On April 6, Jewish Voice for Peace sent out a letter asking students to "boycott" Google and Amazon for working on a cloud project for the Israeli government.
But asking students to actually boycott Google and Amazon is crazy talk, so instead, they asked students to refuse to take internships or jobs with those companies "until they drop Project Nimbus."
You already see the issue. Google and Amazon are giant, but they have far more applicants than they have jobs. College students pledging to not apply for jobs would literally not be noticed by these tech giants. And no student is going to apply to a job or internship only to refuse it afterwards.
It is a totally meaningless gesture. But it is a gesture that JVP assumed would attract thousands of students, especially non-tech students, because they figured they would want to virtue signal not to accept jobs that they wouldn't be qualified for and would never apply to anyway.
Sure enough, a few days after this email, the articles started coming about how "hundreds" of students - 550, to be exact - had signed this meaningless pledge. And it was painted as a great victory.
On Monday, a month later, JVP sent out an identical letter. And according to the website that they send people to, the number of signers has reached only 730 (as of this writing.)
Over four weeks, they barely added anyone to the signatories.
Now let's look at the numbers. There are 20 million undergraduate college students in the US. You could get far more than 700 to sign a petition to draft Scooby-Doo to be President than to commit to not work for Google and Amazon. 700 students represent 0.004% of the students in the country. There are 1000 times more people of college age who believe that the Earth is flat than who say they want to boycott jobs from Google and Amazon.
When Project Nimbus was first in the news, the BDSers made a huge deal that 1000 employees of Amazon and Google wrote a letter opposing it. That was equally unimpressive - one tenth of one percent of all 1.2 million employees, which tech people would call "line noise." Yet the BDSers took those thousand and parlayed it into op-eds in major media.
We see this all the time. Anti-Israel demonstrations that attract tiny crowds are trumpeted as major accomplishments.
The Israel haters are very good at trying to turn their worst failures into victories. Unfortunately, the media is often too willing to do their bidding.
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