Glenn Greenwald
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Interview with Journalists Lee Fang and Jack Poulson on Israeli Influence Campaign on U.S. Campuses
Interview
June 25, 2024
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The Interview: Journalists Lee Fang and Jack Poulson

As we said at the very top of the show, there was an incredibly entertaining and highly revealing meltdown by a CNN host, Kasie Hunt, that we wanted to cover. It says so much about the mindset of these kinds of journalists, which is a very important topic as we approach the presidential debate, the first one run by CNN, on Thursday. But because we had to cover and wanted to cover that much more important breaking news about Julian Assange's long overdue freedom, we're going to go ahead and postpone that segment until tomorrow night.

Instead, we’ll go to another breaking story, an independent reporting, an original and very important reporting, that was published today about the extent of the Israeli influence operation machine inside the United States. It was done by two highly accomplished independent journalists. Lee Fang is one of them. He was a colleague of mine back at The Intercept and after wisely leaving that outlet before it completely sunk into the sea, he is now doing that work at his own Substack, where he regularly breaks big stories using standard and tireless investigative techniques, which is why he is so often on our show: he's constantly breaking those kinds of stories through just sheer, hard investigative work. His coauthor on this story is Jack Paulson, who is an independent journalist who focuses on the intersection of technology and the military. He completed his PhD in computational and applied mathematics at UT Austin, in 2012, before serving as an assistant professor of computational science and engineering at Georgia Tech, and then an assistant professor of mathematics at Stanford University. 

The duo teamed up in a journalistic investigation that was published today in collaboration with The Guardian, into the extent of the Israeli Influence campaign aimed at the United States. 

This is obviously a topic that we have been covering for quite some time. We think it is of the utmost importance that there is a foreign country that is working very hard with a lot of money to not only influence public opinion but also the laws that the United States and our federal legislature enact that have a very direct relationship with that foreign government. And we are delighted to welcome both of them to the show. 

 

G. Greenwald: Good evening. It's great to see you guys both. Congratulations on this story. And I just want to kind of dive right into these questions because I do have a fair number of them. I guess you guys can decide amongst yourselves who's going to answer. If you want. I can just direct them. But let me just ask, let me ask each of you, actually, and, Jack, you can go first. As I said, there's been a lot of reporting recently, over many years, as well as recently, about the extent of what the Israelis are doing to influence American politics, the lawmaking process and American public opinion. What is one or two of what you think are the most significant new revelations in the story that you published? 

 

Jack Poulson: Yeah. So, there is a U.S. nonprofit called the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, which is a bit of a mouthful there, pronounced ISGAP. It was originally a center within Yale. It was kind of kicked out in 2011 for not being sufficiently rigorous. What I think hasn't really been paid attention to is that they have publicly claimed credit for the hearings that led to the firings of the several university presidents, for example, in particular, claiming credit for the December 5 hearings in front of Congress, where Elise Stefanik really grilled Harvard president, Claudine Gay. And basically, we traced out what led to that, in particular their reports on alleged influence on U.S. student campus protests and then how that fits into broader, kind of formal public-private partnership that's pretty widely reported, known as Concert or – you know, it's undergone several different names, it kind of uses all of them interchangeably to this day – Originally it was Kela Shlomo, then it was Concert, and now it's Voices of Israel. And it's really a way for the Israeli government to chip in half the money and then for philanthropists in the U.S. and around the world to chip in the other half to fund kind of pro-Israeli nonprofits to advocate and lobby on behalf of the Israeli government. 

 

G. Greenwald: So, Lee, if you want to pick one or two nuggets of the story that you think provide kind of new revelations about the influence campaign by this foreign government inside the United States, please do so. But also, let me just add to that the kind of broader perspective of what the significance is of the fact that Israel is doing this. 

 

Lee Fang: Well, look, I’m just a few weeks into the Gaza war. There was a discussion in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, about what to do around all of these students at universities, particularly elite universities, where there's a lot of influence in American society, that were critical of Israel. And there was a government minister, Amichai Chickli, who said, “Don't worry, we're going on the offensive – and I'm paraphrasing him – “and we're going to do it in a Concert way.” And he's referencing what Jack was just talking about, this kind of semi-covert organization that's controlled by the Israeli government and ran these kinds of covert PR campaigns in the past. You know, they were set up to be a “PR commando unit” to control kind of troll armies on social media to lobby in the U.S. to actually help pass laws in the U.S. They were partially responsible for the passage of anti-BDS laws over the last few years and in state capitals around the country. Well, after October 7, there was a relaunch of this unit and it's partnering with a number of groups. Some of its partners are doing outreach to black Democrats. They have a partner organization in the U.S. that's mobilizing support from lawmakers from the African American community. Many of their former leaders are working with an Israeli NGO but very active in the U.S. that's helping Meta – You know, that's Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, as well as TikTok, censor media. And, you know, they're using the same rubric that, you know, many other NGOs use, Media Matters and ADL and others, saying that “we're just here to provide assistance in stopping misinformation, disinformation, hate speech,” but they're very clearly working with the Israeli government in censoring and content moderating speech that's critical of Israel. 

In addition to all that, just as this same entity worked to pass anti-BDS laws in the past, and that's been well-documented, what we documented here that's completely new is that they are openly discussing their strategy to pass laws like the IHRA, International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the definition of antisemitism and to basically encode that into U.S. law, state law, federal law. We saw the passage of the bill in the House last month on education policy, but there's similar laws around the country that basically say that a form of illegal discrimination, of antisemitism, is certain forms of harsh criticism. You know, it's saying terms or slogans like “Israel is a racist country” that now can be viewed as a hate crime or as an illegal form of discrimination. That's a big part of their agenda, redefining the term antisemitism, just to stifle certain criticisms of Israel. We were able to obtain exclusive documents showing that even the Israeli Foreign Ministry has been in touch with these local state lawmakers in Florida, to pass this type of legislation. They're openly talking about it in the Knesset, saying this is their top priority. They're saying they're very clear in discussing their strategy. And we looked at transcripts, we looked at various business filings, public documents and government contracts. We really blended together a lot of sources to tell the story. 

 

G. Greenwald: Absolutely. I really encourage people to read it on their own. We're not going to be able to do every part of it here tonight. I want to kind of highlight the important parts and then draw out the implications. 

I just want to add one thing, which is the very first story that I ever reported in my entire life on the question of big tech censorship at the behest of government was at the end of 2015, maybe the beginning of 2016, when there was a document that was released showing that the Israeli government had an ongoing relationship with the top leadership of Facebook, where they were able to submit lists of Facebook pages that the Israeli government alleged were promoting terrorism or were in some way inciting hatred toward Israel. And that basically means any page run by Palestinians that were critical of Israel. And in something like 98% of the cases, Facebook was taking these requests and approving them and banning whatever accounts the Israelis indicated. And of course, this has been going on since then, […] meetings Israel has with big tech companies and saying, we demand that you remove “disinformation.” One of the things they listed as disinformation was the idea that the Israeli military actually killed some of their own citizens on October 7, and it is now proven beyond any shadow of a doubt is true. The Israeli government even acknowledges that. So, they're trying to prevent and, again, not in Israel, but in the United States, the ability for Americans to express certain views. And yet another example where the right – parts of the right –have been indignant about this sort of government-Big Tech collaboration to censor. And this is one of those areas where, magically, the pro-Israel part of the right seems to have no problem. 

Jack, let me ask you. I want to hear your view on this as well, Lee. There's been this kind of obsession on the part of certain segments of the American punditry with what's going on in American colleges for quite some time. And there's always been this kind of strange – you can even say creepy – dynamic where like 45-year old writers from like The New Republic, like, you know, New York Magazine and those kinds of places are just constantly focused on what 19- and 20-year olds are doing and writing articles about that on college campuses like one of the arguments you could make is that, well, the reason you have to focus on that is because these people and those trends become in the future the leaders, shaping our culture. But one of the things I've started to believe over the last kind of 18 to 24 months, a lot of those pundits who have been focused on colleges happened to be among the most vocal supporters of the Israeli government and all of us media. They justify this focus on colleges under an “anti-woke” banner, like people like Bari Weiss and Ben Shapiro, that whole crowd. At the same time, there have been strategy documents from the Israeli government saying the most important thing that we need to do is focus on American college campuses and prevent the growth of anti-Israel sentiment on American college campuses because that is such a threat to our national interests. What have you been able to discover in this new reporting about the priority that the Israeli government has been giving to try to control or influence American citizens or American college campuses? 

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Minnesota Shooting Exploited to Impose AI Mass Surveillance; Taylor Lorenz on Dark Money Group Paying Dem Influencers, and the Online Safety Act
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The ramifications of yesterday's Minneapolis school shooting – and the exploitations of it – continue to grow. On last night's program, we reviewed the transparently opportunistic efforts by people across the political spectrum to immediately proclaim that they knew exactly what caused this murderer to shoot people. As it turned out, the murderer was motivated by whatever party or ideology, religion, or social belief that they hate most. Always a huge coincidence and a great gift for those who claim that. 

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There've been a lot of revelations over the last 25 years, since the 9/11 attack, of all sorts of secretive programs that were implemented in the dark that many people I think correctly view as un-American in the sense that they run a foul and constitute a direct assault on the rights, protections and guarantees that we all think define what it means to be an American. And a lot of that happened. In fact, much of it, one could say most of it, happened because of the fears and emotions that were generated quite predictably by the 9/11 attack in 2001 and also the anthrax attack, which followed along just about a month later, six weeks later. We've done an entire show on it because of its importance in escalating the fear level in the United States in the wake of 9/11, even though it's extremely mysterious – the whole thing, how it happened, how it was resolved. But the point is that the fear levels increased, the anger increased, the sadness over the victims increased and into that breach, into that highly emotional state, stepped both the government and their partners in the media, which essentially included all major media outlets at the time, to tell people they essentially have to give up their rights if they want to be safe from future terrorist attacks. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Minneapolis School Shooting, MTG & Thomas Massie VS AIPAC, and More
System Update #506

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We are going to devote the show tonight to more questions that have come from our Locals members over the week. It continues to be some really interesting ones, raising all sorts of topics. 

We do have a question that we want to begin with that deals with what I think is the at least most discussed and talked about story of the day, if not the most important one, which is the school shooting that took place in a Catholic church in Minneapolis earlier today when a former student who attended that school went to the church, opened fire and shot 19 people, two of whom, young students between eight and ten, were killed. The other 17 were wounded, and amazingly, it’s expected that all of them are to survive. The carnage could have been much worse; the tragedy is manifest, however, and there is a lot of, as always, political commentary surrounding the mass shooting attempts to identify the ideology of the shooter in a way that is designed to promote a lot of people's political agenda. So, let's get to the first question.

 It is from @ZellFive, who's a member of our Locals community. He offers this question, but also a viewpoint that I think really ought to be considered by a lot more people. They write:

 

So, I'm really glad that this is one of the questions that we got today because this is a point I've been arguing for so long. So, let me just try to give you as many facts as I possibly can, facts that seem to be confirmed by law rather than just circulating on the internet. 

So, the suspected killer is somebody named Robin Westman, who is 23 years old. After they shot 19 people inside this church, killing two young children, they then committed suicide with a weapon. The person's birth name is Robert Westman, and around 16 or 17 years old, he decided that he identified as a woman, went to court, changed the legal name from Robert to Robin, and began identifying as a trans woman, so that obviously is going to provoke a lot of commentary, and there's been a lot of commentary provoked around that. We will definitely get to that. 

 

The suspected killer also left a very lengthy manifesto, a written manifesto which they filmed and uploaded on a video to YouTube, along with showing a huge arsenal of guns, including rifles and pistols and some automatic weapons. I believe various automatic rifles as well. I don't think they used any of those weapons at school. I believe they just used a rifle and a pistol, if I'm not mistaken. But we'll see about that. 

It was essentially a manifesto both in written terms, but then they also wrote various slogans on each of these weapons and various parts of the weapons. And we're going to go over a lot of what they put there because there's an obvious and instantaneous attempt, as there always is, to instantly exploit any of these shootings before the corpses are even removed from the ground. And I mean that literally. The effort already begins to inject partisan agenda, partisan ideology, ideological agendas to immediately try to depict the shooter as being representative of whatever faction the person offering this theory most hates or to claim that they're motivated by or an adherent of whatever ideology the person offering the theory most hates. And it happens in every single case. 

Oftentimes, there's an immediate attempt to squeeze some unrelated or perhaps even related agenda in and out of it instantly. Liberals almost always insist that whenever there's a mass shooting, it proves the need for a greater gun control without bothering to demonstrate whether the gun control they favor would have actually stopped the person from acquiring these weapons in the first place, whether they were legally acquired, whether they could have been legally acquired, even with gun control measures, it doesn't matter, instantaneously exploiting the emotions surrounding a shooting like this to try to increase support for gun control. Whereas people on the right often do the opposite. 

On the right, they typically will argue that more guns would have enabled somebody to neutralize the shooter more rapidly, that perhaps churches and schools need greater security. We need more police. So, there's that kind of an almost automatic and reflexive exploitation again, almost before anything is known, but there is an even more pernicious attempt to instantly declare that everyone knows the motives of the shooter, that they know the political outlook and perspective of the shooter. They know their partisan ideology and their ideological beliefs in an attempt to demonize whatever group a person hates most. 

This is unbelievably ignorant, deceitful and ill-advised for so many reasons. The first of which is that every single political action, every single ideological movement, produces evil mass shooters. For every far-leftist mass shooter that you want to show or white supremacist mass shooters that you want to show, you can show people who have murdered in defense of all kinds of causes. And so even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the shooter on the same day the shooting happened, I mean, you can develop a clear, reliable, concise and specific understanding of the shooter that you never even heard of until four hours ago, but you're so insightful, your investigative skills are so profound, that you're able to discern exactly what the motive of this person was in doing something so intrinsically insane and evil as shooting up a church filled with young school children. 

The idea that anyone can do that is preposterous on its face. I mean, the police always say, because they're actual investigators, actual law enforcement officers who want to collect evidence that stands up for public scrutiny and also in court, “We don't know yet what the motive is; we're collecting clues.” But almost nobody on Twitter or social media or in the commentariat is willing to say that. Everybody insists immediately, no, the killer was motivated by the other party, the opposite party of the one I'm a member of, or this ideology that's not mine, or in this religion that is the one I like the most to demonize. It's just so transparent and so blatant what is being done here. And yet it's so prevalent. 

I mean, you could go on to social media and principally the social media platform where the most journalists and political pundits, influencers and the like congregate, which is X, and I could show you probably 40 different theories offered definitively with an authoritative voice. Not like, hey, this might be possibly the case, but saying clearly, we know that the killer was motivated by this particular ideology, this particular set of beliefs. And I'm not talking about random X users, I'm talking about people with significant platforms, people who are well-known. 

I could probably show you 40 different theories like that, where every person is purporting to know definitively exactly what the motive of the shooter was and by huge coincidence they all have latched on to whatever ideology or faction or motive most serves their own political worldview to demonize the people with whom they most disagree, or whatever ideology or group of people they most hate. That's always what is done. And I guess in some cases, if a shooter leaves a particularly clear and coherent manifesto, and we have had those sometimes, we have had Anders Breivik in Norway, who made it very clear that his motive was hatred for Muslim immigrants who shot up a summer camp in Norway. We had the Christchurch, New Zealand killer who attacked two mosques and mass murdered dozens of Muslims at a mosque and made clear he was doing so because it was viewed that Islam is a danger. We had the mass shooter in a Buffalo supermarket, who made manifest their white supremacist views. We've had mass shooters who are motivated by hatred of Christianity, as happened in the Nashville shooter attack on a Christian school there, I mean, I could go on and on. 

As I said, every single political faction produces mass shooters, mass killers, evil, crazy people who use violence indiscriminately against innocents in advance of their beliefs. But most of the time, and you might even be able to say all of the times – I mean, maybe I don't like the phrase all of the times because you can conceive of exceptions, but close to all the time, most of the time, people who go and just randomly shoot at innocent people whom they don't know are above all else driven by mental illness and spiritual decay, not by political ideology or adherence to a political cause. That often is the pretext for what they're doing; that may be how they convince themselves that what they are doing is justified. But far more often than not, the principle overriding factor is the fact that the person is just mentally ill or spiritually broken, by which I mean just a completely nihilistic person who has given up on life and wants to just inflict suffering on other people because of the suffering that they feel or their suffering from delusions. 

And this isn't something I invented today. This is something I've long been saying. And I just want to make one more point, which is, even though there are sometimes manifestos that are extremely clear and say, “I am murdering people in a supermarket that is African-American because I hate Black people and I don't think they belong in the United States,” or “I believe that white people are the sole proper citizens of the United States and I want to murder and kill inspired by those other mass murderers” that I mentioned, even then, it may not be the case that the person's representation of what they're is the actual motive because it could be driven by a whole variety of other factors, including mental illness, or all kinds of other issues to be able to conclude in six hours, even with a crystal-clear manifesto that the person did it for reasons that you're ready to definitively assert are the reasons is so irresponsible. It's just so intellectually bankrupt. 

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