As people may know, I was a journalist before I worked in marketing because I wanted to help the world. Today, my new The Drum column aims to do the same.
I call on Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Taboola CEO Adam Singolda to cut ties with Breitbart.
If you want to stop the spread of far-right racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic propaganda that helps people such as Donald Trump, please share this column far and wide.
An open letter to Mr Bezos, Mr Pichai and Mr Zuckerberg to tear down Breitbart News
In 2016, a terrorist with a machine gun killed two and wounded seven people sitting in a Tel Aviv pub two blocks from my flat. Later that same year, two other gunmen murdered three and injured five at the complex to where my company at the time was moving a few weeks later.
In 2015, I carried a pepper spray gun as I walked to and from work at a time when terrorists were stabbing people daily on the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as well as ramming into them with cars. Many other Israelis took self-defense classes or bought knife-proof clothing.
Almost every day during the summer of 2014, I woke up to missiles from the Gaza Strip exploding above my building and ran to bomb shelters in the afternoons and evenings whenever air raid sirens would signal the approach of a new volley of rockets.
I could go on. Such terrorist attacks intentionally target innocent people out of beliefs in their religious or racial inferiority. I despise terrorists, theocrats, and racial supremacists of all kinds. I believe Breitbart News aids and abets them. So, excuse me if I take this personally.
Identity is a complex idea, but I say that I am Jewish and white. My ancestors hail from Poland, Germany, and Ireland. But I have more in common with the peace-loving Arabic, Islamic, and Druzi people who I know here in Israel than with the useful idiots who marched in the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and killed a protester last month. Ethnicity and religion are not the sum total of a person’s identity or the determinants of the ethical actions to take in any given situation. There is an objective morality that transcends blood and faith.
That is why I am using this particular marketing column to call on Amazon, Facebook, Google, Taboola and all others who profit from Breitbart News to blacklist the publication and cut all ties. Some things matter more than money. In my Promotion Fix columns for The Drum and my keynote talks as a marketing speaker, I often discuss the ways that the marketing industry can improve itself. This issue is the most important one today, particularly as Breitbart has expanded with bureaus in London, Jerusalem, and elsewhere.