The Left controls the presidency and Congress, the educational system, the establishment media, and the entertainment industry. Its political and cultural hegemony is near-absolute, and yet central to the Left’s self-image is that Leftists are the outsiders, plucky underdogs who are struggling courageously against entrenched, self-interested, rapacious, and indomitably hidebound, reactionary powers. It hasn’t been remotely close to being this way since the 1960s or before, so Leftists have to play pretend, as they do when they insist that men are women and Old Joe Biden is the man in charge.
The latest in a seemingly endless line of great pretenders is one Ariel Koren, a far-Left anti-Israel activist who claims that Google, which everyone knows is a racist, Zionist, far-right corporate behemoth, punished her for agitating against the company’s pro-Israel stance. Insisting that her funhouse mirror image was an accurate reflection, Koren resigned from Google in protest. But reality, as always, was quite outstandingly different.
The New York Times broke the story last week leading off with a paragraph that presented Koren’s claims as true without caveat: “A Google employee who became the most visible opponent of a company contract with the Israeli military said on Tuesday that she would resign after claiming Google had tried to retaliate against her for her activism.” Ariel Koren, the Newspaper of Record informed its hapless marks, is “a marketing manager for Google’s educational products arm who has worked for the company for seven years,” but she had written “a memo to colleagues announcing her plan to leave Google at the end of the week.”
Why would anyone leave such a benign and cuddly employer as Google? Not for the reasons that would drive any sensible person to leave. Koren had “spent more than a year organizing against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion agreement for Google and Amazon to supply Israel and its military with artificial intelligence tools and other computing services.” She had “helped circulate petitions and lobby executives, and she talked to news organizations, all in an effort to get Google to reconsider the deal.” But instead of getting Google to comply, Koren received, she claimed, a nasty shock: she received “a surprising ultimatum from Google: Agree to move to São Paulo, Brazil, within 17 business days or lose your job.”
Why, those capitalist dogs! How dare they be so intent on making a buck from the Zionist Entity, instead of boycotting it like all good Nazis and Leftists do, that they summarily demanded that Ariel Koren relocate to South America rather than rein in their corporate greed and comply with her demands? It was appalling, it was senseless, it was semi-fascist, it was revealing. It was also fictional: as it turned out, Ariel Koren’s transfer to São Paulo wasn’t a retaliation for her Leftist anti-Israel activism at all. It actually happened before she began agitating against Project Nimbus.
Related: Why Do So Many Top Democrats Have No Problem Associating With a Virulent Anti-Semite?
The indefatigable researcher Elder of Ziyon uncovered the truth on Friday: despite presenting Koren’s story as fact, the Times had stated off-handedly, six paragraphs down in its report, that “Google and the National Labor Relations Board investigated her complaint and found no wrongdoing.” Elder of Ziyon points out that “the NLRB dismissal letter shows that Koren’s entire complaint is baseless – because Google’s decision to move her role to Brazil came before she started her complaints about Israel and Project Nimbus.” He observes that “if her work environment was so toxic, she would have left Google long ago. But she wanted to squeeze out one more wave of anti-Israel articles – and the New York Times is happy to do its part.” As always.
The truth never matters when the Left’s narrative is being reinforced, however, and so Ariel Koren has become a heroine to haters of Israel worldwide. Even the jihad terror group Hamas got into the act, issuing a statement saying: “Hamas hails the courageous stance of Google marketing manager, Ariel Koren, who rejects Google’s policy of providing services and logistical support to the Zionist occupation, which targets the Palestinian people and their rights, and accuses Google of being complicit in violations against Palestinian human rights.”
Being a hero of jihad terrorists would hardly be a resumé item in a sane world, but this is not a sane world, and given the state of the Left today, it likely makes Ariel Koren a hot property whom any number of Leftist corporations would be happy to snap up. It isn’t as if she had been praised by, say, a pro-family or pro-American group. That would be professional death. But as it is, Ariel Koren is a rising star.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member