Computer giant whose software is used by Israel in Gaza continues anti-Palestinian repression
Microsoft has imposed an automated filter on its internal email systems to prevent employees using the words “Palestine,” “Gaza,” or “genocide”, according to pro-Palestine employee group ‘No Azure for Apartheid’ (NAA). The filter was discovered on the companies email servers yesterday.
Microsoft has long clamped down on pro-Palestinian activism, sacking workers who organised a vigil for the victims of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and this week admitted that it has sold AI and other services to the Israeli military during the eighteen-month-long slaughter of civilians – though claiming that its ‘investigation’ showed that its systems have not been used to kill people. NAA disrupted the company’s ‘Build’ conference on Monday, mounting an anti-genocide protest during the chief executive’s speech over the company’s enthusiastic pursuit of military contracts with Israel’s government, which has become one of Microsoft’s top customers since the start of the genocide.
My people are suffering! Cut ties with Israel! No Azure for apartheid! Free, free Palestine!
No Azure for Apartheid member during Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s speech on Monday.
Microsoft has also come under fire recently for colluding with the Trump regime in its attacks on the International Criminal Court and its chief prosecutor Karim Khan. After Trump issued an executive order declaring sanctions on Khan and other ICC workers for issuing war crimes arrest warrants for Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant, the firm immediately blocked Khan’s access to his email accounts. The ICC is said to have been ‘paralysed’ by the move, with ICC president Judge Tomoko Akane describing it as part of a series of:
serious attacks against the Court’s States Parties, the rule of law based international order and millions of victims.
Israel has killed more than 200,000 civilians in Gaza since the start of the genocide and has destroyed Gaza’s hospitals, schools, housing, water purification. It has now launched a full-scale invasion and continues to prevent food and medicines from reaching Gaza’s surviving population of around two million people – apart from a PR exercise earlier this week in which five containers were allowed to cross the border but not be distributed, and contained mostly shrouds for burying its victims.
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Hmmm, and what of the mention of two israeli embassy workers shot dead in DC bill?
I mean, the medias wall-to-wall coverage of the two victims plastered all over the place, with social media messages from just every western leader, makes it hard NOT to speak about – without mentioning gaza, Palestine, and the tens of thousands already butchered, alongside the remaining tens of hundreds of thousands being left to starve, or die of disease.
Oops… oh well, just as well you can’t sack me, innit, bill?.
“Two Israeli embassy staffers getting shot in Washington DC is less newsworthy than tens of thousands of Palestinians being killed in Israel’s genocidal land grab. It is less important. It deserves less attention. It is not the main story. Israel’s genocide in Gaza is the main story.”
Caitlin Johnstone
May 23, 2025
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/05/23/thoughts-on-the-israeli-embassy-staff-killings/
“The world has already woken up to our complicity and is turning against us. The boycotts will increase and our image will continue to spiral into disrepair.” — Microsoft employee, in an all-staff email following the protest at the Microsoft Build conference.
Sadly, theGuardian article from which thaat quote came is not yet archived, so I won’t provide a link to it (cos we should all DUMP the Guardian)
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” — Edmund Burke
“The world has already woken up to our complicity and is turning against us. The boycotts will increase and our image will continue to spiral into disrepair.” — Microsoft employee, in an all-staff email following the protest at the Microsoft Build conference.”
It is not just Microsoft which the Global Majority are turning against.
Here’s anthropologist and professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Jason Hickle:
https://x.com/jasonhickel/status/1921216304540787025
“Palestine is the rock on which the West will break itself.
Put yourself in the shoes of people in the global South. For nearly two years they have watched how Western leaders, who love to talk about human rights and the rule of law, are happy to shred all these values in the most spectacular displays of hypocrisy in order to prop up their military proxy-state as it openly conducts genocide and ethnic cleansing against an occupied people, even in the face of *overwhelming* international condemnation. What do you think people in the South are supposed to conclude from this?
What would *you* conclude from this in their position? Decades of Western propaganda have been shattered, this time in full technicolour. Western governments have made it clear that they do not care about human rights and the rule of law when it comes to people of colour, the global majority. They spit on humanity. 500 years on from the beginning of the European colonial project and they have hardly changed in this regard.
If you think people will be willing to tolerate this going forward, you are mistaken. As Southern states begin to develop the capacity to reject Western hegemony, they will not hesitate to do so. In the 21st century, the West will find itself isolated from the world majority, and the world will move on without them. If Western governments had any sense, they would realise this fact, work to re-establish the rule of law, and try to establish the moral basis for mutual respect and cooperation with the rest of the world.”
And for a Global Majority which, unlike the West, knows how to join the dots the hypocrisy of an Oligarch controlled Collective West and its political and media classes using local proxies to plunder the rest of the planet and slaughtering brown-skinned people whilst pretending to be anti-racist is certainly not going to be limited to the Zionist Israeli proxy.
They can see the common threads of a superiority complex which divides humanity into the “civilised” so called “Garden” of the white West and the “primitive” designated “Jungle” of everyone else from Palestinians to Black Africans, Asians to Slavs, Latinos to Indo-Chinese.
As Hickle observes, the process of quarantining a terminally unhinged and unreformable not fit for purpose collapsing Western system is already underway.
Meanwhile…………
………..diplomat Alistair Crooke puts further meat on that bone:
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/05/19/transition-to-new-world-order-beyond-most-in-west/
Channelling Michael Hudson, Crooke focuses on an out of control parasitic debt laden financial system which is gradually unravelling:
“restructuring in some form clearly is inevitable. It comes down otherwise to a choice between bankruptcy slow, or fast and disorderly…..
…..The raw fact of the structural imbalance crisis is bad enough. But the western geo-strategic crisis goes much deeper than just the structural contradiction of inward capital flows and a ‘strong’ dollar eating the heart out of the U.S. manufacturing sector. Because it is bound up, too, with the concomitant collapse of core ideologies underpinning liberal globalism……
……the western economic paradigm of debt-led, hyper-financialised consumerism has run its course and that change is inevitable. But so heavily invested is the West in the ‘Anglo’ economic model that, for the most part, the economists stay paralysed in the spider’s web. There is no Alternative (TINA) is the watch phrase….
……..here is the fundamental point: The crisis of liberal globalism is not just a matter of re-balancing a failing structure. Imbalance anyway is inevitable where all economies similarly pursue, all together, all at once, the export-led ‘open’ Anglo-model.
No, the bigger problem is that the archetypal myth of individuals (and oligarchs) pursuing their own separate and individual utility maximisation – thanks to the hidden hand of market magic – is such that in aggregate, their combined efforts will be to the benefit of the community as a whole (Adam Smith) has collapsed too.
Effectively, the ideology to which the West clings so tenaciously – that human motivation is utilitarian (and only utilitarian) is a delusion……
…….Put plainly, the West cannot transition to an alternate economic structure (such as a ‘closed’, internal-circulation model) precisely because it is so heavily invested ideologically in the philosophical underpinnings to the present one – that to question those roots seems tantamount to a betrayal of European values and of the foundational libertarian values of America (drawn from the French Revolution).
The reality is that today the western vision of its claimed Athenian ‘values’ is as discredited as its economic theory in the rest of the world, as well as amongst a significant slice of its angry and disaffected own populations!”
———————————————–
For the most part, Crooke seems to be talking here about the Oligarch captured political, media, economic, educational professional management classes. Who have largely internalised this model to the extent that their entire psyche, both individually and collectively, is invested in the paradigm. So much so that it is next to impossible to envisage those Crooke is talking about not being prepared to die in a ditch and to take the rest of humanity with them rather than give up half a millennium or more of overlordship.
However, even this represents only part of the problem.
Cue Australian journalist (one of the few worth the title) Caitlin Johnson:
“Western civilization is dominated by a power structure that has invested more heavily in “soft power” (mass-scale psychological manipulation) than any other in history. It pervades our media, our internet services, our art — literally all of mainstream culture.
The politicians lie, the news media lie, the movies lie, the internet lies, the advertisements lie, the shows between the advertisements lie. They lie about our world, they lie about our government, they lie about what’s important, how we should think, what we should value, and how we should measure our level of success and worthiness as human beings.”
Caitlin Johnstone: You don’t have to choose between being happy and being informed
The point being that the all pervasiveness of the Western propaganda model – since Bernays a century ago – means that a not insignificant section of Western populations are also just as committed to an unworkable and collapsing paradigm as the elite classes which are dragging us down.
That represents an existential issue for those parts of the population Crooke identifies as being a “significant slice of its [the Collective West’s] angry and disaffected own populations!” Just as it does for the Global majority.
I’d never realised Caitlin Johnstone was Australian, Dave H. Live and learn…
Right Wing/Naive Liberal Gates & The Control Freaks.
Oh dear just seen because Harvard has demonstrated support for critical thinking over Gaza the lumpen US Govt is threatening to ban its 6,700 international students.
International students enrich the student experience.
They bring millions to the US economy.
And when they return home they act as volunteer ambassadors for the USA, or at least used to.
Lumpen King Con shoots himself in the foot again.
Primary School children in the US could do a better job in governing.
With Gaza et al & the US Govt we are dealing with absolute Right Wing Nincompoops!
Critical Thinking 1 Lumpen Right Wing USA Govt 0.