Open Letters - Israel-haters' biggest bang for the most meaningless buck

The Guardian published a letter from several hundred anonymous Google and Amazon employees against those companies starting a $1.4 billion contract, Project Nimbus, to build cloud services in Israel.

The letter itself reveals the antisemitism of the writers. It admits that there are lots of customers of Google and Amazon that the employees find distasteful - 

We have watched Google and Amazon aggressively pursue contracts with institutions like the US Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), and state and local police departments.

But when it comes to Israel - only then are they angry enough to send a Letter. Only then do they tearfully say that they "cannot look the other way." 

Even more telling are the contracts that they don't list - deals with China and Saudi Arabia and with armies throughout the world escape their ire. Only to slam Israel do they exert the huge amount of effort to click on a button on a keyboard.

300 workers at Amazon and 90 workers are Google anonymously signed this letter. That comes out to 0.023% of all Amazon employees. For Google, it is 0.064%. 

For contrast, 2.3% of Americans believe the Earth is flat - a hundred-fold more that the percentage of  Amazon workers who say that Israel is terrible.

This is the way all anti-Israel letters work. A small number of people - in academia, it is always the exact same group of several hundred people - write a letter about how awful Israel is, they represent a minuscule percentage of the total number of people in the field, and the letters get eagerly publicized by news outlets who often share their sentiments.And if they cannot get The Guardian to publish their letter, they can self-publish in Medium and still get publicity from media outlets.

Nothing gets more bang for the buck than letters. They don't even require someone to get out of their seats to protest something - just a mouse click and a keyboard clack. Celebrities like Roger Waters and Noam Chomsky sign anything anti-Israel anyone sends them. 

It's all a scam.

But it is a scam that media outlets are more than happy to spread. 

This Amazon/Google letter is particularly cowardly. The signatories are not even willing to risk putting their names on the letter. We don't know if they are top-ranking coders or mailroom interns. But they still take the high road, claiming that they are afraid of losing their jobs for signing a letter. They take literally no risk. It is no braver than voting in a Twitter poll.

And the Guardian plays along - along with other media that report on the story as if it is a real story, and not something that any Israel hater can whip up any day of the week.

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