David MillerDavid Miller
Source: Al Mayadeen English
21 Oct 2024 02:04
7 Min Read
Real-estate billionaire Barry Sternlicht’s Facts for Peace is just one of the covert ops being used by the Zionists to dampen opposition to genocide in Palestine.
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Facts for Peace is yet another covert operation launched by elements of the Zionist movement, in this case fronted by motivated fanatical Zionist billionaires.
The US news site Semafor first revealed the advent of this effort on November 9th last year under the headline “Billionaires discuss $50 million anti-Hamas media blitz”.
Real-estate billionaire Barry Sternlicht originated the campaign in the days after the Oct. 7 attacks in “Israel”. In an email, he sought $1 million donations each from dozens of the business world’s wealthiest people.
He wrote that he’d had “a great conversation” about the effort with CNN owner David Zaslav and that Endeavor CEO and talent agent Ari Emanuel had agreed to coordinate the campaign, though spokespeople for both men said they aren’t involved now.
The email was sent to more than 50 household names, including media mogul David Geffen (322 on the 2024 Forbes list of billionaires), investors Michael Milken (424) and Nelson Peltz (1851), and tech luminaries Eric Schmidt (94) and Michael Dell (16). All told, the recipients have a net worth of nearly $500 billion, according to Bloomberg and Forbes data.
Of course, all of these are the names of Jewish billionaires, and such a venture is obviously facilitated by the fact that Jews are disproportionately billionaires. Seven of the top eleven billionaires in 2024 are Jewish; Larry Ellison (3), Larry Page (5), Sergey Brin (7), Mark Zuckerberg (8), Steve Ballmer (9), Michael Bloomberg (10), Michael Dell (11). Everyone would appear to be Zionist. Overall, according to Forbes, in 2022, there were 2,668 billionaires in the world, of whom 267 were Jewish, a total of 10%. Jews make up 0.2% of the population of the world, meaning they are over-represented per head of population by a factor of 50. By contrast, the only other group that is over-represented is white people (those of “European descent”). They make up some 16% of the global population, but 65% of billionaires, an over-representation of just over four times.
In his email, Sternlicht wrote that he was trying to raise $50 million from the group and seek a matching donation from a large Jewish charity for a media blitz to “define Hamas” as “not just the enemy of Israel but of the United States.”
By early November, it had raised several million dollars, hired Josh Vlasto, a former aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, to advise it, and quietly launched a website (factsforpeace.org).
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported later in November that “a multimillion-dollar campaign attacking the pro-Palestine movement has spent more than $370,000 in the past month on viral adverts for Facebook and Instagram without disclosing where its money comes from.
Vlasto’s name is absent from the Facts for Peace listing for the Facebook and Instagram ads and the Facts for Peace website, but reverse searches for the number registered on Meta’s Ad Library point to Vlasto, and the number is also listed as the number for his PR company, Bamberger & Vlasto.”
Fulfill the Promise LLC, was founded on 15 September 2022. It was renamed Change the Narrative Coalition LLC on 16 October 2023 and then became Facts for Peace on 16 October.
Through The Barry S Sternlicht Foundation, Sternlicht has in 2022 funded Birthright, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Likudnik think tank the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the genocidal Chabad Lubavitch cult.
Facts for Peace is just one of the covert ops being used by the Zionists to dampen opposition to genocide in Palestine. There are many more.
A “mysterious Israeli political marketing firm with little online presence” called STOIC is reported to be at the heart of another secretive information operation using AI to produce cynical and misleading content. Amongst the messaging is reported to be “deeply Islamophobic and anti-immigrant content”. The campaign involves seemingly independent websites with no obvious links to each other.
One website, called Good Samaritan, mapped and ranked American universities according to the amount of alleged antisemitic incidents on their campuses. An examination of the site’s code showed that it included unique features from sites that had been previously exposed. A network analysis found other websites using the same IP, all traced to STOIC.
These included the following:
United Citizens for Canada had multiple social media accounts and disseminated heavily Islamophobic material, including claims that Muslim immigrants were a threat to Canada.
Another was the Arab Slave Trade site, which was copied almost entirely from Wikipedia and was aimed at Black Americans, trying to encourage the idea that Arabs had been slave traders in Africa.
Another site called Serenity Now branded itself as anarchist. It sought to convince young Americans to oppose the creation of a Palestinian state because “states are man-made structures” and a Palestinian state “would hurt the goals of the progressive movement.”
The key takeaway is that Zionists are willing to adopt any ideology so long as they perceive it as useful to counter the movement against genocide and the increasing consensus that Zionism cannot be reformed.
Unusually, this operation was busted in part by social media giant Meta and by Open AI which discovered that its ChatGPT software was being used to generate problematic content.
They confirmed the existence of the influence operation and ascribed it to the Israeli company STOIC.
But are these seemingly independent efforts to manipulate and dissemble like Facts for Peace and the covert ads, actually linked to the regime? It appears so.
It is reported that the covert STOIC campaign was funded to the tune of $2 million by the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, which has recently taken over the responsibility for public diplomacy. It is still not clear which state intermediary won the contract and subcontracted to STOIC.
However, it is likely linked to Voices of Israel, the “public benefit” company used by the regime to evade the US Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The Facts for Peace campaign also seems linked, as it has partnered with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and another regime cut out the Combat Antisemitism Movement, which is responsible for raising 50% of the costs of all campaigns with the Ministry, while the bidder provides the other 50%.
The secretive and intelligence-linked Ministry of Strategic Affairs may no longer have responsibility for the global Zionist disinformation effort, but that doesn’t mean that it is not alive and well and lurking covertly in many places around the world under the wing of the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
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David Miller
David Miller
investigative researcher, broadcaster, and academic. He is the founder and co-director of the lobbying watchdog Spinwatch and editor of Powerbase.info.
