If you’ll forgive a crude colloquialism, Google’s training programme is crap, and I’m not being judgemental here. By its own proud announcement, Google has succeeded at turning every company lavatory into a classroom.
This constitutes the exact reversal of the situation familiar to anyone who has gone to a comprehensive school, but I’ll keep the dismal state of our public education for another time.
What interests me here is the lavatorial aspect of learning pioneered by Google some years ago. Since then their educational series Learning on the Loo has been a constant presence in every Google company around the world.
Lavatory stalls there come equipped not only with customary rolls but also with educational flyers enlightening Google employees on a variety of subjects. I’ll give you a clue: neither Thomistic philosophy nor quantum mechanics is among them.
The academic subjects favoured by the company are more practical, including such topics as Better Incident Management, 6 Tips for Writing a Better Email, and Avoiding Bias (also evidently hyphens) in Decision Making.
One bias that Google would like its people to avoid is the anti-Jewish one, and by the looks of it the company is facing an uphill struggle. Many employees have been posting comments ranging from anti-Israeli to virulently anti-Semitic.
Leading the way was the company’s Head of Diversity Strategy who must have misread his remit. He accused Jews of having an “insatiable appetite for war,” forgetting to mention that such a belligerent craving only ever evinces itself when Israeli babies are decapitated, and sometimes not even then.
Google has declared war on such attitudes, choosing its loo stalls as the training ground. Its Jewish Allyship flyers teach misguided employees that not all their Jewish co-workers are equally bad, and some of them aren’t to blame for the atrocities being committed by Israeli Jews in the Middle East.
I’m only paraphrasing here, not exaggerating. The verbatim lessons teach Googlers that “every Jew is different,” adding that employees should “avoid assuming a Jewish colleague represents the Israeli government”.
According to Alan Bloom, education is supposed to disabuse pupils of wrong notions and replace them with correct ones. On the evidence of these flyers, many Google employees think all Jews are the same, and each one of them is responsible for everything done by the Israeli government.
Contextually, this means the Israeli government is evil, though not necessarily every Jew in the world is. Why, some of them could even become Googlers’ best friends, especially if they disavow Israel’s right to defend itself or indeed to exist.
There goes that educational effort, right down the sewers. “Continuous learning is a big part of Google’s culture,” announces the company’s website. In this case, what Google’s employees are learning continuously is that some kinds of anti-Semitism are better than others.
Now imagine a flyer saying that not all Muslims are the same, and some not only aren’t terrorists themselves but may even disapprove of terrorism. Or that every Irishman is different, and it’s wrong to blame all of them for IRA bombing campaigns. Or that some blacks, including those working for Google, don’t peddle drugs and run prostitution rings.
Can you hear the hue and cry raised in every medium? Can you see screaming headlines on The Guardian’s front page? Can you picture an avalanche of complaints followed by another one of lawsuits and, probably, criminal indictments?
Since the monstrous HAMAS attack on Israel, anti-Semitic attacks in Britain have gone up 600 per cent. Jews no longer feel safe walking the streets in their neighbourhoods or sending their children to school (you know, it’s real schools I’m talking about, not public loos). As to anti-Israeli sentiments, even reputable media are either unable or unwilling to keep them under wraps.
It’s hard not to conclude that latent anti-Semitism always bubbles away just underneath the surface, only waiting for a pretext to burst out. And there comes Google, teaching its employees that, murderous and aggressive though Israel is, some Jews aren’t quite like that.
I don’t know what shining educational ideal the company’s managers see in their mind’s eye, but if it’s ridding their employees of anti-Jewish bias, their effort will fall far short. Like all those megalomaniac campaigns declared by various states, the likely result will be exactly the opposite of the one declared.
A war on poverty makes more people poor. A war on drugs produces more addicts. An attempt to redistribute wealth destroys it. An overhaul of education promotes ignorance. An all-out effort to end all wars leads to more, and bloodier, wars.
And Google’s attempt to indoctrinate its employees against anti-Jewish bias is guaranteed to make them more anti-Semitic, not less.
I wonder what Sergei Brin, Google’s co-founder and himself Jewish, thinks about this. Probably nothing: he is too busy bankrolling Democratic causes to worry about such incidentals.
“Since the monstrous HAMAS attack on Israel, anti-Semitic attacks in Britain have gone up 600 per cent. ”
And the history books will cover this period and say of anti-Semitism that there was a marked increase in anti-Jewish incidents among the British people.
A marked increase yes but not from among the British people. People that live in Britain the culprits but not British as is normally understand that word.
Ah, those contemptible Jews and their “insatiable appetite for war”! Always scheming and conniving! Whenever they want a war they trick others into attacking them using what seem to be innocuous activities: going to concerts, coffee shops, pizza parlors, or just lying in bed. Trickery!
Leo Pinsker coined the word “Judeophobia” about 150 years ago. I think we ought to revive it. None of the fake phobias promulgated by the Left is really a phobia, because none of them lacks reasonable justification, but fear and hatred of Jews is genuinely mad.
Also, “Judeophobia” has the advantage over “anti-Semitism” that Lefties can too easily deny being “anti-Semitic” – with the mental reservation that Arabs are Semites too.
Meanwhile, one wonders how long it will take for the BBC to run out of pictures of grieving “Palestinian” grannies and bawling “Palestinian” babies to feature on their Judeophobic propaganda website.