Tun Dr M, our beloved former Prime Minister, openly supports Israel–well sort off.
Today on his blog chedet.cc, he called on everyone to boycott Israel, stating quite clearly in his latest post that;
I think the whole world in the interest of justice should boycott doing business with Israel. This is truly a pariah state which is immoral and beyond the pale of human laws.
Now of course, you’re wondering if Tun Dr M supports Israel or not? Well in actual fact it’s both, because while his words say he opposes Israel, his actions, specifically those of his website suggest otherwise.
Tuns website is hosted on GoDaddy, which is quite a popular web hosting company, possibly the biggest in the world. What Tun probably isn’t aware of, is that GoDaddy was acquired by 3 private equity firms back in July 2011, leading the charge in that buy-out was the private equity firm KKR and Co, which stands for Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts, which if you can’t tell by their names–were 3 Jewish Americans.
Now of course, there’s a huge difference between a Jewish American and an Israeli, but in this particular case, the firm KKR and Co were actually listed as the Biggest private equity investor in Israel in 2013, including one deal where KKR bought over a tire company in Israel for a cool $500 Million USD, or roughly Rm1.6 Billion. In fact the CEO of GoDaddy today is a KKR executive–so KKR pretty much is running the Web hosting company that chedet.cc is hosted on.
So in effect, Tun Dr M, has procured his web hosting from people who then use that money to invest into Israel. In other words, he’s indirectly supporting Israel.
Which brings me to my next question. If Tun Dr M, with his vast resources and time (I’m guessing he’s retired) can’t figure out how to boycott Israel, what chance do any of us have. Ever use Waze lately, well your usage of Waze indirectly contributed to it’s price US$1.3 BILLION dollar price tag, that Google paid to an Israeli company. I mean–do you really think you can boycott Israel? I’ve written about this in the past, it’s nearly impossible to boycott Israel these days, because they’re so wired into the technology that fuels the global economy. Big tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Intel all have a major presence in Israel.
Israel is contributing to the global economy via its phenomenal technological growth. Unsurprisingly, Israeli school children score an average of 516 on the TIMSS ranking for science, while Malaysian school children score an embarrassing 440. In due time, we could boycott Israel and they wouldn’t even notice.
So before you think about boycotting Israel, why don’t we focus on getting our house in order, so that the next time we intend to boycott someone, they’ll feel it.