The Constructs: Is Sheryl Sandberg an Israeli Agent of Influence?
It’s easier to "lean in" when you have an intelligence service behind you.
All behavioral traits are heritable and yes, that includes espionage. There are families of spies, a fact we are learning from the Maxwell family, whose members include Ghislaine and Isabel, both of whom proudly continue in their father’s footsteps. Are there other families of spies operating in America today and if so, where would they work? What would they control? And how might we stop them?
Recent news that Attorney General Karl Racine of DC is doggedly pursuing the relationship between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook and how Facebook’s four executives, among them Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg, might have contributed to making our nation less safe, is long overdue.
Why are the Facebook executives so afraid? Because the story they’ve been telling isn’t true.
They are covering their tracks and trying to curry favor: by banning facial recognition and now by banning obvious Israeli firms — Harvey Weinstein client Black Cube chief among them — from the platform.
This is a bit like the crooks pledging to crack down on crime or OJ’s bid to stop the real criminals or that there’s gambling in Casablanca.
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Ever since I met Mark Zuckerberg some 17 years ago it’s been my contention that the Facebook project is both far more interesting and more dangerous than we’ve been led to believe. Having known some of the principals I have never really believed the Facebook story and it turns out I had every reason to be suspicious.
The most interesting aspect is Eduardo Saverin, who provided the initial capital.
The company was incorporated in Miami and we aren’t supposed to talk about Saverin’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party (through marriage) or to transnational organized crime. Nor are we supposed to notice all the tech executives that have since decamped to Miami. Are they leaving San Francisco? Or simply returning home?
Whereas neoconservatism sought to spread “democracy” by force of arms Facebook sought to spread it by “connecting the world.” Or, at least that’s the cover story. Behind every great fortune is a great crime and Facebook is this: it is a mesmerization machine, subsidized by Russian-Israeli-Brazilian criminal cash, and designed to enslave vulnerable people in a trance while exploitatively stealing their time and attention.
Neoconservatism and communism are all just failed abstractions. Facebook, too, will fail for the simple reason that people are wildly different and yet prefer those just like themselves. Indeed the same forces that bring people together internationally ultimately will prove to be Facebook’s undoing. You have more in common with those who share your racial and ethnic background for the same reason you love your family: They are an extension of you. Genetic nepotism for the win and way of life, in other words. Survival not of the fittest but of the family.
Donald Trump, a German-Scott American, played very well to the Germans and Scotts who make up the key demographics in the key states in the key counties he needed. Trump’s electoral failures were that he was a kind of cover for Kushner and Zuckerberg who sought to exploit the forgotten man and the Forgotten Man promptly forgot them at the ballot box. To his credit Trump seems at last to recognize this and is picking fights with the Israeli lobby and Netanyahu in particular.
Brexit gave Britain an out to rejoin her overseas positions around the world, at least what few remained of them. Did the British empire end? Let’s ask AUKUS. AUKUS — an alliance of the English peoples — is the net outcome but so, too, is Putin’s claim to the soul of every Russian wherever he may be and there are Russians seemingly everywhere, from Miami to Kazakhstan to London. Emperor Xi makes a claim, too, on the Chinese mind and body, something we ought to take very seriously as they populate our universities, our gifted and talented programs, and “invest” in our property, venture, and stock markets. We cannot allow a world in which the Chinese rape their environment while depositing the loot in our societies. The homophilic nature of social media is precisely the forces that will unwind it.
It isn’t a coincidence that a homosexual would see this phenomenon clearly or that a student of Rene Girard would see the mimetic and memetic effects of social media.
The question for Peter Thiel is how to escape being the scapegoat now that the Anglo-American intelligence services have turned its attention to Facebook’s menacing effects.
And that is a question only he can answer.
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I had penned a rather massive point by point rebuttal, apologia, explication of Max Chafkin’s book, The Contrarian, which I might well have titled instead, The Construct, or perhaps even, The Silicon Valley Scapegoat.
Though it did not do well The Contrarian is worth reading though I do hope there’ll be other more interesting books about Peter. Hell, I might even write one. If I come across as a Peter Thiel apologist it may well be because I am one. Or, if you prefer, I am a Thiel student. I think Peter is one of the great thinkers of our time but he has his flaws but I believe he will ultimately choose the right. Or at least that’s how I’ve placed my bets.
Still, I do wonder what the fuck he is thinking employing obvious fraud Eric Weinstein and why he makes much ado about the Chinese spies at Google but not the Israeli ones at say, Founders Fund or Facebook. That would make for compelling reading but it isn’t in Chafkin’s book.
(Perhaps I will publish my full review of The Contrarian another day. It’s always good to have an arrow or two in the quiver for when you need to perform Robinhood-like feats of derring-do. No, I do think I’ll save the heroics for when they are needed. It’s best to ration one’s self. Terribly sorry about all that. If you think I’m a coward or evading you aren’t wrong.)
So for the moment and because so many have asked and because Facebook seems to be in the news as of late let me say this about The Contrarian.
That which Chafkin writes about me he gets mostly right. Let me elaborate.
Gawker was a front for Russian intelligence and I am honored to have worked so closely with Peter is dismantling that rogue actor. Gawker’s servant was Michael Cohen of Renova Group. Yes, that Michael Cohen. Thiel told me that Michael Cohen called him asking him to go easy on Gawker. Thiel refused to his ever living credit. The Chafkin book doesn’t quite go into how sociopathic Gawker truly was. David Geithner, brother of ex-Obama Treasury Secretary, was a target merely for belonging to an American deep state family.
My criticisms of Peter is that we ought to have done far more to the other media malefactors, backed as so many of them are, by foreign money. Watch this space. A free press that is subsidized by foreign intelligence isn’t very free at all. And yes, I would submit that that includes Mike Bloomberg whose ties to China deserve further exploration. Bloomberg’s running for office could well have been a way of paying off a bunch of people. How else to explain it?
Clearview is an attack on Facebook. Facebook, through its in kind multi-million dollar donation (sure it was a settlement) to the mobbed up Chicago trial firm of Loevy & Loevy, has declared war on Clearview, which seeks to separate Facebook’s photo database from its exploitative ad ecosystem. I make no secret about the role Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the ad supported internet played in radicalizing me. If I could be put into a trance through Facebook who knows who else could be? Q Anon and Black Lives Matter are part of the same domestic radicalization program, albeit with different agents animating each side, but still designed to pull us apart.
Peter’s investment in Clearview was a masterstroke which hedged him for the coming collapse of Facebook. His decision to back Clearview came at the expense of his relationship with the highly compromised staff at Founders Fund. It was, in other words, a mark of political courage. Shame on Founders Fund for not realizing it but they struggle over there to understand Peter’s intuition. In my opinion much we’d be much better off without Founders Fund and with Peter making these decisions unilaterally. He’d have less space to hide but he could do a lot more good.
Peter is the real Facebook whistleblower. Indeed throughout his time on the Facebook board Peter has been a sort of whistleblower ferrying bits and pieces out to the press, helping to let the public know what was really going on. He is every bit a whistleblower as Frances Haugen and I’d submit a great deal more effective. Many of the things you know about the naughty things Facebook has done has come from Peter smuggling it out.
If it be true that Zuckerberg and Kushner cut a deal to harm America I doubt very much that Peter was its architect. No, that unholy alliance between Ben Shapiro, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jared Kushner owes its existence to the predations of the know it all Harvard types whose arrogant stupidity can only be understood by those who have experienced it first hand. What’s that line in The Great Gatsy? Ah yes, here it is:
It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
That was another gilded age, of course, but plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Oh, where, oh where are the trust busting Rooseveltians when you need them?
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Chafkin misses a few things:
The word “Israel” doesn’t show up, except in passing about a weird Canadian-Israeli investment Peter made at his hedge fund Clarium Capital. It did well, we’re told, though we are left with little explanation as to why that might be. Nor does the personage of Jeffrey Epstein, with whom Peter and others in Silicon Valley are rightly obsessed about, having dined and invested alongside him. If one builds databases one assumes it’ll be in safe hands and yet it so rarely is. Epstein proves that without question. We are all just living in Epstein’s world.
This lack of an Israel mention is odd because Peter’s father mined the uranium for the South African and Israeli atomic bomb in Namibia. When Peter frets about the apocalypse it might have been because he lived under the roof of someone who had helped midwife it. (I wasn’t around for but two years of the eighties but I understand that this nuclear oblivion thing was kind of a big deal.)
Indeed Peter’s aide to camp and CFO at PayPal was none other than Roelof Botha, the grandson of the late P.W. Botha, who later became prime minister and who was the South African defense who, in 1975, tried to buy Israeli warheads from Shimon Peres for its own South African nuclear weapons program.
In 1977 Botha, then foreign minister, visited Israel to sign a pact with Prime Minister Menachem Begin and foreign minister Moshe Dayan to manufacture at least six nuclear weapons. When Israel joined in on the efforts to boycott South Africa the elder statesman regarded the betrayal as a personal affront. He even threatened to stop South African Jews from being able to take money out of South Africa.
Today his heir Roelof heads up Sequoia’s US operations where the Chinese move money out of China and into American venture. Botha’s wife is Singaporean-Chinese and Sequoia had no problem investing in SenseTime, the Chinese facial recognition company barred from the U.S.
But Sequoia partner Doug Leone dithered and strung Hoan Ton-That along and never invested in Clearview even though he loved using the product to keep the names of his Chinese employees straight. I’m sure he did all sorts of due diligence on his Chinese employees. Ha ha, I’m just kidding with you. You and I both know he doesn’t. It’s treasonous to support foreign companies over American ones, especially when they are used for intelligence gathering purposes.
Gotta deploy that Chinese cash in the latest and greatest startup, after all, just not pro-American ones. Just how exactly Sequoia-backed SnapChat or WhatsApp are game changing investments I leave to you to ponder but hey, WhatsApp got acquired by Facebook for $19 billion, earning Sequoia $3 billion, or 50 times on their money. I suppose that makes up for Facebook’s Sean Parker not allowing Sequoia to invest early on.
In any event, back to South Africa, Nelson Mandela ascended to the commanding heights of South Africa and proved to the world that he was a neoliberal and not a communist. Too late! The looting of South Africa began in earnest then as resources were extracted from the international pariah and deposited elsewhere, in safer places – like say, in PayPal. Some of the extractors included David Sacks, whose Lithuanian-born grandfather was a candymaker in South Africa and whose father invested family money in PayPal. Sacks’s saccharin investments continue apace and he has invested in Bird, the electric scooter company. Ah yes, we wanted flying cars but we got Bird instead.
PayPal was Israeli and Eastern European Jewry with Thiel as its Teutonic face while Musk, enamored of the Russians, was decidedly more Eastern and Russian. Musk was quickly couped by Peter’s Jewish friends and the neocons surrounding Thiel have since acquired a bit of experience at that sort of thing. Then as now governing post-coup proved to be another thing entirely and the company was forced to sell to eBay, itself a front for the CIA. (Look a little closer at Pierre Omidyar and The Intercept and of course Meg Whitman, why don’t you.) As you know the CIA would have no interest whatsoever in whatever everyone were buying in auctions. No siree.
Chafkin misses the real thing behind Peter and he attempts to pin Silicon Valley’s faults on Peter. This goes way too far.
All businesses seek to be monopolies, yes, obviously while denying that they are monopolies. There are good monopolies and bad monopolies just as there are good governments and bad governments. There are national champions which serve the national interest and there are national embarrassments who in the olden times would have had their charters revoked but nowadays get humiliated in front of congressional hearings.
What we are discussing is power: where power resides, who wields it, and on whose behalf it is exercised. And that power doesn’t ultimately reside with Peter. Powers resides with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, who make all decisions. They alone can fix whatever problems Facebook has and they alone choose not to.
Mark’s life, or at least a Hollywoodized version of it, has been well explored. He’s often compared to a dictator and has compared himself to a wartime general, rather hilariously so if I might add. He handles product not business development. In my view he is a prisoner, forced by others to acquire companies that they have already invested in. Compromise Mark and you can control Facebook and control the world. Who wouldn’t want to do that? This is in stark contrast to the boyish kid profiled in The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick.
Facebook values itself based on Metcalfe’s Law or n^2. Only by understanding this equation can you really understand a lot of the strategies that Zuckerberg and Sandberg have deployed. They have to keep acquiring companies so that their ad networks continue to work. You can learn all about this topic and more in the very good textbook, Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World.
Here’s the equation for the mathy among us.
[(number of users)(ad value per user)] ^ 2 = Value of Facebook
Alas Facebook has an incentive to lie about the number of users and never to do a complete overhaul of its fake users. The social network doesn’t do what they do in Korean or Asian social media companies and require a driver’s license or government ID to log on – the very “real identity” problem Facebook purported to try and solve.
(Ironically Russian spyware firm Parler does just that because Parler is all about identifying the discontented conservatives and radicalizing them still further. Russia has already engaged in collecting data on homeschoolers and American service members. In the aftermath of January 6th the Russians even gamified hunting seditionists by selling facial recognition to the good liberals through their company Pim Eyes.
Just as Metcalfe’s Law explains how Facebook could grow in value so quickly so too does it explain the unique dangers Facebook faces. If it starts to lose users Facebook can be unwound just as fast as it grew. Think MySpace on crack.
Many of the companies Sandberg and Zuckerberg have acquired can only charitably be called spyware or malicious time sucks.
Instagram
The book on the clash between Zuckerberg and Sandberg and the Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger is Sarah Frier’s No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram. In essence Mark Zuckerberg promised the Instagram founders’ autonomy but delivered an ad and influencer hellscape which has led to all of the teen suicides we now experience routinely. Jealous of Instagram’s success Zuckerberg diverted resources from Instagram to Facebook, a decision which prompted the two cofounders to quit.
“[Zuckerberg] tried to introduce a tool that would drive Instagram traffic to Facebook. Sandberg, for her part, insisted on more ads on the app,” write Sheera Frankel and Cecilia Kang in An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination. The Royal Society for Public Health in the UK named Instagram as the worst app for mental health for young people. The Russians and other foreign actors employ it as a foreign influence machine.
Onavo
Zuckerberg acquired Israeli tech firm Onavo for $115M, according to Frenkel and Kang. Onavo acted as a kind of Internet surveillance product for Facebook’s acquisition team.
Guy Rosen met Roi Tiger in the Israeli Army’s 8200 unit before cofounding Onavo together, according to YNetNews.com.
Both Rosen and Tiger say that Facebook regards Israel as an important asset. Proof of this is that Facebook only operates two development centers outside of the US – in London and Ramat Gan.
"Facebook is aware of the achievements of its office in the country within the framework of the internet.org," maintains Tiger. "I can say that I am already in concrete discussions about the next projects that we will bring to Israel, not only related to internet.org, but also other vital issues are very important to us as a society. This shows Facebook's commitment to Israel."
Today Rosen serves on the integrity team at Facebook – the same team that Frances Haugen left.
Why is an Israeli citizen heading that up? Isn’t there a conflict of interest there in light of foreign governments intervening with Facebook? Indeed it’s been a core strategy of Prime Minister Netanyahu to place spies in Silicon Valley. Did that happen here?
In any event Onavo became key for Facebook acquiring WhatsApp.
What’s up with WhatsApp?
Frenkel and Kang again:
Jan Koum and his cofounder, Brian Acton, had sold WhatsApp on the condition that the company would operate independently from the rest of Facebook. Zuckerberg had assured Koum, who feared government surveillance via apps, that he would make privacy a priority….
Acton said that, in a meeting with Sandberg, he proposed a metered pricing model that charged users a small fraction of a penny for a certain number of messages. Sandberg shot down the idea, claiming, “It won’t scale.”
I’m not so sure I buy Koum’s privacy obsession. It’s pretty clear that WhatsApp has all kinds of holes in it that enabled Koum’s beloved Israelis to penetrate it. Koum donates heavily to Israeli and Jewish causes and he is a Refusenik from Ukraine — the very sorts of people that the Sandberg family was trying to bring to the United States.
Jewish Insider has more:
The [Koum] foundation gave at least $1 million apiece to Bnai Zion Foundation, BBYO, the Birthright Israel Foundation, Friends of Ir David, Israel and Co., Israel Healthcare Foundation, and the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto, California. A $5.3 million donation was made to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, which sponsors programs and projects for current and former IDF soldiers… Two of his foundation’s recipient organizations — the Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee — work with Jewry in the former Soviet Union. [Emphasis mine]
All of this raises a series of questions. Did Zuckerberg buy WhatsApp to pay off people in the Old Soviet Union? We already know he paid off Sequoia, which is flush with Chinese cash. How much did this affect his calculus?
How did Sheryl Sandberg’s longstanding ties with the Refusenik community color her decision to buy WhatsApp? Is this all a form of money laundering to foreign investors and backers? Did WhatsApp deliberately leave holes in its technology that made the work of NSO Group, an Israeli spyware firm also heavily connected with Unit 8200, easier to accomplish?
Indeed in Facebook’s lawsuit with NSO Group, the Israeli hacking firm that has come under disrepute, NSO defends itself by saying that Facebook loved NSO’s technology and wanted to deploy it. Who knows who is telling the truth anymore.
And that’s precisely the problem. We need a truth and reconciliation committee investigating Facebook though a trial will do.
I know a player when I see one. Like Elizabeth Holmes or Ann Wojcicki before her, Sheryl Sandberg is a construct. But unlike them she is the author of her own story – quite literally having written two books about herself – and has flirted with a run for the American presidency.
Had Peter Thiel and I not helped Trump be elected we’d no doubt be suffering through a Sandberg stint as Treasury Secretary. She was apparently measuring the drapes and plotting her escape into the second Clinton White House. Après moi, le déluge! Let them eat Facebook! Or let Facebook eat them, it’s all the same to Sheryl as she prepared to serve under President Hillary Clinton.
It didn’t happen. And she got stuck. She will now have to answer for what’s she’s built and for whom it works.
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It is Sandberg, not Zuckerberg, who is the author of Facebook’s woes. It is she, not he, who built the hyper addictive ad platform which Facebook now uses for its global domination.
Who is Sheryl Sandberg really? What motivates her? Where does she come from? And what does she have in store for the rest of us?
Sheryl Sandberg is keen to tell us about the importance of family in her life. She’s even interviewed her parents on stage and discussed their Eastern European immigrant roots. “The most important thing is to be a mensch,” her mother Adele says.
Has Sheryl Sandberg been a mensch? No, she’s been haughty and naughty — from Harvard to Facebook.
She hasn’t so much “leaned in” as been “selected for” by the Jewish men in her life.
“Sandberg speaks occasionally of her Jewish identity, but it does not play a major role in her account, despite the fact that a careful reader can trace significant Jewish [male] connections, from Larry Summers to Sergei Brin to Mark Zuckerberg,” wrote Professor Deborah Dash Moore of U. Michigan in a review of Sandberg’s book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013).
Summers was engaged in a political project. She is a faux feminist, which even a cursory examination of her college thesis makes clear. Your humble correspondent leaked it way back when. Here’s how it was discussed in 2016 by none other than Milo Yiannopoulos.
The Facebook COO appears to have wholly bought in to feminist pseudo-statistics, making the extraordinary claim that 95 percent of domestic violence victims are female. The true ratio of male to female domestic violence victims is now known to be far more even, with meta-analyses of over 200 studies showing a rough gender symmetry in domestic violence.
Sandberg can’t be excused by the date of publication (1991). By then, researchers had long been aware that men and women abused each other on a roughly equal basis. By 1988, this research had already been published in mainstream journals.
At one point in the thesis, Sandberg does acknowledges male victims, noting that she does “not mean to imply that men are not also subjected to acts of violence by their partner,” but later goes on to approvingly cite an argument from two academics – without evidence – that “by and large” most women who attacked men did so “to defend themselves.”
In the thesis, provided to Breitbart News by journalist Charles Johnson, Sandberg makes it clear that men, “traditional attitudes” and “western society” are the driving forces behind domestic violence. “Intimate violence is not only fostered by traditional attitudes towards marriage, but by the hierarchical, male-dominant nature of Western society” writes Sandberg.
Western society is to blame? Really? This analysis would be sophomoric but Sandberg’s a senior honors thesis from Harvard! What gives?
Sandberg has been running a political project ever since she was a college student that are at odds with greater realities but which make for very good PR. There’s a direct through line from her college days to her status as queen of Facebook.
If so, she wouldn’t be the first in her line to pursuing an odd political project. Sandberg dedicated her 1991 college thesis to her grandfather Benjamin Einhorn, a libertarian and a goldbug and a prominent supporter of the Koch-backed American Institute for Economic Research. (Her cousin is the hedge fund billionaire David Einhorn.)
The elder Einhorn died in 2007 but the political activism in Sandberg’s family didn’t die with him.
Israel and the fate of Soviet Jewry (which we shall turn to in a moment) is Sandberg family’s chief political interest.
Her father Joel Sandberg is very close to Eli Beer, the head of the United Hatzalah. Sandberg may even have saved his life during the early days of coronavirus. He certainly credits himself for it. So does Alan Dershowitz, who, along with Joel Sandberg serves on its board.
What is the United Hartzalah? Well it officially says that are an “emergency medical organization.” But is it?
Meir Dagan, the former head of Mossad, joined its board in 2014. Dagan passed away in 2016. United Hartzalah’s chairman is Mark German, whose expert networking firm, Gerson-Lerhrman, was under investigation by the FBI, the SEC, and the New York Attorney General. Among the accusations, never proven, was that Gerson-Lehrman served as a front for foreign intelligence. Today Gerson invests in Israel and donates charitably in Africa. Just like that philanthropist who traveled around with Bill Gates on their respective private planes.
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This is not the only “charity” that the Sandberg family supports.
Sheryl Sandberg backs IsraAid — her sister works for it in Kenya, of all places — and the Anti-Defamation League, both of which have ties to Israeli intelligence. Sandberg donated $2.5m to IsraAid with her fiancé last year. “I know Israel is very important to her,” says IsraAid’s director. That donation followed a $2.5m donation to the ADL, which has worked to pressure Facebook to use its designations in its code.
At the same time the U.S. intelligence community is snubbing Israel Facebook’s COO is donating to groups linked to Israeli intelligence.
Imagine for a moment that we had a major social media platform where its second in command donated to Chinese government linked outfits. Would we really tolerate it?
Israel is an ally, of course, even when things are tense, but Russia is decidedly not. We will turn to the role of Russia and the looting of Russia by Israelis and others in a moment but for now let’s focus more closely on Sandberg’s family.
Much of the archival material concerning Sheryl Sandberg’s family ties to Israel and to the Likud Party comes from the archives of the Center for Jewish History. Joel and Adele Sandberg thought enough of their work on behalf of Soviet Jewry to donate their papers. You can also peruse the family history in the pages of the Jewish Floridian. I’ve included a smattering here.
All throughout you’ll find comfort with the trappings of power — the same sort of comfort you see in their daughter.
Why were Joel and Adele Sandberg so involved? And what should we make of their activities?
Let’s be candid here: giving names of people to prime ministers, traveling abroad in dangerous circumstances, hobnobbing with elected officials.
This is not just the work of activists. This is the work of spies.
So were Joel and Adele Sandberg’s Israeli spies? And if they are, are they spies still? Or are they merely fellow travelers?
Sheryl Kara Sandberg was born in Washington D.C. before her family decamped to Miami. Why she was born in D.C. is not readily explained, though perhaps owes to her father attending Johns Hopkins.
Sandberg tells us that her mother – Adele – who was studying for her Ph.D naturally – became pregnant with her and she’s very grateful for her mother’s activism.
And yet, her mother left Sheryl and her two younger siblings to go to the former Soviet Union. Why? To serve Refuseniks.
“My parents usually don’t have too much time to do some of the things they want to do because they’re always working on Soviet Jewry,” wrote Sheryl aged 10. “They sometimes can’t spend as much time with my brother, my sister and I as they could if they didn’t do so much work, but I know that it is really all worth while.”
Sheryl even included her Soviet “twin” — Kira Volvovsky — in her Bat Mitzvah. Oddly Kira seems no longer of interest to Sandberg once she arrived in America.
Weirdly Joel and Adele Sandberg kept material about Kira’s parents. Could the letter writing campaign have been more than just pen pals between children?
In any event, the Refusenik cause was a family affair as Joel Sandberg recounted to another audience. He praised his parents and their commitment to the Soviet Jewry cause.
Adele and Joel were profiled in the 2007 documentary Refusenik. In fact that film was once listed as Joel’s favorite on his Facebook account.
The Sandbergs were heavily engaged in the goings on of Soviet Jewry in the US and Israel. They visited the old Soviet Union together and were even deported after meeting with several Jewish outfits there. “There are not many wives about whom you could say that she was a terrific partner during a KGB interrogation; but, I can even say that about Adele,” Joel Sandberg once said in a speech.
Above they are photographed with Menachem Begin, a totally normal thing for a mere housewife and an ophthalmologist.
Spying is such a dirty world. Perhaps the Sandberg family would prefer the same term that the Maxwell family used — “agents of influence"?
Indeed, while at the time the Soviet Jewry cause seemed noble, indeed essential, another way is to view them as human trafficking more than one million people around the world.
The face of this movement was Natan Sharansky and that face was duplicitous indeed.
The Sandbergs were also well acquainted with Natan Sharansky and called often and emphatically for his release. Read just one of Joel’s laudatory speeches about Sharansky’s work.
It’s been a multi-decade relationship that the Sandbergs have with Sharansky.
In addition to their international activism, let’s call it, they apparently even hosted a discussion with Sharansky in May 2021. This happened long after Sharansky was revealed to be a neoconservative who penned the influential book, The Case for Democracy and found himself as a White House influencer. How fitting that the case for democracy ultimately achieved the objectives of the state of Israel and Likud by removing one of its chief foes — Saddam Hussein. A Middle Eastern war for oil would have the happy coincidence of driving up the price of oil and benefitting Vladimir Putin’s petrostate.
By New Yorker editor David Remnick’s telling Sharansky was the face of the persecuted Jew. Sharansky was prosecuted, ostensibly, for being a CIA spy but interestingly President Jimmy Carter took the rare step of denying altogether that Sharansky was a CIA spy. Why was that? Could Carter have been telling the truth?
And could the entirety of Sharansky’s past be, well, could it be fake?
Real anti-Soviet dissidents, like Dr. Yuli Nudelman, suggested as much and here’s an interview he did with Barry Chamish:
Dr. Yuli Nudelman is the former chief surgeon of Rambam Hospital. In the 1960s he was a leader of the movement to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel. When the Soviets released him, he quickly made his mark in Israel as a major in the IDF, awarded for his battlefield surgery, then as a crusader against local medical corruption. He was a columnist for the left wing crusading newsmagazine HaOlam HaZeh and later the author of two powerful books exposing serious malpractice in the Israeli medical system.
In 1999 he released a book in Hebrew and Russian called, Natan Sharansky Unmasked. Within, he claimed that Natan Sharansky, then Housing Minister, was a longtime KGB agent with deep ties to the worldwide Russian mafia. Soon after its release, Natan Sharansky sued Dr. Nudelman for libel and the Jerusalem district court ruled that he had to pay Natan Sharansky the unheard of compensation of nearly $200,000. This was widely acknowledged as a precedent aimed at restricting the most basic rights of freedom of expression. Dr. Nudelman's brother Boris was also his partner in the Natan Sharansky research project and he died, overcome by the injustice of the trial.
On Jan. 20, Dr. Nudelman met me at my home for an intense interview. He also gave me his book on Natan Sharansky and a thick stack of evidence which left me convinced of the veracity of his claims. I warn my readers that you will find the following report discouraging. However, I have long warned that the leadership of the Jewish people has been thoroughly infiltrated by frauds and criminals claiming they are working on our behalf. That Natan Sharansky is just another crook serving ugly interests should not come as that much of a surprise.
Before presenting the quite shocking evidence, we begin with my interview of Dr. Nudelman:YN - In 1962, the KGB initiated a program of dissidence against the Soviet Union. By running the dissident groups, it could control the various factions which were dissatisfied with Soviet repression and later utilize the leaders as agents in the West. They were known as, spies of influence. By appearing to be anti-Soviet they were welcomed abroad and trusted. They could worm themselves into the top echelons of foreign governments. Natan Sharansky was one of these agents, and possibly the most successful.
BC - But wasn't he a Zionist leader in the Soviet Union? Didn't Natan Sharansky spend eight years in prison for his activities?
YN - Natan Sharansky was never a leader. Natan Sharansky was unknown to most of us until the Western media turned him into a hero. Natan Sharansky supposedly spent seven years in jail and one year in a prison camp. No one saw Natan Sharansky in jail except Mendelevich, and he claims he only saw his eyes through a peephole. Understand this, there is not one witness to Natan Sharansky sitting in jail. Natan Sharansky spent a year in a prison camp as a hut commander. That was the position given to KGB informers.
BC - But what about his wife Avital, who fought for his freedom in Israel?
YN - All a KGB show, like her supposed conversion to Judaism in 1974. She is from a family of spies. Her brother Michael was sent to Washington to infiltrate the CIA. He got into trouble there and fled to Israel. Not long after he arrived, he was poisoned to death at age 44.
BC - What was the point of this charade surrounding Natan Sharansky?
YN - Natan Sharansky infiltrated Israel as a worldwide hero. Remember, Natan Sharansky got here through a spy exchange, not simply released from prison and allowed to leave like all the rest of us. Within a few years he was living in a $1.5 million dollar home. Where did Natan Sharansky get that kind of money? Next, Natan Sharansky was in the government cabinet. Now Natan Sharansky's really useful. When the powers that run America want Netanyahu to withdraw from Judea and Samaria, who do they send to the Wye plantation? Their agents Sharon and Natan Sharansky. When the same powers seek a justification for attacking Afghanistan and Iraq, who do they turn to but the trusted Natan Sharansky. Just last week Condoleeza Rice called Natan Sharansky the father of the movement to turn the Middle East democratic. When Putin is condemned worldwide for the slaughter in Chechnya, who comes to his rescue but Natan Sharansky. InciCheap Dental Insurancely, that turned out to be a big mistake for Natan Sharansky.
BC - Why?
YN - Because after my book was published, Natan Sharansky called in his chips. Natan Sharansky asked Putin to release his whole KGB file to him so no one could ever see it. Then he released on the Internet the parts of the file he thought would serve him best. Natan Sharansky chose the wrong files to release because they revealed what we all knew. During his interrogation and trial in 1977-8, Natan Sharansky gave the KGB a long list of Jewish activists. It was during his trial that the witch hunt against us began in earnest. Dozens of Jewish activists were arrested, some beaten severely. Natan Sharansky was nothing but a dirty little snitch.
These are serious allegations. Now we look at the evidence, much of which comes from the protocols of Nudelman's trial. What stands out is that a Who's Who of former Soviet Jewish activists testified on Nudelman's behalf, whereas not one witness except his wife, testified for Natan Sharansky. Natan Sharansky could find not even one witness who knew him from prison and who saw his bravery in action.
If it were true that Sharansky is a KGB asset or spy we’d expect he would continue to do the bidding of the Russians. And true to form Sharansky has repeatedly done the bidding of his Russian allies throughout his political career. (One wonders if the names that the Sandbergs passed along to Begin ended up in the hands of the Soviet Union’s KGB, too.)
Here’s Professor Michael Desch (now of Notre Dame) explaining the Russia connection to Sharansky in 2005 in The American Conservative.
As minister of the interior in 1999, he refused to extradite two Russian Jews living in Israel who were former NKVD officers charged with massacring dozens of civilians in Lithuania prior to World War II.
Sharansky’s ties to Russian organized crime have long been well known.
Even before he became formally active in Israeli politics, Sharansky was linked with some shady characters. The Scotsman tied Sharansky’s Yisrael B’Aliyah to Russian mafia figure Grigory Lerner. According to the Jerusalem Post, Israel’s Internal Security Minister Avigdor Kahalani also confirmed that as minister for trade and industry, Sharansky organized a 1996 meeting between another Russian Jew, Grigory Luchansky, and Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhu. The London Times called Luchansky “the most dangerous non-convicted person in the world” and the British government barred him from the country. The Israeli government also refused to renew his passport because of his suspected ties to Russian organized crime. Luchansky himself admitted to Globes that he gave money directly to Sharansky in 1995 or 1996 for his charitable organization for Russian immigrants.
Notwithstanding his treatment in Russia…
Sharansky has also become Israel’s most ardent advocate for closer relations between the Jewish state and an increasingly autocratic Russia—though he recognizes “some unfortunate things are happening in Russia.” During a 1998 visit to his former homeland, Sharansky told Interfax that the two countries “share numerous strategic interests, economic, political, sometimes even military.”
Say what?
Was Sharansky’s takeover of the Likud Party and calls for a greater alliance with the Russians actually a KGB plot to take over Israel?
If Sharansky is a fake dissident it raises the tantalizing question of whether or not the efforts to settle hundreds of thousands of Jews in Israel and America were part of a large project and just what that project really was.
It’s my contention that the rise of the Russian Jewish mob in the United States is what gave us Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Donald J. Trump, both of whom are constructs of Russian-Jewry. The Russian-Jewish mob’s rise also gave us the Kushner crime family.
What are some nice Jewish senior citizens, parents to the wealthiest woman in tech, doing meeting with someone with mob ties?
Journalist Seth Hettena has already laid out the financial connections. His piece is worth reading in its entirety but here are the opening paragraphs.
Much has been written about how Russia used Facebook to influence U.S. voters in the 2016 election. Few people realize that Facebook was built with the help of Russian money.
Alisher B. Usmanov, an Uzbek-born mining magnate and one of the world’s richest men, poured nearly $900 million into Facebook before it went public in 2012. For a time, he was one of the social media giant’s biggest investors.
CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg said at the time that Facebook carried out “extensive due diligence” on this investment. That means the company would have had to have known that that its biggest outside investor was a man viewed in business, diplomatic, and intelligence circles as a gangster.
Such information wasn’t hard to come by. In 2007, two years before Usmanov invested in Facebook, Craig Murray, a controversial former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, denounced the metals tycoon as a “vicious thug, criminal, racketeer, heroin trafficker and accused rapist.” Murray made these charges in a blog post on his website (see copy here), that was subsequently removed under legal threat from the UK firm Schillings. Similar allegations were made a few days later on the floor of the European Parliament.
Facebook’s crack due diligence team clearly didn’t see Usmanov as a risk. But Megafon, a Russian mobile phone company in which Usmanov had invested, did. Take a look at this disclosure in Megafon’s initial public offering in 2012:
Gafur Rakhimov was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2012. “Rakhimov is one of the leaders of Uzbek organized crime with a specialty in the organized production of drugs in the countries of Central Asia. He has operated major international drug syndicates involving the trafficking of heroin,” the Treasury Department stated.
Rakhimov, a man Usmanov has known for years, is a heroin kingpin. Sorry, an alleged heroin kingpin.
Read it all but pay particular attention to Yuri Milner, the Russian-Israeli oligarch whose money flow from the Kremlin can be seen here in a helpful graphic from The Guardian.
What’s a Russian-Israeli oligarch doing investing in Jared Kushner and Mark Zuckerberg, who worked together to cut a deal about the 2020 election?
The close relationship between Facebook and Russian-funded Cambridge Analytica hasn’t been disclosed to the American pubic. It’s ultimately why I decided to donate to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She alone could draw blood on Zuckerberg.
We do need to dig in Facebook’s past, AOC!
Russian asset, Parler founder and Cambridge Analytica funder Rebekah Mercer asked Facebook for a meeting through close friend Matt Michelsen, disgraced head of Curative. (Curative, funded by Chinese backed VCs, was a fake covid testing company that got a billion from the taxpayer before the FDA pulled its authorization.)
Mercer was rebuffed from that meeting, which in any event seems almost superfluous. The Russians had already gotten what they wanted. Are the Russians trying to influence American politics?
Well, funny you should ask. Yes, those are the two candidates backed by Peter Thiel.
Besides don’t the Mercers have some ginormous tax bill to pay?
****
In subsequent posts we will look more closely into Sheryl Sandberg’s relationship with Larry Summers and Summer’s relationship with the state of Israel, the Kremlin, and the looting of Russia.
Just how did Larry Summers get so rich? I know we aren’t supposed to ask that but let’s consider this fact:
Consulting work helped make Summers a wealthy man between the time he left government service in 2001 and when he returned in 2009. When President Bill Clinton nominated him to be Treasury Secretary, he listed assets of about US$900,000 and debts, including a mortgage, of US$500,000. When he returned to serve in the Obama administration, he reported a net worth between US$17-million and US$39-million.
What role does Summers play in our politics?
We will probe Sandberg’s relationship with political operatives like the Definers, where where my erstwhile friend Tim Miller worked to smear George Soros, who was among the first to raise real questions about Facebook’s (and Google’s) malignant effects on world politics.
The Definers is currently being sued by the Qataris over its smear campaigns on behalf of the United Arab Emirates. Is this shades of Fusion GPS and Israeli-connected GOP billionaire donor Paul Singer?
There’s a quite a lot more to say about how a feminist press uncritically reported whatever Sandberg told them. You’d think they’d learn their lessons from Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos or Jessica Richman of uBiome but here we are. It does women and minority entrepreneurs no favors to hold them to an entirely different standard.
And what exactly was going on in Mexico with her late husband? In an interview she has said that there was an issue with the autopsy. What was that issue?
How should we think about WhatsApp facilitating human trafficking in light of Sandberg and Zuckerberg’s support of pro-amnesty immigration outfit FWD.us?
If globalization is the movement of peoples, goods, information then Facebook is globalization personified.
It, too, must be destroyed, or it will destroy us all.
It has become, in the words of Lord John Browne, who writes in Make, Think, Imagine: Engineering the Future of Civilisation (2019) a “social menace.”
Leaders in this area [of social media] have too often lost sight of the consequences of their actions, following an ambition summed up by the misguided Silicon Valley mantra, ‘move fast and break things’. When little or no thought is given to the impact that engineering has on society it can cause great harm.
We have to become thoughtful stewards but to do that we have to know the real history.
"Qanon" is not from the same side of the 'Division coin' as indicated in this article. Rather it is a Couter-Coup awareness campaign. Assange and others who have claimed it is a "Pied-Piper"operation or an "Operation Trust", clearly do not have the truth. In fact most media information that uses "Qanon" instead of Q, does not know much. Why don't you ask WHO Q is?