stakes in startups, trading on credit that no other user could get. Much of that money, much of which belonged to FTX’s customers, is likely gone.

FTX’s swift collapse—it went from paragon to bankrupt in just over a week—has renewed questions about crypto’s viability, its unregulated status and how so many well-heeled investors could have been misled for so long. Investors have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into digital currencies in recent years. Staid financial institutions were finally getting in on the action, too.

The executive tapped to guide Mr. Bankman-Fried’s companies through bankruptcy said the state of FTX’s affairs was the biggest mess he had seen in a decadeslong career that includes unwinding the accounting scandal that was Enron Corp. In a court filing he said many of the firm’s records of its digital assets seemed to be missing or incomplete; in many cases, he was unable to locate relevant bank accounts.

In last week’s bankruptcy papers, a Kenya-based money-transfer company was listed as an FTX entity. That surprised its CEO, Elizabeth Rossiello.

In a 2021 financial report, FTX said it had agreed to buy her company for about $220 million. FTX never did. There was no agreement, at any price, said Ms. Rossiello. “We were going to be their exclusive partner in Africa,” she said, nothing more.

“From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented,” John J. Ray III said in court papers.

A full accounting of what went wrong at FTX is likely months away, but a reconstruction of what the firm did and how its executives operated makes plain its public image—a team of brilliant quants bringing a sophisticated, digital approach to risk—was a mirage.

Mr. Bankman-Fried has blamed the misuse of customer funds on sloppy record-keeping and a flood of unexpected customer withdrawals...

Still lots more.

 

When V.I.P. Isn't Exclusive Enough: Welcome to V.V.I.P.

At the New York Times, "Every sports venue has its own tiered system of luxury. The World Cup in Qatar is providing a reminder that there is always a higher level":

AL KHOR, Qatar — With its haughty aura of exclusivity, the red-carpeted, velvet-roped V.I.P. entrance at Al Bayt Stadium seems designed to inspire maximal awe and envy. As regular fans were herded through their gates at the England-United States game on Friday, the V.I.P. guests were welcomed by an exotic figure dressed as some sort of antelope, covered head to toe in shimmering golden squares.

(When pressed on its identity, the figure, who was not supposed to speak, muttered under its breath: “Oryx.”)

Not that it is available, or even fully visible, to you. Flanked by barriers and cut off from the normal road system, Al Bayt’s V.V.I.P. entrance is a sweeping thoroughfare on which the most important fans, starting with Qatar’s emir, who arrives by helicopter with his entourage and then hops into a Mercedes, are chauffeured directly into their special enclave in the stadium. That way, they are never required to interact with, or even occupy the same general space as, regular fans.

Every sports venue has its tiered system of luxury — the owner’s box, the business lounges, the special-access elevators, the ridiculously expensive seats, the even more ridiculously expensive seats. But at this year’s World Cup, the convergence of two entities awash in luxury and entitlement — Qatar, where all power and privilege flow from the emir, and FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, with its vast wealth and patronage network — provides a bracing reminder that there is always a more rarefied degree of exclusive.

The main difference between the luxury and non-luxury seats at this year’s World Cup is alcohol. In a shock to fans (and to Budweiser, the official beer of the tournament since 1986), Qatar reversed itself and decreed just before the event began that the sale of alcoholic beer (indeed, alcohol of any kind) would be banned in and around the stadiums.

But that didn’t affect the flow of free beer — or free champagne, Scotch, gin, whiskey, wine and other drinks — available to non-regular fans in the V.I.P., V.V.I.P. and hospitality areas. The rules, it seemed, did not apply to them.

At a $3,000-a-seat hospitality lounge at Al Bayt during the U.S.’s game with England, for instance, the bar menu included Taittinger Champagne, Chivas Regal 12-year-old whisky, Martell VSOP brandy and Jose Cuervo 1800 tequila.

“If you want to drink, you can’t drink in the stadiums,” said Keemya Najmi, who was visiting from Los Angeles with her family. “So this is just a lot more comfortable.”

Also adding to the comfort: a dedicated check-in desk staffed by smiling hosts doling out special passes and little gift bags; a coriander-infused welcome drink that was a jolt to the system; tables bedecked with nuts, dates, popcorn and potato chips; an endlessly sumptuous buffet comprising dishes like slow-cooked lamb shoulder and marinated tuna steak, along with a carving station and a selection of six desserts; and a band belting out cross-cultural fan favorites like “Sweet Caroline.”

In all, there are five tiers of “hospitality” in the stadiums, according to Match Hospitality, a FIFA partner that operates those sections, beginning with $950 stadium seats that serve street-style food, along with wine and beer. At the highest end are private suites that cost about $5,000 per person and offer six-course meals prepared by a private chef, cocktails served by sommeliers and mixologists and the promise of “guest appearances” by unnamed celebrities.

The most exclusive suite is the Pearl Lounge, right above the halfway line at Lusail Stadium, which offers each guest an “exceptional commemorative gift.” There is also, according to someone who has been in it, a suite at Al Bayt that, for some reason, boasts a retractable bed and a bathroom equipped with a shower.

This World Cup has taken in about $800 million in hospitality seat sales — a sports industry record, a Match Hospitality spokesman said. But many of those guests have paid for the privilege, unlike, it seems, the V.I.P.s (or the V.V.I.P.’s).

The taxonomy of V.I.P.-ness has been a matter of some debate among those on the other side of the velvet ropes. There are different theories. “The V.I.P.s are the sponsors,” declared a woman who, it must be said, works for one of the sponsors herself and was speaking in a hospitality lounge, not a V.I.P. suite. (She is not authorized to talk to the press and asked that her name not be used.)

No, said a Saudi journalist in the stands who also asked that his name not be used. “The V.I.P.s are usually from business and the banking sector,” he said. “The V.V.I.P.s are the emir and the people around him — his family, his father — and foreign officials.” Those would include, presumably, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who sat near the emir during the opening match, as well as Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who were spotted in a luxury box at the U.S. match.

There’s a consensus that top FIFA officials, like President Gianni Infantino, are V.V.I.P.s, but that other FIFA and FIFA-adjacent personnel are merely V.I.P.s.

Meanwhile, a Qatari involved in organizing logistics for the tournament, who did not want to speak on the record because he is not allowed to, said that sometimes there is a surfeit of V.I.P.s at Qatari events. In that case, so many people end up getting bumped up to V.V.I.P. status that the organizers are forced to create a new tier entirely: V.V.V.I.P., the human equivalent of a seven-star hotel...

Oh brother. V.V.V.I.P. Keep adding Vs and the designation is meaningless after a while. I mean, no self-respecting emir would let some commoner out V him in the luxury hospitality competition.

More at the link.

How Caroline Ellison Found Herself at the Center of the FTX Crypto Collapse

A strange woman. Very strange.

At WSJ, "As CEO of Alameda Research, Ms. Ellison took a leading role in helping Sam Bankman-Fried build the FTX empire."

Alameda was at the center of Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsing FTX empire. Caroline Ellison was at the center of Alameda. https://t.co/sRk7CWWjm4

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) November 20, 2022

Israel's Devastating Capitulation to Hezbollah

From Caroline Glick:

It is almost impossible to grasp the danger of Israel’s present moment. A month before the Knesset elections, the caretaker government led by Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz is moving full speed ahead with a maritime agreement with an enemy state that it insists will obligate Israel in perpetuity. The Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) agreement Israel is concluding with Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon will fundamentally alter Israel’s maritime borders, deny the Jewish state tens of billions of dollars, which will go instead to a government controlled by Iran’s Lebanese foreign legion, Hezbollah, and transform Hezbollah and Iran into actors in the eastern Mediterranean.

The deal in question has been under negotiation for more than a decade. In 2010, as the natural gas deposits in the eastern Mediterranean were being rapidly explored and developed by Israel, Cyprus, Greece and Egypt, Israel signed agreements with its neighbors to delineate the boundaries of each state’s EEZ. Since Israel and Lebanon are enemy states, Israel did not negotiate an agreement with Lebanon. Lebanon did however negotiate an agreement with Cyprus, as part of which it drew a line delineating the southern boundary of its maritime waters. Israel accepted the Lebanese line and submitted its maritime economic zone borders to the United Nations on the basis of the Lebanese/Cypriot agreement and the bilateral agreement it had concluded with Cyprus.

Given that Hezbollah rejects Israel’s right to exist, Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon surprised no one when it immediately objected to Israel’s map, even though it was based on Lebanon’s own demarcation.

Lebanon demanded 854 square kilometers of Mediterranean waters that formally belonged to Israel. The Lebanese demand included complete control over the massive Qana natural gas field, much of which extends into Israel’s waters. Fred Hoff, who served at the time as the Obama administration’s point man for the eastern Mediterranean, offered a compromise deal which would have given around 55 percent of the area to Lebanon and left 45 percent under Israeli sovereignty. Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon rejected the deal, and there the negotiations stood, more or less, until last July.

In the meantime, Israel began developing the Karish gas field, which by all accounts is located in its EEZ. Karish was scheduled to go online last month, but in July, Hezbollah boss Hassan Nasrallah threatened to attack Karish if Israel began production before reaching a deal with Lebanon. Hezbollah then attacked Karish with four drones, which were intercepted by the Israel Defense Forces.

Rather than retaliate for Hezbollah’s aggression, fearful of Hezbollah, Israel delayed the start of work at Karish, and Biden administration envoy Amos Hochstein swooped into action. As Lebanon expert Tony Badran from the Foundation for Defense of Democracy has copiously documented, the Biden administration is dead set on giving as much money as possible to Lebanon—with full knowledge that money to Lebanon is money to Hezbollah. The administration’s desire to enrich a state dominated by Hezbollah/Iran stems from what Badran and the Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran described in May 2021 as its overarching goal of realigning the United States away from its traditional allies—Israel and the Sunni states—and towards Iran.

During his visit to Israel in July, just days after Hezbollah’s drone attacks on Karish, Biden upped U.S. pressure on Israel to conclude a deal with Lebanon and so enable the Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese government to begin raking in billions of dollars in gas revenues from the Qana field. U.S. pressure only increased since then.

Rather than stand up to the administration and oppose a deal that empowers Hezbollah both economically and strategically at Israel’s expense, the Lapid-Gantz government caved. As head of the caretaker government, Lapid, and his partisan subordinate Energy Minister Karine Elharar began marathon U.S.-mediated negotiations with Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese negotiators over the maritime boundary. Gantz compelled the IDF to support the deal and present his capitulation to Hezbollah extortion as a massive strategic achievement that strengthens Israel’s deterrent edge over Hezbollah.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the deal is that it doesn’t obligate Lebanon. Israel’s deal is with the United States, not Lebanon. And judging by Nasrallah’s statements, Hezbollah views it as a starting point, not an ending point. During the course of the negotiations, the Lebanese negotiators suddenly presented a new, even more expansive territorial demand. Lebanon, they said, is the rightful owner of more than the disputed 854 km of Israeli waters. It is also the rightful owner of large swaths of the Karish gas field. Hochstein reportedly used the ploy, along with Nasrallah’s extortionate demands, to compel Lapid and Gantz to agree to give up a hundred percent of the disputed waters. But now that Lebanon has already tipped its hat to its next demand, and given that Lebanon is not obliged by the boundary line Israel has accepted, it’s obvious that Lebanon will disavow the deal at a time of Hezbollah’s choosing.

Lapid, Gantz and their allies portray the deal as a diplomatic and strategic masterstroke. By surrendering to all of Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon’s 12-year-old demands, they brag that Israel has secured its ability to develop Karish. In other words, they’re bragging that they’re signing a protection deal with Hezbollah. In exchange for 854 square kilometers of sovereign Israeli waters, they believe that Hezbollah will permit us to exploit our natural resources—at least until Nasrallah decides to renew his threats and demands.

Aside from the Israeli media, no one has been buying their line. On Monday morning, former U.S. ambassador David Friedman tweeted incredulously, “We spent years trying to broker a deal between Israel and Lebanon on the disputed maritime gas fields. Got very close with proposed splits of 55-60% for Lebanon and 45-40% for Israel. No one then imagined 100% to Lebanon and 0% to Israel. Would love to understand how we got here.”

Former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted at a press conference on Monday that whereas he held the line against Hezbollah for a decade, Lapid folded after only three months.

To try to present their agreement as something other than capitulation to Hezbollah’s extortion, Lapid and Gantz are claiming the deal is the key to a Lebanon free of terrorist influence. This claim is weird on its face. After all, they insist that the Lebanon they are negotiating with is an independent entity not controlled by Hezbollah. And at the same time, they say Lebanon needs tens of billions of dollars from gas proceeds from Qana to free itself of Hezbollah control.

And that isn’t the only absurdity in their claim. Lebanon’s financial dealings are both controlled by Hezbollah and entirely opaque. Hezbollah can be trusted to take as much of the gas proceeds as it sees fit and leave the Lebanese with the crumbs at the bottom of its plate.

In his press conference Monday, Netanyahu said that the deal will not obligate a government under his leadership because it is “illegal.” And he is right. Under Israel’s 2013 Basic Law on territorial concessions, the government is required to present all agreements involving the relinquishment of Israeli territory to the Knesset for approval. To take legal effect, an agreement requires either the support of two thirds of the Knesset or the majority of the public in a referendum. Contrary to the basic law, Lapid and Gantz are refusing to bring the deal before the Knesset for approval.

And with the support of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, they insist that since the agreement is about economic waters, it isn’t about territory and therefore doesn’t require Knesset approval. Baharav-Miara initially said that all that is required is for the Security Cabinet to approve the deal. That it doesn’t even have to be made available to the Knesset for perusal—let alone approval. Under public pressure, she updated her position Sunday and announced that the deal has to be approved by the full government and submitted to—but not approved—by the Knesset. This too is a mile short of the requirements of the law. Baharav-Miara’s behavior is also a harsh commentary on the corrupted, politicized state of Israel’s legal fraternity.

It was her predecessor Avichai Mandelblit who insisted that caretaker governments may not carry out any non-essential functions or initiate policies that will obligate a successor government. On the basis of his dictate, Mandelblit barred Netanyahu’s caretaker government from appointing an acting state prosecutor. Obviously, the Lapid-Gantz surrender deal to Lebanon’s Hezbollah-controlled government falls within the Mandelblit’s criteria for prohibited actions.

Baharav-Miara’s behavior demonstrates that as far as Israel’s politicized legal fraternity is concerned, there are two laws governing the state—one for the left, and one for the right. For the left, everything is permitted. For the right, nothing is. In other words, as far as the legal fraternity is concerned, Israel is governed by its leftist government lawyers, not by the rule of law.

This brings us to the media. In light of the strategic and economic implications of the deal, if Israel had a functioning media, journalists could have been expected to provide critical coverage of the agreement and carry out an informed debate. After all, that’s the purpose of the Fourth Estate. But rather than do its job, in a demonstration of its own political bias and corruption, with a few notable exceptions, Israel’s liberal media have done next to no due diligence in their reporting of the agreement. Instead, they have parroted the Lapid-Gantz government’s talking points one after the other.

The only Hebrew-language media outlet that has subjected the radical surrender agreement to significant scrutiny has been Israel’s new conservative outlet Channel 14. Last week, Lapid petitioned the Central Elections Commission to shutter Channel 14, which, he insists, is opposition propaganda because it doesn’t provide him with enough positive coverage.

On Sunday, Sen. Ted Cruz, (R-Texas) tweeted, “I am deeply troubled that Biden officials pressured our Israeli allies to hand over their territory to the Iran-controlled terrorist group Hezbollah.” Cruz indicated that if the Republicans win control of Congress in next month’s elections, they will conduct a formal investigation of the administration’s actions. As Cruz put it, the deal is “another topic for the next Republican Congress to investigate.”

On Monday night, Globes reported that until a few weeks ago, Israel’s position was that it would retain a third of the disputed waters and its rights to the Qana gas field. But then, at a fateful meeting in the Defense Ministry, Gantz and Lapid’s representative, National Security Adviser Eyal Hulata, abandoned Israel’s long held stand and agreed to give up all of the disputed waters and Israel’s economic rights to Qana. Israel’s chief negotiator, Udi Adiri, vociferously rejected the capitulation and resigned in protest. Hulata was installed as the new head of Israel’s team.

Israel's Choice: Independence or Appeasement

From Caroline Glick, "For 12 years, under Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud, Israel pursued a foreign policy based not on dependence on the U.S. but on Israeli economic and military power. The results speak for themselves. The results of the Benny Gantz-Yair Lapid U.S.-reliant appeasement policies also speak for themselves":

Caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid and his supporters in the media went berserk Tuesday after Opposition Leader Benjamin Netanyahu spoke out against the gas deal the Biden administration is mediating between Israel and Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon."

Since Hezbollah launched two drones against Israel’s Karish gas platform in July, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly threatened to blow up Karish if Israel brings Karish online without first surrendering to Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon large swathes of sovereign Israeli land underneath Israel’s recognized maritime economic zone, including the Qana gas field.

Rather than stand with Israel against Hezbollah, the Biden administration is siding with Hezbollah—Iran’s Lebanese foreign legion against Israel. U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein has pressed Israel to surrender to most of Hezbollah’s outrageous demands. And Israel has folded to the combined U.S.-Hezbollah extortion. Lapid has agreed to give “Lebanon” the Qana field. Together with his partner in strategic collapse Defense Minister Benny Gantz, Lapid insists that with the Qana field, “Lebanon” will be economically saved and once that happens, the Hezbollah-controlled country will magically free itself from Hezbollah’s grip and sign a peace deal with Israel.

Netanyahu’s statement popped their balloon. Summarizing the negotiations to date, Netanyahu warned, “Lapid has entirely collapsed to Nasrallah’s threats. Nasrallah threatened him that if we operate the Karish platform before we sign a gas deal with Lebanon, he’ll attack Israel. Lapid got scared and didn’t bring Karish online.

“Now he plans to turn over to Lebanon, with no Israel control or oversight, a gas field valued at billions of dollars that Hezbollah will use to purchase thousands of missiles and rockets that will target Israel’s cities.”

Netanyahu was right, of course, and that is the problem for Lapid and Gantz. For months the media have hidden the dangers implicit in the deal, and sufficed with parroting government talking points. Lapid intended to avoid public scrutiny, ram the deal through before the Nov. 1 elections and declare himself a genius statesman. When Netanyahu exposed the bluff, Lapid threw a tantrum, accusing Netanyahu of harming Israel’s national interests by interfering with the talks.

The gas deal with Lebanon—and Netanyahu’s decision to tell the public the truth about the deal—is one of three Lapid-Gantz foreign policies that have come under the full gaze of the public this week. Together they highlight the disparity between the Lapid-Gantz foreign policy they will continue to enact if elected Nov. 1, and the foreign policy Netanyahu and the Likud enacted during their 12 years in office, and will restore if they form the government after the elections.

On Tuesday, Lapid let it be known that in his speech before the U.N. General Assembly, he would announce his support for the establishment of a Palestinian state. On the face of it, Lapid’s PLO advocacy makes no sense. There already is a de facto Palestinian state in Gaza. It is an Iranian-backed terror state which has waged five separate missile, rocket and terror campaigns against Israel since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

As for Judea and Samaria, the Palestinian Authority, which is supposedly the responsible adult of Palestinian governance, controls little of the territory it ostensibly governs. It uses its sparse resources to prosecute a legal, diplomatic and economic campaign against Israel and to facilitate and participate in terrorist operations by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah against Jews.

To the extent U.S. funded Palestinian security forces take action against Hamas, they do so not to prevent terror attacks against Israel, but to prevent Hamas from taking over the P.A. Of course, the easiest way for Hamas to take over the P.A. would be through elections. Hamas has led P.A. head Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party in every poll since Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006. This is why Abbas keeps cancelling scheduled elections, stretching his four-year term into its 16th year without end in sight. Abbas knows that any elections will oust him and his Fatah cronies from power.

Leaving aside the fact that Israel’s rights to Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem are far stronger than the Palestinians, the fact is that there is absolutely no prospect that a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem could possibly live at peace with Israel today or in the foreseeable future. So Lapid’s advocacy is at a minimum ill-timed and irrelevant.

But it is also devastating. In opting to advocate for the awarding the P.A. with a state, Lapid is legitimizing and empowering Israel’s enemies at Israel’s expense.

And Lapid isn’t alone. While Lapid does PR for a Palestinian terror state at the U.N., his partner Gantz is building one on the ground in Judea and Samaria. Over the past two years, Gantz has given the Palestinians and their European funders free rein to build illegal villages and seize agricultural land throughout Area C, which is administered entirely by Israel under the Oslo peace deals. Gantz has simultaneously barred Israelis from building in the areas and ordered the IDF to block all Israeli construction efforts. Thousands of acres of Area C, which were slated for Israeli settlement have been seized under Gantz’s watch by the Palestinians. These wholesale land seizures now threaten to turn flourishing blocs of Israeli communities like Gush Etzion into isolated enclaves.

Likewise, Gantz has been permitting Palestinian security forces to operate in areas where they are barred from operating under the peace agreements. He has even turned a blind eye to the illegal deployment of Canadian military forces in Area C. As Regavim documented last week, Canadian military forces which operate under the authority of the U.S. Security Coordinator in Jerusalem have been seen in uniform in Gush Etzion and the south Hebron hills harassing Israeli civilians and attempting to enter closed military zones. These operations are breaches of both Israeli and international law. But Gantz has been enabling them.

Gantz has renewed political contacts with Abbas and violated Israeli anti-terror laws by shoveling hundreds of millions of shekels into P.A. coffers. Gantz justifies his illegal policies by proclaiming them part of a strategy to “limit the conflict”—a euphemism for unilateral concessions to Palestinian terrorist groups.

For 10 years, Netanyahu worked quietly to render the P.A. irrelevant on the ground and in the region. This week, we marked the second anniversary of the Abraham Accords, the greatest demonstration of his success. Reached despite Palestinian opposition, the Abraham Accords showed that Israel does not need to appease Palestinian terrorists to end the Arab conflict with Israel. Through their Palestinian-centric policies, Gantz and Lapid not only legitimize Palestinian terrorists, by returning the Palestinians to center state, they undermine the Abraham Accords by forcing Israel’s Arab partners to stand with the Palestinians against Israel.

This brings us to the third disparity between the Lapid-Gantz foreign policy and the Netanyahu-Likud policies...

Still more. 

Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning

Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya.

Why Sheryl Sandberg Quit Facebook's Meta

She's sketchy.

At WSJ, "One of the world’s most powerful executives became increasingly burned out and disconnected from the mega-business she was instrumental in building. That dovetailed with a company investigation into her activities":

Sheryl Sandberg’s departure from Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. FB -3.68%▼ came as a surprise even to many people close to the tech giant. In reality, it was the culmination of a yearslong process in which one of the world’s most powerful executives became increasingly burned out and disconnected from the mega-business that she was instrumental in building.

More recently, there was a fresh irritation: Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal contacted Meta about two incidents from several years ago in which Ms. Sandberg, the chief operating officer, pressed a U.K. tabloid to shelve an article about her former boyfriend, Activision Blizzard Inc. Chief Executive Bobby Kotick, and a 2014 temporary restraining order against him.

The episode dovetailed with a company investigation into Ms. Sandberg’s activities, which hasn’t been previously reported, including a review of her use of corporate resources to help plan her coming wedding to Tom Bernthal, a consultant, the people said. The couple has been engaged since 2020.

As of May, that review was continuing, the people said.

“None of this has anything to do with her personal decision to leave,” said Caroline Nolan, a Meta spokeswoman. She earlier said that the Kotick matter had been resolved.

Earlier, on the Activision issue, a spokeswoman said at the time Ms. Sandberg had never made a threat in her communications with the Daily Mail, the U.K. tabloid. Mr. Kotick said it was his understanding that the Daily Mail didn’t run the story because it was untrue.

The broad company review added to a difficult period for Ms. Sandberg, which included the personal challenges of blending two families as part of her coming marriage and dealing with multiple family members with Covid-19, according to people close to her.

A long-planned sabbatical, as part of the company’s program to offer 30 days of paid leave every five years, was postponed multiple times this year, first when her fiancé came down with Covid and then, a few months later, when she and her children did. At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Ms. Sandberg was notably absent among the confab of global business leaders. Instead, Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox and head of global affairs Nick Clegg, who was elevated to president in February, were the top executives present.

Ms. Sandberg, 52 years old, stayed in the U.S. to attend the bat mitzvah of her daughter, according to people familiar with the matter. She told people close to her that she was relieved not to have to go to Davos, an event that for years was a highlight of her annual calendar, the people said.

Burned out

Ms. Sandberg has been telling people that she feels burned out and that she has become a punching bag for the company’s problems, the people said. “She sees herself as someone who has been targeted, been tarred as a woman executive in a way that would not happen to a man. Gendered or not, she’s sick of it,” said one person who worked alongside Ms. Sandberg for many years.

Ms. Sandberg hasn’t been closely involved with the company’s high-stakes plan to execute Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s pivot to the development of virtual worlds in the so-called metaverse, the people said.

That vision, which Mr. Zuckerberg has said will require billions of dollars in investment and take more than a decade to implement, is less dependent on advertising, which has long been Ms. Sandberg’s fief. She didn’t attend many of the leadership meetings related to the strategic shift, and people close to her said she felt the effort didn’t play to her strengths.

Ms. Sandberg, who will remain on Meta’s board, informed Mr. Zuckerberg on Saturday of her intention to resign. While her relationship with some other board members, including Mr. Zuckerberg, had become strained at times, Ms. Sandberg’s decision to step down was voluntary, according to people familiar with her decision....

Ms. Sandberg, a former chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, was already a rising star when Facebook snatched her away from rival Google. Her mandate was to take a free social network, and build a business around it in large part by using the vast swaths of data it collects on its users—and allowing Mr. Zuckerberg to focus on the engineering side of the company.

Advertisers loved it, with Ms. Sandberg as the primary liaison between the company and Madison Avenue. Her profile rose alongside that of the social-media company’s. After Facebook went public in 2012, Ms. Sandberg became an icon for women in business following the release of her 2013 book “Lean In.”

She wrote about how ambitious women in the workplace are often misconstrued as aggressive. She encouraged women to “sit at the table,” speak up, vie for important assignments and not talk themselves out of certain positions or projects for fear of not being able to manage work and life commitments.

A second book, “Option B,” chronicled her grief and recovery from the death of her husband, who died in 2015 while they were on vacation in Mexico.

As her reputation grew, so too did whispers of her political aspirations. There were enough rumors in 2016 that she could leave Facebook for a cabinet role for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton that Ms. Sandberg felt the need to shoot the rumors down.

“I really am staying at Facebook. I’m very happy,” Ms. Sandberg said in October 2016 at a conference.

But Ms. Sandberg’s standing within Facebook began to change after that election. The company was mired in allegations that it didn’t do enough to circumvent Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

Controversy surrounding the election grew for the company in March 2018 when the Guardian and the New York Times reported that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had improperly accessed the data of 50 million Facebook users. That data was then used to target voters on Facebook to get them to support Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign, according to the reports. The number of affected users was later revised to 87 million.

Cambridge fallout

After the fallout of Cambridge Analytica, Mr. Zuckerberg told Ms. Sandberg that he blamed her and her teams for the scandal, the Journal previously reported. Ms. Sandberg confided in friends that the exchange with Mr. Zuckerberg had rattled her and she wondered if she should be worried about her job.

The two scandals resulted in Ms. Sandberg being called by Washington to testify on foreign influence on American social networks.

Ms. Sandberg was further embattled by a 2018 New York Times report alleging that she had overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, including hiring a Washington-based opposition research firm.

In the wake of those events, Ms. Sandberg became a less visible presence around Washington and ceded many policy issues to other executives, said former employees who worked with her.

At times, Ms. Sandberg expressed frustration that she was being blamed for issues that arose in parts of the business she didn’t control, the former employees said.

Her overall influence also waned, in part because Mr. Zuckerberg in recent years asserted tighter control over all aspects of the company’s operations.

Last year, when the Journal published a series of investigative articles called The Facebook Files based on thousands of internal documents, Ms. Sandberg stayed largely silent. She is a strong advocate for women, and her muted public response was noted inside and outside the company in part because one of the revelations was that the company researchers had repeatedly found that Instagram was harmful to a sizable percentage of its young users, most notably teenage girls.

Data from the internal documents also showed that Ms. Sandberg’s share of employees had shrunk in recent years. At the start of 2014, 43% of the company’s staff reported to her, but that amount fell to 31% by 2021.

Ms. Sandberg also has been anxious about how coming film and television projects on Facebook will depict her tenure as one of the top women in tech. “There’s no scenario in which a successful businesswoman is not portrayed as a raging bitch,” she told one adviser.

In recent years, there was persistent speculation about her leaving, though some speculated that the controversies surrounding Facebook left Ms. Sandberg with fewer opportunities...

Actually, no. Since the news broke she's leaving the company she's been approached with an offer of a board seat and a CEO position. 

Such privilege. *Eye-roll.*

The Western Citizen is Dying? (VIDEO)

At the Friedman Center in Israel, Victor Davis Hanson discusses his new book, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America, with Caroline Glick:

Biden's Foreign Policy is Driven by Impulse, Not Reason

From Caroline Glick:

Almost every day, questions arise about President Joe Biden‘s ability to make presidential-level decisions. The questions stem mainly from Biden’s repeated rhetorical gaffes.

In a recent column in the Boston Herald, Howie Carr assembled a sampling of dozens of Biden’s misstatements since the start of May. Among the highlights, Biden told guests at the White House, “I thank all of you for being here, and I want you to enjoy the rest of the recession.”

In a speech before an audience of policemen, Biden asked, “How many police officers have multiple time and put a lion and had to do things that they’d have to think they’d have to do?”

Whereas Biden’s domestic policy malapropisms are generally subjects of amusement (or derision) with few consequences, the same cannot be said of his parallel misstatements when it comes to foreign policy.

Consider the war in Ukraine. In late January, as Russian troops were situated on the border with Ukraine awaiting Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s marching orders, Biden gave a press conference in which he exposed NATO‘s disagreements by noting that the alliance would be divided over how to respond to a “minor incursion” by Russian forces.

Confusion, and worse, impulsiveness, have been the hallmarks of Biden’s decisions no less than his pronouncements. The helter-skelter withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan last August remains the paramount example of the impulsive nature of Biden’s foreign policy. Biden ordered U.S. forces to withdraw, ending a 20-year war in humiliation and defeat without first coordinating the move with U.S. allies.

Biden gave the order without first making arrangements for U.S. citizens to depart the country, and apparently without regard to an inspector general report that warned the Afghan military would not be able to maintain control of any part of the country without supporting U.S. air control and contractors.

Biden acted in callous disregard for the safety of the U.S.’s Afghan partners, and without first making arrangements to secure the $90 billion in U.S. weapons that the withdrawing U.S. forces left behind.

Obviously, much of the failure can be laid at the feet of the Pentagon, the CIA and the State Department. But it was obvious that in the case of the Afghan withdrawal, it was Biden calling the shots from the top.

The Afghan withdrawal devastated the credibility of the U.S. as both an ally and an enemy. Its direct and indirect consequences will haunt the U.S. and its allies for years to come.

Biden’s actions against Russia since it invaded Ukraine are similarly seen by allies and enemies alike as the product of impulsive decisions, made without sufficient consideration of easily foreseeable consequences. Three decisions stand out, in particular.

The first was Biden’s decision to freeze $300 billion in Russian dollar reserves. The decision was unprecedented. And although it harmed Russia economically, it devastated the credibility of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. In response to the move, China and Russia abandoned the dollar in their bilateral trade. Other key countries, including Saudi Arabia and India, have also agreed to sell and purchase oil and gas in local currencies, undermining the petrodollar.

In response to the U.S. move and to Washington’s decision to block Russia from the international banking system, Russia began insisting that foreign purchasers of Russian oil and gas open ruble and foreign currency accounts with Gazprombank. Germany, Italy and more than a dozen other EU member states have thus far complied.

The ruble is as strong as it was before the February invasion. Simultaneously, the U.S. dollar is weak and its role as the world’s reserve currency is being questioned around the world. Time will tell if this is the beginning of the end of the dollar-based international economy. But what is already apparent is that the U.S. move on Russia’s dollar reserves was a net loss for the U.S. A more carefully crafted sanctions package might have had less deleterious consequences.

Then there are the leaks from Washington regarding the direct role the U.S. is apparently playing in Ukrainian military operations against Russia. The sources of the leaks are unclear. Biden is reportedly angry about them. All the same, administration officials have informed reporters that the U.S. provided Ukraine with the intelligence that enabled Ukrainian forces to sink the Moskva, Russia’s flagship in its Black Sea fleet, as well as intelligence that has enabled the Ukrainians to kill Russian generals.

In other words, Biden administration officials are telling the media that the U.S. is not merely supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia; rather, the U.S. is an active participant in that war. Whether it is Biden’s wish to go to war against Russia, or whether he is being led by his advisors, is unclear. But what is clear enough is that the escalatory consequences of these leaks are dangerous. Moreover, the U.S. interest in such escalation is unclear—at best.

The same can be said regarding the sudden decision to add Sweden and Finland to NATO. Is the U.S. really willing to send forces, if need be, to defend these nations? If so, where is that reflected in U.S. military budgets, training, hardware and doctrine?

Finally, there is the issue of the sanctions’ impact on the U.S. economy and on the global food supply. For months ahead of Russia’s invasion, as Putin’s troops deployed along the border grew, the Biden administration signaled that the U.S.’s primary tool for defeating Russia would be economic sanctions. Under the circumstances, Biden and his team could have been expected to calculate the sanctions for their effects on Russia and their blowback for the U.S. and its allies, as well as to consider the implications of Russian counter-sanctions on the U.S. and the global economy. But from the looks of things, it appears that the administration considered neither of these things.

Take the embargo on Russian oil and gas. Due to Biden’s decision to drastically cut U.S. energy production well before Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. had moved from being a net energy exporter to a net importer. Fuel prices in the U.S. had already risen precipitously. Those price rises aggravated skyrocketing inflation rates caused by a rapidly expanding U.S. money supply unmatched by a corresponding rise in domestic production.

Biden’s embargo on Russian oil and gas, therefore, took a bad situation and made it much worse.

Then there are the banking sanctions on Russian nationals. Russia is the main global exporter of fertilizer. While fertilizer exports weren’t banned, the financial sanctions on Russian nationals have impeded the ability of Russian exporters to do business with foreign purchasers, driving up the cost of fertilizers—and through them, of all foodstuff.

This brings us to the issue of Ukrainian food exports. Ukraine is a major supplier of wheat and corn to global markets. Ukrainian production and exports dropped by roughly 50% following the Russian invasion. And now Russia is blockading Ukraine’s Black Sea ports in order to prevent any exports of what remains of the besieged country’s crop yield. Expectations of a global food shortage are already causing panic worldwide, particularly among poor, unstable nations that are dependent on wheat imports to feed their people.

Russia will bear primary responsibility for global famine. But a better conceived U.S. sanctions strategy might have provoked a less devastating Russian counter-response. Now, with the real prospect of global food shortages, the danger of a naval confrontation between U.S. and NATO forces and Russian forces in the Black Sea rises every day.

Russia’s conventional forces have performed far below expectations. But Russia’s nuclear arsenal is both larger and more advanced than its U.S. counterpart. And unlike the U.S., Russia has built extensive and credible defensive systems to protect its cities and military bases from nuclear attack. Putin and his top advisors are openly threatening to use nuclear weapons if they feel it is necessary. Under the circumstances, any military exchange between the U.S. and Russia has the potential of becoming a nuclear war.

In response to the Ukrainian grain crisis, India announced last week that it is suspending its wheat exports to secure its domestic food supply. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, India has repeatedly flummoxed the Biden administration with its unwillingness to join the U.S. and NATO in their campaign on behalf of Ukraine. India’s early decision to maintain its oil and gas purchases with Russia while moving the trade from dollars to rupees and rubles was the first clear sign that New Delhi was staying loyal to its Cold War ally and moving away from the U.S.

India’s decision to distance itself from the U.S. poses grave consequences to the U.S. in its rising superpower struggle with China. President Biden, like President Donald Trump before him, rightly views India’s participation in a U.S.-led Pacific alliance as a key component of the U.S.’s strategy for containing China.

This brings us to Biden’s latest foreign policy gaffe with strategic implications. In response to a reporter’s question on Monday during his visit to Tokyo about whether the U.S. would use military force to defend Taiwan from China, Biden said, “Yes, that’s the commitment we made.”

But that isn’t the commitment the U.S. has made. For decades, U.S. policy with respect to the defense of Taiwan has been one of “strategic ambiguity.” The context of Biden’s remark, made from Tokyo at a time of heightened Chinese aggression against Taiwan, was significant. And while Biden’s advisors worked feverishly to present his remark as inconsequential, and U.S. policy as unchanged, the president has now “misspoken” numerous times on Taiwan.

Biden’s many gaffes and whispers of possible dementia have led many to wonder whether he is really the one driving U.S. policy. But to the extent he is, Biden’s foreign policy is a bundle of impulsive actions, whose economic and strategic implications have been disastrous for the U.S. and destabilizing to the world as a whole.

 

Democrats Mobilize Demonization

Well, er, speaking of the devil. I just wrote about this a minute ago, "Lincoln Project's Attack on Elise Stefanik is Evil":

And now here's Caroline Glick, "Demonization, American Style":

Demonization, the effort to portray a political rival as an inhuman monster, has long been a means to mobilize public support. The ancient Romans did it. The Soviets didn’t know there was another option.

While negative campaigning has long been a tried and true method for winning elections in the free world, actual demonization was fairly rare, particularly in the United States, actual demonization was a fairly rare phenomenon until after the turn of the century. But in recent decades, and with unprecedented intensity and venom since 2016, the Democrats have aped the Soviets and adopted demonization as their main political tool for winning elections. The primary object of their hatred is former President Donald Trump.

Last Sunday, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi showed how it is done in an interview with CNN. The interview focused on the Democrat Party’s concern that the conservative majority in the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, ending the federal mandate for abortions and letting the separate states decide for themselves whether to place limitations on the procedure. Concerns among Democrats and the party’s progressive base rose exponentially earlier this month when in a shocking break with the past, a source at the Supreme Court leaked a draft judgment on the issue authored by conservative Justice Samuel Alito to Politico.

Sunday, CNN‘s Dana Bash asked Pelosi if the fact that conservatives are now the majority on the Supreme Court means that the Democrats dropped the ball on abortion rights. Pelosi rejected Bash’s assertion and instead blamed Trump.

Brimming with rage Pelosi seethed, “Who would have ever suspected that a creature like Donald Trump would become president of the United States, waving a list of judges that he would appoint, therefore getting the support of the far-right, and appointing those anti-just freedom justices to the court?”

In that one sentence, Pelosi managed to demonize Trump, demonize Trump voters and delegitimize three sitting justices of the Supreme Court. It bears noting that as Pelosi made these remarks, Democrat activists were staging threatening demonstrations outside the homes of conservative justices.

Pelosi’s statement wasn’t an isolated event. It was part of an overall partisan strategy ahead of the Congressional elections in November. President Joe Biden gave voice to it in a speech last Friday where he spoke of “Ultra MAGA Republicans.” Just to make clear what he was talking about, he called Trump “King MAGA.” MAGA, or Make America Great Again, was of course Trump’s election slogan in 2016. Since then, MAGA has become shorthand for Trump supporters.

The obvious purpose of Biden’s coinage of “Ultra MAGA” was to link all Republicans to Trump and to make the 2022 elections a referendum on Trump, the demonic “creature” even though Trump isn’t on the ballot and the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress.

The administration is so excited by the new term their invented that Biden’s spokeswoman bragged that “Ultra MAGA” was the product of six months of market research.

Wednesday, Politico reported that the progressive fundraising giant Moveon.org is launching a $30 million “Us vs. MAGA” ad campaign ahead of November. Moveon.org executive director Rahna Epting told the progressive online publication that the purpose of the campaign is to tie Republicans to Trump, who all right-thinking people hate because he threatens the very existence of America.

The idea of using demonization as a political tool was most powerfully introduced to radical US politics by political guru Saul Alinsky. Alinsky’s 1971 book Rules for Radicals became the political bible for revolutionary leftists in the Democrat Party. There Alinsky warned his disciples that in light of the unpopularity of their America-hating agenda, the way to win is by distracting the public from their actual agenda and to focus their target audience instead of on their political opponents, whom they would defeat by presenting him as the devil.

One of Alinsky’s star pupils was a young coed at Wellesley College named Hillary Rodham, better known by her married name Hillary Clinton. Alinsky’s methods were adopted and taught in the 1990s by a community organizer in Chicago named Barack Obama.

As the US moves into elections mode, the last thing the Democrats want to talk about is policy. The only issue they may want to run on is abortion, and it’s unclear how popular the issue will be in swing states and districts. The more the US public feels the impacts of the Democrats’ economic, energy, and social policies, the lower the party’s polling numbers drop. Every day another shocking story appears about the fruits of the Democrats’ revolutionary agenda.

This week, for instance, the school board in Kiel, Wisconsin, a small town of some 3,000 people decided to charge three middle school boys with sexual harassment.

Their crime?

They didn’t refer to a girl in their class as “they” or “them” after she said she decided she is no longer willing to be referred to as “her” or “she,” because she no longer considers herself a female.

According to Critical Race Theory expert Christopher Rufo, depending on the questions asked, between 60-80% of Americans oppose revolutionary sexual policies. The more stories appear like the one from Kiel, Wisconsin, or even more distressing ones about children given sexual hormones by school officials without their parents’ knowledge or consent, the more voters abandon the Democrat Party in fear.

The Democrats’ response to the public’s rejection of their agenda isn’t to move toward the public by ending their support for sex-change operations for minors. They remain stridently committed to their agenda. The Democrats’ response to the public’s rejection of their policies is to castigate the Republicans as the evil acolytes of Trump who share his demonic characteristics – first and foremost, “racism.”

Last weekend, an 18-year-old racist antisemite murdered 10 people in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. Biden, Democrat politicians from coast to coast, the progressive media, and Hollywood stars all rushed to blame Trump, Fox News, and the entire Republican Party for the slaughter. Never mind that the same day, a Chinese man motivated by hatred of Taiwanese entered a church attended by Taiwanese immigrants in California and opened fire killing one and wounding four other worshippers. Last December, a black racist mowed down six people, and wounded 77 more, (all white) at a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Republicans didn’t blame Biden and the Democrats.

Tuesday, Democrat advertising executive Donny Deutsch explained the Democrats’ post-Buffalo massacre efforts on MSNBC. In Deutsch’s words, the Democrats’ mission post-Buffalo is to, “Brand every Republican,” as the party of “racist, violent replacement theory.”

“Take a branding iron, put it on them so any mainstream Republican has to wear that badge.” Notably, the Democrats’ “Ultra-MAGA campaign hasn’t raised any concern among Republicans. Indeed, immediately after Biden launched it, the Republican National Committee began printing “Ultra MAGA” t-shirts to give away to party donors.

Some 95% of Republicans voted for Trump in 2016 and in 2020. Despite its near-unanimous support, the Democrats’ demonization of the former president did have an impact at the margins of the party and among independent voters. Members of these groups were convinced that Trump and the Republicans are a demonic force that threatens the soul of America.

It wasn’t the likes of Deutsch who convinced them. That job was carried out by a smattering of former Republicans who share the Democrats’ visceral hatred of Trump. In the 2018 Congressional elections, and to an even greater degree in the 2020 presidential race, members of this tiny minority of Republicans appeared nearly around the clock on progressive media organs to castigate Trump and his voters as dangerous, racist and evil. While their overall impact was indiscernible, in all-important swing states where Biden’s margins of victory were miniscule, they appear to have made a difference.

Today the same group of former Republicans is working full throttle at the side of the Democrats to prevent their former party from winning the mid-term elections and taking control of Congress.

Sitting at Deutsch’s side on the MSNBC panel Tuesday was political activist and former Republican Miles Taylor. While serving as a mid-level official in the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration, Taylor anonymously published an op-ed in the New York Times and a book where he claimed that many officials inside the administration believed that Trump was a danger to the United States. These officials, he said, were working together to subvert Trump’s policies and save America from its duly elected president. Now Taylor is running a well-funded Super-PAC, where “former Republicans” run campaign ads against Republicans.

Taylor explained that the goal is to shame Republicans into leaving the party.

“I tried and failed to save the party in my own little way,” he said.

“We tried to prevent Trump from rising in 2016. Some of us tried from within to contain his reckless impulses. We thought we beat him in 2020, but we didn’t. Trumpism is alive and it’s well and it’s fueling this so that what conservatives need to do is convince other conservatives to quit the Republican Party.”

It’s hard to know what these former Republican conservatives tell themselves when they see empty shelves in supermarkets, $4.00/ gallon gas, cratering stock markets, and boys being persecuted for being boys in schools across America. It’s hard to know what they tell themselves when they see children indoctrinated to reject their biological sex and hate their parents and their country.

But what is clear enough is that through their efforts to demonize their fellow conservatives, former party and former president, these Trump-hating former Republicans enable the progressive revolution. Under the mask of anti-Trump paranoia, this revolution rejects the foundations of the United States and seeks to transform the country from the land of the free and the home of the brave into the land of the unfree, and home of the bullied, cowed and socially engineered.

 

Twitter, the Supreme Court, the Progressive Revolution

From Caroline Glick, at the Jewish News Syndicate, "As long as revolutionary progressives maintain their control over key U.S. national institutions, Republican election victories will be insufficient to save the U.S. and restore liberty to its citizens":

May 8, 2022 / JNS) America is in the throes of a revolution. As historian Victor Davis Hanson has noted, progressives now control nearly every national institution. They control Wall Street, Silicon Valley, universities, local school boards, the teachers’ unions, the entertainment industry, the vast majority of the media, the Justice Department, the FBI and the U.S. military, and currently, the White House and both houses of Congress.

Progressives use their control over these institutions to change both the character of the United States and the rules of the game in a manner that will enable them to perpetuate their power regardless of the sentiments of the American people.

Progressives are rewriting American history. They are taking aim at God and believers, and at the nuclear family, while indoctrinating children against their families and their country. There is no area of human endeavor that progressives have not politicized.

One of the last national institutions where the conservatives hold sway is the Supreme Court. And last Monday, the Supreme Court came under a malicious assault whose clear goal is to subvert its independence. In a move without precedent in U.S. history, Politico published a draft Supreme Court decision written by Justice Samuel Alito. Alito is a member of the Court’s conservative majority.

Today’s Supreme Court comprises five conservatives, one centrist and three progressives. Alito’s draft explained why the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which removed the power of states to determine the legality of pregnancy termination, making abortions legal nationwide, was unconstitutional and overturned it. If Alito’s decision, which is supported by his fellow conservative justices, becomes final, the power to determine the legality of pregnancy termination will devolve back to the individual states.

Second, the leaker sought to incite righteous rage among progressives, that will pressure the two remaining moderates in the Democratic majority in the Senate to vote to abrogate the Senate filibuster. By preventing Republicans from using the filibuster, the razor-thin Democrat majority will be able to ram through radical legislation ahead of their expected losses in the congressional elections in November.

Among other things, unfettered by the filibuster, progressives will be able to expand the number of justices on the Court from nine to 15. And if they move fast enough, President Joe Biden will be able to pack the court with an additional six progressive justices and thus effectively seize permanent control of the high court.

As for those elections, all major polls foresee progressives suffering crushing, historic defeats in both houses. Until Obama’s presidency, when progressives seized control of the Democrat Party, polls like the current ones would have compelled the Democrats to abandon their progressive policies and make a ninety-degree turn to the center. But today, every demonstration of public opposition to progressive policies convinces progressive revolutionaries to double down. When last year parents began protesting anti-American, racist and increasingly pornographic indoctrination of their children in K-12 schools, Attorney General Merrick Garland instructed the FBI to treat protesting parents like “domestic terrorists.”

Progressive-controlled state and local governments have responded to public outcries against skyrocketing crime rates by passing laws banning pre-trial detention and bail, sending violent criminals back on the streets.

In every sphere of public endeavor, progressive politicians, bureaucrats and activists have met public opposition and protest with tyranny and rebuke.

One of the main weapons in the progressive arsenal is disinformation—the deliberate distortion of information to advance an agenda...

This disinformation campaign brings us to Twitter, the social media platform purchased last month by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. Over the past decade, Twitter became the social media network with the largest influence on the public discourse. No self-respecting journalist, activist or policymaker can afford not to have an active account.

Twenty years ago, the internet and the social media platforms it generated became the largest free market of ideas in human history. They were also the engine for political victories for conservative politicians in the United States. For the first time, the internet gave conservative candidates the ability to communicate directly with voters, without the mediation of liberal/progressive media behemoths. All of this began to change during Obama’s presidency, as more and more conservative voices suffered a spectrum of sanctions, from shadow bans, which blocked their audience from seeing what they were posting, to banishment from Facebook and other social media platforms.

The process accelerated and became more extreme in the aftermath of Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race.

Trump’s victory was a grave embarrassment for the Silicon Valley oligarchs. Clinton blamed them for her loss. Her basic claim was that had Facebook, Twitter and Google not permitted the Trump campaign more or less the same use of their platforms as they ostensibly offer everyone, Trump would not have won. As Clinton and her supporters put it, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and their colleagues were supposed to prevent Trump and his supporters from “disseminating disinformation,” that is, campaign materials, on their platforms. Freedom of expression, Clinton and her supporters insisted, wasn’t for everyone.

Chastened, to prevent Trump’s reelection in 2020, Zuckerberg donated $340 million to election non-profit groups he founded for the purpose of increasing Democrat vote numbers in key swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia. At the same time, Facebook and Twitter initiated a censorship campaign against Trump and his supporters the likes of which no one had ever experienced.

That censorship campaign reached its height weeks before the election, when the New York Post published the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. President Joe Biden’s son, a crack addict, had abandoned his laptop in a repair shop in Delaware. After his efforts to return the laptop were unsuccessful, the owner of the store turned its contents over to the FBI because the computer contained evidence that Biden and his family may have committed several felonies.

At a minimum, the contents of the laptop exposed that Hunter Biden and his uncle Jim Biden had pocketed millions of dollars from foreign firms with direct ties to the Chinese, Ukrainian and Russian governments. Hunter Biden seemed to implicate his father in the influence-peddling operations in several of his emails.

The Post story was explosive because it was entirely true. It was Hunter Biden’s laptop. All the details of the deals were authentic. They exposed a web of influence peddling with hostile governments that made clear that Biden and his family were ripe for extortion by those governments. Yet, rather than allow their platforms to be used to inform the American people of this information, Twitter led the way in preventing the public from hearing about it. Twitter de-platformed the New York Post and private users who dared to link to the story. Facebook followed suit. Fifty retired U.S. intelligence and security chiefs proclaimed the story was “Russian disinformation.”

It took a year for the New York Times and Washington Post to admit that the laptop was indeed Hunter Biden’s laptop and that the New York Post stories were entirely true. In the meantime, in the name of fighting “disinformation,” Twitter, Facebook, Google and other internet giants had denied the American people access to information that, as post-election polls made clear, would have swung the election in Trump’s favor.

Since its first days in office, the Biden administration has openly pressured technology giants to increase their censorship and block conservative voices, claiming that such silencing and suppression is necessary to fight racism and fake news...

 

Ukraine and the American Crack-Up

It's Caroline Glick:

From Washington to Berlin to Warsaw to Kyiv, everyone says that only Russian President Vladimir Putin knows what he plans to do with the 120,000 troops he has deployed to the Ukrainian border. But at this point, even if Putin decides not to invade, even if he withdraws all of his forces from the border zone he has already won a strategic victory of historic proportions against the United States.

Without firing a bullet, Putin and his 120,000 soldiers have fomented the unofficial – but very real – break-up of the NATO alliance. NATO is rightly considered one of the most successful military alliances in history. It was founded in 1949 at the outset of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. Its purpose was to deter the Soviets from trying to expand their empire from Eastern and Central Europe into Western Europe. NATO’s success derived from two main factors. First, NATO member states were by and large agreed that their common interest in preventing Soviet expansion outweighed their separate national interests, and so required collective action under the U.S. strategic umbrella. Second, the Soviets and America’s NATO allies all believed that the U.S. was strategically credible. The Soviets believed that the U.S. was serious about fulfilling its commitments to its NATO partners. And NATO members believed that the U.S. would make them pay a very severe price if they opted to blow off the alliance and cut a separate deal with the Soviet Union.

Today, NATO cannot act collectively against Putin in a coherent way because Germany no longer views Russia as a strategic threat, and no longer views the U.S. has a leader it needs to follow.

How has this situation come about?

Much of the credit goes to Putin, who has been working towards this point for 15 years. Putin recognized that when used strategically, Russian energy exports could drive a wedge between NATO members. Traditionally, Russian natural gas exports to Europe went overland through Poland and Ukraine. This meant that energy supplies to Germany and Western Europe were dependent on Russian energy exports to former Soviet bloc countries, and Germany needed to protect Poland and Ukraine to protect its own interests.

In 2006, Gazprom, Russia’s oil and gas conglomerate unveiled its plan to lay an underwater pipeline across the Baltic Sea that would transport natural gas directly to Germany, bypassing Poland the Ukraine. Shortly thereafter, then German Chancellor Gerhardt Shroeder left office. And a month after he departed the chancery, Shroeder announced that he had taken a position as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Gazprom’s subsidiary responsible for laying the gas pipeline.

The message was clear. Germany had agreed to delink its strategic energy and economic interests from the former Soviet republics and Poland, which had joined NATO in the aftermath of the Cold War, and from Ukraine.

Today we see that Putin’s Baltic Sea gas pipeline – now known as Nord Stream 2 – did precisely what he hoped it would do. Over the past few weeks, the Germans have made little effort to hide that they are siding with Russia against Ukraine and their NATO allies. Germany prohibited NATO member Estonia from transferring weapons to Kyiv. And when Britain sent an arms shipment to Kyiv earlier in the week, the British were careful not to fly over Germany. They didn’t ask the Germans for permission to overfly their airspace, because they assumed the Germans would deny their request. In other words, London recognized that Germany, the linchpin of NATO is pitching for the other team, but didn’t want to didn’t want to make a stink about it.

But with all due respect to Putin and his successful use of energy exports as a strategic weapon, Putin couldn’t have pulled Germany away from NATO without Biden. Indeed, gas exports from Russia are more an excuse than an explanation for Germany’s moves.

The Germans feel free to walk away from their commitments to their NATO allies because they realize that the Biden administration won’t make them pay a price for their behavior. Like German Chancellor Olaf Sholtz, Biden has no intention of lifting a finger to protect Ukraine from Russia.

When Nord Stream 2 was announced, the Bush administration immediately understood the implications for NATO and strongly objected to the project. Barak Obama and his vice president Joe Biden also strongly opposed the pipeline. As the construction of Nord Stream 2 neared conclusion in 2019, then President Donald Trump imposed sanctions on all firms involved in the project. Trump’s intention was clear. Since Nord Stream 2 is geared towards breaking up NATO by driving a wedge between Germany and the Western European members on the one hand and NATO members Poland and the Baltic states on the other, to protect NATO, Trump decided to make every entity that endangers it pay a steep price.

Given Biden’s long record of opposing Nord Stream 2, going back to his days in the Senate, there was good reason to believe that he would maintain Trump’s sanctions. But President Joe Biden rejected the views of Vice President and Senator Biden.

Last May President Biden cancelled Trump’s sanctions on Nord Stream 2 participants. And last August, the Biden administration cut a deal with Germany over Nord Stream 2. The deal was one which no German leader in their right mind could object to, and no U.S. President who sought to prevent the NATO crack up could support. Under the terms of the deal, the U.S. dropped its opposition to the operation of Nord Stream 2 in exchange for a vague German commitment to do something for Ukraine. If Biden’s abandonment of U.S. opposition to Nord Stream 2 wasn’t enough to convince Germany and Russia, (and Ukraine) of his rank unseriousness in everything related to Ukraine and NATO, Biden’s amazing acknowledgment during his news conference last week that “a minor incursion” of Russian forces into Ukraine would not be met with a unified response from NATO ended any residual doubt. Despite the administration’s fervent clean-up efforts, Putin got the message, and so did the rest of the world.

It’s important to note that Biden’s decision not to block Russia from invading Ukraine is eminently defensible. Ukraine is not a member of NATO. And while the U.S. certainly supports Ukrainian independence, America’s interest in Ukraine’s sovereignty does not outweigh its interest in avoiding a war with Russia.

Had they been inclined to do so, Biden and his advisors could have easily made the case for non-intervention in a way that would have secured both NATO and America’s credibility as a superpower to its adversaries and allies alike.

Biden could have expressed support for Ukraine while noting rightly that Russia’s aggressive behavior threatens the nations of Europe more than it threatens the U.S. And while the U.S. would be happy to stand with its European allies to confront Russia, it will not confront Russia for them. That would have put the ball in Germany’s court, and whatever the outcome, the U.S. would have emerged unscathed.

Instead, seemingly on an hourly basis, the administration is ratcheting up its war mongering rhetoric and threats against Russia. Tuesday Pentagon spokesman James Kirby said that Biden had ordered 8,500 troops in Europe on alert.

Apparently, the Russians, Ukrainians and the rest of the world were supposed to take Kirby’s announcement as proof of Biden’s seriousness of purpose. But the opposite is the case. Kirby’s statement was utterly meaningless. He didn’t say which troops were on alert, or on alert for what. He didn’t mention what mission the alerted troops had received. And almost at the same time Kirby made his meaningless announcement, Biden said that no U.S. forces would be deployed to Ukraine.

More than Biden’s surrender on Nord Stream 2, it is the complete disconnect between Biden’s actual policy and his strategic messaging policies that make governments like Germany’s realize that they will pay no price for acting with U.S. adversaries against the U.S. Busy turning America into a joke on the world stage, Biden will have no interest in punishing Berlin for betraying NATO, and America.

Ukraine is far from the only place where there is zero connection between the Biden administration’s policies and its communications strategy. Biden’s Iran policy is equally disingenuous and self-destructive. Biden and his team claim that the purpose of the nuclear talks with Iran in the Vienna is to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear armed state. But the agreement the U.S. is negotiating with Iran will guarantee Tehran will become a nuclear armed state in short order.

The implications of Biden’s foreign policy for the United States are clear enough. Not only is the administration enabling the break-up of NATO. The Biden administration is destroying America’s deterrent power and superpower position.

As for Israelis, and other threatened U.S. allies watching from the sidelines, the take-home lesson of Ukraine is clear. No U.S. security guarantee can outweigh independence of action. To survive, a nation requires strategic, economic and energy independence, and the will to wield it.

 

The Escalating International War Against Israel

From Caroline Glick:

At the UN General Assembly last week, a large majority of member nations voted to lavishly fund a permanent inquisition against the Jewish state. The member states funded the operation of an “ongoing independent, international commission of inquiry,” against Israel.

The commission, run by outspoken haters of Israel with long records of demonizing the State of Israel and its people, was formed by the UN Human Rights Council in a special session in May. Its purpose is to deny and reject Israel’s right to exist, its right to self-defense, its right to enforce is laws, and its citizens rights to their properties and to their very lives.

The Human Rights Council’s decision to form its new permanent inquisition constitutes an unprecedented escalation of the political war the UN has been waging against Israel for the past fifty years. To grasp the danger, it is necessary to understand how Israel’s foes operate at the UN and how their partners in Europe and Israel itself operate.

We begin with the UN. In 2005, acting on pressure from the Bush administration, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan disbanded the UN Human Rights Commission. The Bush administration’s chief complaint was that the commission was endemically anti-Semitic.

The UN Human Rights Council was founded in 2006, and its members and UN staff wasted no time making clear that they intended for the new council to be even more anti-Semitic than its predecessor was.

Shortly after the Human Rights Council was established, it determined that demonizing Israel would be a permanent agenda item. Item Number 7 is the only permanent agenda item that deals with a specific country. And like the council’s nine other permanent agenda items, Item 7 is discussed at every formal council session. Item 7 enjoins the council to discuss, “Human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.”

Having a permanent agenda item dedicated to specifically demonizing Israel however, wasn’t enough to satisfy the Human Rights Council’s obsession with attacking the Jewish state. So since 2006, the council has convened nine special sessions to expand its focus on attacking the Jews. To get a sense of just how overwhelming the council’s focus on Israel is, in the same period, the council has convened just 19 special sessions to deal with every other country on the planet.

The council’s template for demonizing Israel has been fairly consistent through the years. Immediately after each Palestinian terror campaign against Israel comes to an end, the Holocaust denying, terror sponsoring PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas has his UN representatives ask for a special session to discuss the “war crimes,” and “crimes against humanity” Israel supposedly carried out against the Palestinians. No one ever mentions that ever single missile launched against Israel from the Hamas terror regime in Gaza constitutes a separate war crime. No one ever mentions Hamas at all.

In short order, the council accedes to the PLO’s request and convenes the special session. On cue the member nation’s representatives rise, accuse Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, operating a killing machine, targeting children, and any other crime they can think of. Then a majority of the members vote to form a new “commission of inquiry,” led and staffed by “independent” investigators nearly all of whom believe that Israel has no right to exist and that Jews have too much power.

At the end of its “in-depth investigation,” the commission issues a report which determines that Israel conducted war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This brings us to the second arm of the international political war against Israel – Europe. Every Human Rights Council resolution to form a commission of inquiry, includes a call to non-governmental organizations and other parties to submit “testimonies” and “reports” that will substantiate the council’s blood libel that Israel committed war crimes and is inherently and incurably evil. NGOs registered in Israel, the Palestinian Authority and in Western countries answer the council’s call. And the final reports issued by each of the inquisitions include hundreds of citations from “testimonies” and reports submitted by these NGOs as proof of Israel’s inherent venality.

These organizations are not independent actors. European governments fund them and direct their operations. If they operated in the U.S., nearly every NGO involved in the Human Rights Council’s witch hunts against Israel would have to register as foreign agents of European governments. As MK Amichai Chikli put it, “Europe is waging a war against Israel.”

Last week, Chikli and MK Keti Shitreet were scheduled to hold a conference at the Knesset on European funding of radical NGOs. But in a sign of the depth of Europe’s commitment to its war against Israel, and to its power in Israel, the EU embassy in Israel placed massive pressure on the Knesset secretariat and the Knesset Speaker to cancel the conference. In the end, the conference was cancelled at the last moment, citing Covid-19 restrictions, even as the Knesset’s parliamentary operations went on unimpeded.

The reports the Human Rights Council publishes at the end of each fake commission of inquiry against Israel form the basis for various boycott efforts against Israel that European bureaucrats carry out. For instance, on the basis of one such report, EU member states stopped recognizing Israeli veterinary certificates relating to agricultural exports from Jewish farmers in Samaria.

This brings us to the third arm of the international political war against Israel – Israel’s European-influenced, progressive legal establishment. Last weekend, Haaretz published an interview with former attorney general and recently retired Supreme Court justice Meni Mazuz. Between the lines, Mazuz explained the legal establishment’s methods for transforming anti-Israel UN documents into “law.”

A significant portion of the interview dealt with Mazuz’s campaign from the bench to block military demolitions of homes of terrorists.

As Professor Avi Bell from Bar Ilan University’s Law Faculty explains, “The law explicitly stipulates that it is legal to demolish the homes of terrorists. And there are dozens of Supreme Court decisions that approve demolition orders, based on the law.”

Mazuz told Haaretz that for many years, including during his tenure as Attorney General, “I thought that house demolitions were an immoral step, in contravention of the law whose effectiveness was dubious.”

But when Mazuz served as attorney general, he lacked the authority to end the practice. As he explained, “I couldn’t tell the government that it is prohibited when dozens of Supreme Court decisions say that it is permitted.”

But the minute Mazuz was appointed to the Supreme Court, he began legislating his political views from the bench. To substantiate his position regarding the demolition of terrorists’ homes, Mazuz said that he relied on “the positions of legal scholars,” in Israel and abroad, and on the decisions of the UN Human Rights Council.

“The demolitions cause us international damage,” Mazuz said. “Do you think that these things stay here? That they don’t come up every year at human rights councils in Geneva and in international forums?”

In other words, Mazuz made clear that along with several of his colleagues on the bench, he used the anti-Israel reports generated by the obsessively anti-Israel UN Human Rights Council, to justify his rulings which denied Israel the right to act in accordance with Israeli law in a manner that the duly elected government, and the duly constituted leadership of the IDF deemed necessary in their efforts to quell Palestinian terrorism.

As Bell explains, aside from a limited category of UN Security Council resolutions, UN actions and decisions are all devoid of significance in international law. Decisions by the UN Human Rights Council, like those of all other UN bodies are political documents without any legal weight.

Mazuz and his colleagues in the legal fraternity exploit the public’s ignorance and the impotence of the government and Knesset to transform these political documents into “law” through their judgments and legal opinions.

And this brings us to the Human Rights Council’s permanent inquisition whose operations a large majority of UN member nations voted to fund last week at the General Assembly. As Prof. Anne Bayefsky explained in a detailed report published this week by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the commission of inquiry’s mandate is effectively limitless. The commission is empowered to rewrite the entire history of the Arab conflict with Israel and determine that Israel’s birth was an original sin which must be undone. The commission is empowered to carry out an “investigation” on the basis of “testimonies” which EU-funded anti-Israel groups will supply them describing entirely fraudulent “war crimes” that will form the basis of indictments of Israeli elected leaders, IDF commanders and line soldiers, and Israeli civilians who reside in Judea, Samaria and unified Jerusalem. The UN’s political “courts” in turn will agree to try them for these made-up crimes.

Moreover, as Bayefsky noted, the commission is charged with making “recommendations on measures to be taken by third States to ensure respect for international humanitarian law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem…[to ensure] that they do not aid or assist in the Commission of internationally wrongful acts.”

A similar statement is made in the resolution’s preamble regarding “business enterprises.”

The message in both cases is self-explanatory. The reports the inquisition will publish will serve as the basis

for economic boycotts of Israel to be enacted by both government bureaucrats and businesses.

Israel has no choice but to fight this commission and any business, government or judge that uses its reality-free reports. Israel must ensure that the anti-Semitic propaganda the commission puts out does not turn into “law” through the actions of radical justices and government attorneys. And Israel must reconcile itself to the fact that the EU bureaucracy and much of Europe is waging a war against it, and launch a vigorous counter-assault...

 

Caroline Wozniacki

Beautiful family.

Feeling very grateful and blessed! Happy Thanksgiving from our family to yours❤️#thanksgiving pic.twitter.com/QqJLNB1O9J

— Caroline Wozniacki (@CaroWozniacki) November 25, 2021

Alexis Ren, Ashley Tavort, and Caroline Vreeland

It's a good day!

Ms. Alexis is on Twitter.

Ashley Tavort is here.

And also Caroline Vreeland here and here.

Dark Clouds Over the 'New America'

 From Caroline Glick, "Dark Clouds: Google, Amazon, Israel and the New America":

America is changing before our eyes. But the Finance Ministry apparently hasn’t paid it any mind.

Last week, the head of procurement at the Finance Ministry’s General Accountant’s Office formally announced that Amazon (AWS) and Google won the government tender to provide cloud services to the government as Israel moves forward with the first phase of the Nimbus Project. Tender bids submitted by Microsoft and Oracle were rejected.

The Nimbus Project is a massive, multiyear project that will replace the data management infrastructure of government ministries and the IDF. To date, government ministries have used decentralized servers and dozens of independently operating websites to house and manage their data. The Nimbus Project will move all government computing data and applications to commercial clouds provided by technology giants.

When the government computer systems migrate to Google and Amazon’s data clouds, these firms will manage all of official Israel’s non-classified data and computerized applications. This will include everything from government and military payrolls to welfare payments, to government pensions. It will include the medical files of all Israelis. It will include their personal and corporate tax returns.

It’s possible that from the technical and financial perspectives, the General Accountant’s tender committee’s decision to award the cloud contracts to Google and Amazon was reasonable. The two corporations are the industry leaders in cloud technologies. But even on the technical and financial levels, there are differing opinions about the committee’s decision.

Oracle’s bid was allegedly lower than those submitted by Google and Amazon. Moreover, the tender requires that the clouds be physically located inside of Israel. Oracle and Microsoft have both built cloud centers in Israel. Oracle’s is set to open in August and Microsoft’s is scheduled to open in January 2022. Google and Amazon for their part have yet to begin building their data centers, so for the next two years, and more likely the next 3-4 years, contrary to the stipulations of the tender, Israel’s government and IDF data will be housed in Europe.

Then there is the issue of redundancy. The trend today among governments and large corporations is to spread their data out among several cloud providers. Israel could have chosen to award the contract to all four companies and kept costs lower by forcing them to compete over pricing every year. Redundancy in cloud servers also lowers the risks of sabotage and technical failures that can lead to loss of data or failure of computing systems.

At any rate, assuming the tender committee followed the best practices from both financial and technical perspectives in granting the cloud contract to Google and Amazon exclusively, the decision is disconcerting all the same. The problem is not financial or technological. The problem with Google and Amazon is cultural. The organizational culture of both corporations raises significant questions about the wisdom of granting them exclusive control over Israel’s government data for the next seven years.

During this month’s Operation Guardian of the Wall, some 250 Google employees who identified as anti-Zionist Jews wrote a letter to Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai. They began by asking that Google reject the determination that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism and that the company fund Palestinian organizations.

The “Jewish Diaspora in Tech” called for “Google leadership to make a company-wide statement recognizing violence in Palestine and Israel, which must include direct recognition of the harm done to Palestinians by Israeli military and gang violence.”

Then they turned to the Nimbus contract.

“We request a review of all…business contracts and corporate donations and the termination of contracts with institutions that support Israeli violations of Palestinian rights, such as the Israeli Defense Forces.”

Shortly after the Google employees published their letter, some five hundred Amazon employees entered the anti-Israel fray. They signed a letter that was almost identical to the Google employees’ letter. They called for Amazon to reject the definition of anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. They insisted that Israel is a racist colonial project and that the land of Israel belongs to the Palestinians. They called for Amazon to financially support Palestinian organizations. And they asked that the firm, “commit to review and sever business contracts and corporate donations with companies, organizations, and/or governments that are active or complicit in human rights violations, such as the Israeli Defense Forces.”

Another employee group called “Amazon Employees for Climate Justice” tweeted a long chain of posts denouncing the company’s participation in the Nimbus Project. Among other things, they wrote, “We stand in solidarity with Palestinians who went on a historic general strike to protest Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza. Amazon and Google recently signed a $1B deal supporting Israel’s military. Amazon is complicit in state killings and human rights abuses.

“Amazon’s workers didn’t sign up to work on projects that support militaries and policing forces. We didn’t sign up to be complicit in state killings and human rights abuses in the U.S., Israel, and around the world,” they concluded.

The workers’ protests in both companies are deadly serious. In 2018, Google employees discovered that the company was working with the Pentagon to develop an artificial intelligence system to improve the accuracy of U.S. military drones. Some 4,000 Google employees, including dozens of senior engineers signed a petition to Pichai demanding that Google end its involvement in the project. As they put it, “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war.”

Google management caved to the pressure and cancelled the contract with the Defense Department.

In January, Amazon cancelled its cloud service contract with the social media platform Parler, which was identified with Republicans. Amazon justified move by claiming that Parler contained “violent content.” The fact that violent content is also contained on other social media platforms – including Amazon itself – was neither here nor there.

Notable as well is the fact that Amazon’s CEO and founder Jeff Bezos is a close friend of musician Brian Eno. Like Roger Waters, Eno is a prominent proponent of the anti-Semitic BDS campaign that seeks to boycott Israel and demonize and silence its Jewish supporters worldwide.

The senior officials at the Finance Ministry, the national Cyber Authority and the Ministry of Defense who granted Google and Amazon the government and IDF cloud contracts may simply not understand the dire implications for Israel’s national security posed by the antagonistic positions of some Google and Amazon employees.

In a press conference this week, the heads of the Finance Ministry actually presented these statements as testaments to the credibility of the contracts. The fact that the leaders of Google and Amazon signed the deal with Israel despite the hatred their employees express towards the Jewish state is proof of the companies’ commitment to the project, they insisted.

The Finance Ministry added that there is no cause for concern because the contracts require that Google and Amazon set up subsidiary firms in Israel to actually manage the clouds. As Israeli registered companies, the subsidiaries will be bound to the requirements of Israeli law. And as such, they will have no option of sabotaging the work or otherwise breaching the contract no matter how anti-Israel the Google and Amazon employees outside of Israel may be.

The problem with this argument is that the subsidiaries in Israel will be wholly owned by their mother corporations. All of their equipment will be owned by Google and Amazon in the U.S. If the mother corporations decide to pull the plug on the Nimbus contract, the local subsidiaries will be powerless to maintain them.

The same Google management that blew off the artificial intelligence project with the Pentagon three years ago to satisfy their workers should be expected to repeat their actions in the future. If their employees unite to demand that Google abrogate the Nimbus contract, management can be expected to absorb a few hundred million dollars in losses to keep their workers happy.

The polarization of opinion on Israel that we are witnessing in American politics between Republicans who support Israel and Democrats who oppose Israel, is an expression of a much larger division within American society. The heartbreaking but undeniable fact is that today you can’t talk about “America” as a single political entity.

Today there are two Americas, and they cannot abide by one another. One America – traditional America – loves Israel and America. The other America – the New America – hates Israel and doesn’t think much of America, either.

Traditional America believes that the U.S. brought the promise of liberty to the world and that even though it is far from perfect, the United States is the greatest country in human history. In the eyes of the citizens of Traditional America, Israel is a kindred nation and the U.S.’s best friend and most valued ally in the Middle East.

New America, in contrast, believes that America was born in the sin of slavery. New Americans insist America will remain evil and an object of scorn at home and abroad so long it refuses to exchange its values of liberty, capitalism, equal opportunity and patriotism with the values of racialism and equity, socialism, equality of outcomes, and globalization. For New Americans, just as the U.S. was born in the sin of white supremacy so Israel was born in the sin of Zionism. In New America, Israel will have no right to exist so long as it clings to its Jewish national identity, refusing to become a “state of all its citizens.”

New America’s power isn’t limited to its control over the White House and Congress. It also controls much of corporate America. Under the slogan, “Stakeholder Capitalism,” corporate conglomerates whose leaders are New Americans use their economic power to advance the political and cultural agendas of New America. We saw stakeholder capitalism at work in March following the Georgia statehouse’s passage of a law requiring voters to present identification at polling places. Major League Baseball, Coca Cola, Delta and American Airlines among others announced that they would boycott the state, denying jobs to thousands of Georgians in retaliation.

Silicon Valley is the Ground Zero of Stakeholder Capitalism. Its denizens are the loudest and most powerful proponents of using technological and economic power to advance the political and cultural agendas of New America.

Microsoft and Oracle are appealing the Nimbus tender award. They are basing their appeals on what they describe as technical and other flaws in the tender process. Israel should view their appeals as an opportunity to reverse course.

In light of New America’s hostility towards Israel generally, and given the proven power of Google and Amazon employees and their expressed antagonism towards Israel, the Finance Ministry should reconsider the tender award. Technical considerations aside, the decision to grant Google and Amazon exclusive control over the State of Israel’s computer data did not give sufficient weight to all the relevant variables.