Video: Palantir CEO Karp – given huge NHS data contract – grins and fidgets under genocide challenge

Palantir also has UK policing contract – and its CEO has also boasted about killing people for profit

In February “unashamed techno-nationalist” Alex Karp, the chief executive of software company Palantir – which supplies military software and services to the Israeli occupation that has murdered and maimed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank – told shareholders he’s sure they’re having as much fun as he is and approves of the company ‘scar[ing] enemies and on occasion kill[ing] them’.

And earlier this month Karp – who last year published a Christmas message for investors in which he boasted about his and his colleagues ‘gratitude’ for their role in making the ‘obvious superiority of the West’ something to be ‘feared’, and has described US university students protesting against Israel’s genocide in Gaza as “an infection inside of our society” – grinned and fidgeted on stage at a US forum as a Palestinian-American woman challenged him over his collaboration in Israel’s genocide, until his interviewer called for security to remove her:

Palantir has a huge contract with the UK government that gives it access to the data of all NHS patients – and other contracts, as former Leicester East MP Claudia Webbe has pointed out, with police forces in the UK to provide surveillance software. Exactly how many police forces is unclear, because three quarters of UK forces refuse to say whether they too have a contract with the firm, as Leicestershire Police has signed under the Starmer government.

As the Good Law Project notes:

Palantir has worked with US agencies accused of separating children from their parents, wrongfully detaining thousands of US citizens and forcibly sterilising women. The day after Israel was accused of genocide at the International Criminal Court, the company signed a deal with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to provide “support for war-related missions”. And Palantir’s predictive policing project in LA was cancelled in 2019 after accusations that it entrenched racism and didn’t reduce crime.

Palantir has also been linked, in a parliamentary enquiry and through investigative journalism, to the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. None of this has been considered by the Starmer regime or its predecessors as enough reason to bar the US-supremacist firm from access to the data and privacy of UK citizens.

But for all his links to the US and Israeli militaries and his pride and ‘gratitude’ in being a death-dealer, Karp looked unsure how to handle simple questions and comments from a single Palestinian woman, until his mate called security.

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