# How Your Tech Is Being Used for Genocide | Gaza Diaries

**Author:** Dr. Omar Suleiman
**Series:** Gaza Diaries with Dr. Omar Suleiman
**Published:** 2024-06-25
**YouTube:** https://youtu.be/SZYxUoHYPIg
**URL:** https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/gaza-diaries/how-your-tech-is-being-used-for-genocide-gaza-diaries
**Topics:** Politics & Practical Theology, Psychology & Mental Health, Social Justice, Trauma

## Description
Dr. Omar Suleiman sits down with Paul Biggar for a discussion on the corruption and misuse of technology in enabling the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In November 2023, Paul Biggar authored a compelling piece titled “I Can’t Sleep” and launched “Tech for Palestine” as a response to combat the...

## Transcript
**[0:00]** I can't sleep. I'm lying in bed every night and images of Gaza are running through my head. Fathers holding their babies, dead, caked in dust. Bombs dropped on homes, on hospitals, on schools. Tens of thousands of dead and indiscriminate bombings.

**[0:17]** Children crying, pulling through rubble to find their families. This was the first paragraph in a blog post that many of us read back in December called "I Can't Sleep." And it was written by an individual named Paul Biggar who has since gone on to found a group called Tech for Palestine

**[0:38]** and has been vocal about the role of tech in this atrocious genocide that we have been witnessing day in and day out. Dear brothers and sisters, as we've been speaking about Gaza diaries, people that have been in Gaza on the ground and have witnessed the atrocities firsthand, I think one of the things that all of us have greatly underestimated

**[0:59]** is the way that tech has been deployed in this atrocious genocide that we have been witnessing in different ways. That the same products that we consume from the same companies are being used to destroy the lives of others

**[1:16]** even as they seemingly improve ours. That drones that fly above the heads, you might remember when we interviewed Dr. Haifa and she spoke about how you're safe as long as you can hear the sound of drones. You're not safe when they disappear because that means that a bombing is imminent.

**[1:32]** You live with this sound constantly above your head. And she said something that was so profound. She said, when you hear the sound of the drones, you're safe.

**[1:48]** When you hear the sound of the drones, you're safe. When you hear the sound of the drones, you're safe. It's when it's quiet, you need to be careful. It's when it's quiet, you need to be careful.

**[2:08]** And if you hear the sound of bombing, you need to smile. Listen to this. SubhanAllah. If it is coming to you, you will feel nothing. Either you will feel nothing because you're dead, or the next thing you'll see, everything is in your head.

**[2:23]** You will not hear the sound of the bombing. But those same drones have made the sounds of crying children to force Palestinians to run out to try to save children only to become the next set of casualties.

**[2:39]** I remember a cousin that lived in Gaza speaking to me, and he just made it out of Rafah just a few days ago. And I remember in 2021, he shared this with me. He said that what made this bombing so different, what made this particular round of atrocities

**[2:56]** so different back in 2021, and he's lived through all of them. He said that it felt like this time we were lab rats, that this is just some big experiment, and we are the subject of that experiment. He said that of those that he lost in 2021 or those that came closest to the bombings

**[3:15]** in 2021, that they described these tiny devices coming right to their windows and then entering in as tiny devices before they exploded, that they had seen sophisticated weaponry that they had not seen before. We are witnessing a genocide on our screens, but the same companies that manufacture our

**[3:34]** screens are also part of the perpetrating of this genocide. Paul Biggar, I want to welcome you, and I want to thank you for the work that you have been doing in the past few months to try to bring about awareness and then to also try to bring about a solution to the atrocious nature of tech these days.

**[3:55]** Thank you so much for being with us today. If you could briefly introduce yourself and the work that you do to the audience here today. Thank you so much for having me. I've always been a startup founder. I'm a software engineer by training, but I got into startups and entrepreneurship, and

**[4:15]** I've been doing that for 15-ish years. I started Tech for Palestine along with a group of 25 other people because we were all doing projects that were in some way intended to help people in Palestine, to help change

**[4:35]** the narrative around Palestine in the US, and in particular to change the narrative in the tech field. What made you write this blog post on December 14th? If you can kind of walk me through the process, when did you think about writing it?

**[4:52]** What made you write it, and what has been the reaction since? I was on vacation for a couple of weeks in October, November, and I just, I wasn't, you know, all the time I was just checking my phone to see what was happening in Gaza.

**[5:11]** I was sort of marinating in the genocide, and the whole time I was thinking, what can I do about this? I think we all expect that at some point in our lives we get to the point where we can have some sort of impact, where if we're successful in our careers, then finally people will listen

**[5:31]** to us or we can do something about the bad things that happen in the world. I was feeling extremely helpless, and I thought, you know, just what is the thing that I can do? And I realized that, you know, I'm good at writing, and I have a little bit of a platform,

**[5:53]** a little bit of a following, not huge, but I realized that the thing that I had was that I have extremely high tolerance for risk, and I'm at a place in my life where being cancelled just isn't a thing that's going to affect me.

**[6:11]** And I realized that if I don't write a piece like this, then who will? The narrative that I realized I had to take was one where, you know, I was new to Palestine. I've never been to the Middle East at all.

**[6:29]** You know, I wasn't someone who could discuss the Nakba that I had, you know, just read about for the first time weeks beforehand, but I realized that what I could write was just the feelings that I was having, and I felt that probably a lot of other people were

**[6:45]** having the same feelings. So I kind of want to, you know, ask you to sort of take us through a process of how this all happens in terms of the tech world's involvement. You know, over the last few years, we've been trying to paint a picture for people of what

**[7:00]** the process of apartheid is, right, and how that is so embedded in the institutions that we partake in on a daily basis. So at the core of the BDS movement, many people are learning about divestment for the very first time, right?

**[7:15]** They kind of understood the concept of boycott at a personal level, but divestment at the education level. You can see the way that people are sickened when they come to realize that the same institutions of higher learning that they put their kids in or that they enroll in to become changemakers

**[7:34]** in the world are also investing in such a horrendous occupation, investing in apartheid. And you kind of paint that picture of someone who goes to school, who works hard to pay their tuition with whatever money is left over after the tax dollars that are also being

**[7:52]** used to fund the weaponry, and then coming to realize that that money is going to also the investment in occupation and apartheid. Making people aware of defense contractors and the role that the military industrial complex plays in all of this, the cruelty of this, that this is a big market, right?

**[8:11]** I think many people, average Americans, came to know about Halliburton and how that factored into the Iraq War and so many different ways that it just speaks to the cruelty of the so-called progress in society where you've got someone sitting behind a computer in Nevada,

**[8:34]** eating a bag of chips, sipping on a Coke can that presses a button, and then that deploys this drone that goes and blows up a wedding and murders 200 innocent people. So it's painting the picture, right? And walking people through the entire process of apartheid, the process of being invested

**[8:53]** in apartheid as a country. How do you start to paint that picture for someone who doesn't understand how tech factors into all of this? What is the role that these companies play in apartheid, in the genocide? And how are we maybe subconsciously playing a part in that process without even realizing it?

**[9:12]** I think the challenge that people have in understanding it is how systemic it is. It's not a direct connection between the things that we do. It's rather a system of everything being connected in a way that makes it so that the money that

**[9:30]** we make when we scroll through Instagram, right? We make money for Meta. Meta uses that to suppress the content that we see. They build AI, and that AI is used to decide which voices are going to be seen.

**[9:51]** And when you take a step back from a company that's doing specific suppression like Meta or Google or YouTube, and you take it back 20 years earlier, there was a point at which Mark Zuckerberg was trying to set up Meta, or that Larry Page was setting up Google,

**[10:09]** where a room full of people were deciding, should we give $500,000 to Mark Zuckerberg to decide that he can make this thing that's going to take over the world?

**[10:25]** The people in that room are a huge part of the system. You were talking about universities. They are also getting a lot of their funding from universities. People like Peter Thiel, for example. Peter Thiel, who made a decisive and important donation to Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

**[10:44]** Peter Thiel, who invested in Palantir and who started and co-founded Palantir, which is part of the AI behind the war, is the same Peter Thiel who gave Mark Zuckerberg $500,000. That was instrumental in building Facebook in 2005. The systems of venture capital, of right wing, of weapons manufacture, of private equity,

**[11:06]** they're all interrelated with the tech companies, whether they're social media tech companies or whether they're tech companies that are doing cybersecurity and testing it directly on the Palestinian people. I think that one of the things that really shocks people is not the idea that these social

**[11:25]** media companies are actively suppressing the voices on behalf of the Palestinian cause in service to the Zionist project. I think that what is shocking to people is how active these same companies have been in the actual oppression and the actual operation that's taking place.

**[11:44]** If you were to tell me a few months ago that WhatsApp would be directly complicit, that Meta would be feeding facial recognition to the Israeli government, which literally puts people's lives in danger, that a group of billionaires on a WhatsApp group are directing

**[12:02]** the New York mayor on behalf of a foreign government to shut down encampments at Columbia, that AI is being used to eliminate Palestinian people already, that they have a way by which they deploy pure tech and that they are experimenting, that there's big money in this, I wouldn't

**[12:22]** have thought it would be this advanced already. I think that there have been warnings about AI. There have been warnings about where these tech companies are going. But how far have we already lost the plot? That's kind of the question, is how far gone are we already?

**[12:37]** You've already got so much that's been done and so much that's been developed that there still haven't been leaks about, that we still haven't had the Pauls of the world come out and tell us about that are operating behind the scenes. How far has this gone and can it ever be reeled back?

**[12:56]** We are gone, gone. It's so far. Everywhere that you look, there's people who are promoting Israel, who are controlling

**[13:12]** some aspect of the conversation, whether it's the editors of The New York Times who are printing direct propaganda, direct false propaganda. Everywhere I look, there's someone pulling on the strings. So I'll give you one example that you're asking about Meta and this is frankly shocking.

**[13:32]** When you look at the Meta leadership, Mark Zuckerberg donated money to Zaka, which is one of the largest or one of the creators of the October 7th atrocity propaganda that

**[13:47]** has been consistently and repeatedly proven false by lots of different publications, including Israeli ones. They have Sheryl Sandberg, who's on their board and who for a long time was their leader, who is one of the most active spreaders of the mass rape hoax that is used to dehumanize

**[14:10]** Palestinians. Their chief information security officer, Guy Rosen, is former IDF, was former 8200, which is the same people that built Lavender, Israeli NSA. He lives in Israel and lives in Tel Aviv.

**[14:26]** This is the person who has the most power in deciding at Meta what conversations are had, what policies are made about the content that we're seeing and who gets suppressed

**[14:42]** and who doesn't get suppressed. And so everywhere you look in Meta, in LinkedIn, in Twitter, in Google, you are facing the

**[14:58]** same sort of suppression. And it's the same story every time. There's people who are extremely pro-Israel in very important positions who are making the decisions about what content you and I get to see.

**[15:13]** And it's in tech, but it's the same thing that you see in newspapers. It's the same thing that you see in CNN and on Fox News and on the international media as well. It's the same thing everywhere.

**[15:28]** What do you say to the idea of making genocide bad for business? So like this idea that, look, you have just from a pure numbers perspective, more people in the world that use these platforms that are pro-Palestinian than pro-Israel.

**[15:45]** I mean, in the United States, we live in a bubble, a very carefully crafted genocidal bubble. I mean, it's clear as night and day for anyone that travels outside of the United States or doesn't limit themselves to US media, corporate media, or talking points from their politicians

**[16:03]** at every level of government. From just a business perspective, at what point is it just bad for business for these companies? Is that a way forward to make more people around the world aware and then perhaps to try to instrumentalize that people power, that numbers game against these companies?

**[16:21]** I think that's exactly the way that it has to go. It doesn't seem like tech is going to reform itself. In terms of how the narrative has shifted in the US, we've seen the narrative shift massively over the last six months.

**[16:38]** But tech has been extremely stubborn and in fact, I would say is one of the holdouts in terms of narrative shift. You've seen very little shift at all. When you look at what changed things in South Africa, the economic boycott was one of the

**[16:58]** major aspects of what caused apartheid to fall eventually. I don't think that it's going to be exactly the same in Israel, but the economic boycott, the academic boycott, the sports boycott, the divestment, those are all going to be key parts of damaging the Israeli economy and making our displeasure felt within Israel.

**[17:25]** But also in making it clear to the United States that you can't keep doing this, that if you continue to suppress, to shut down, even to side with Israel, or in the most recent case with the Blockout 2024 campaign, if you stay quiet during a genocide, we as people

**[17:48]** are not going to continue to support you. We know it's America, the place where we have an effect is with money. It's purely for these companies. The only thing that they care about is how much money they're going to make.

**[18:03]** And so it becomes how can the economics be changed from continuing to support Israel, which for many of them is an ideological interest and not a financial interest.

**[18:18]** So as it starts to hurt, there's a lot of people in those organizations who don't have that ideological interest and who are then saying, why are we doing this? It's hurting the bottom line. The reality is that you've got these companies that operate that we're all familiar with.

**[18:36]** So suppression is happening across the board. I wouldn't be surprised if Google, YouTube suppress this video. They've shadow banned much of our content on Palestine already. We've been shadow banned on Meta, we've even TikTok, X is long gone as well.

**[18:53]** So the shadow banning, the suppression is all there with these companies that we're all familiar with. But then there are names that operate in the background that I think are even less familiar to people than the military contractors. So now people are starting to become familiar with some of the ways that Lockheed Martin

**[19:11]** and Raytheon, you hear some of these names. And some people that are not privy to that industry can catch on a bit. But when you hear a name like Palantir, that means nothing to 99.9% of people. And they just had a conference a few weeks ago on AI warfare, I guess the first AI warfare

**[19:33]** conference. And the thought of a bunch of business executives sitting in a room eating their five course meals and laughing about how they've just developed a new technology that could eliminate people more efficiently while still being profit generating is terrifying to people.

**[19:50]** But I think that it's a sign of the moral decay of society too, right? Like as the United States sort of pontificates to the entire world about human rights. And freedom and just everything that it stands in complete contradiction of.

**[20:09]** As the curtain is kind of being drawn and the face is being exposed. How do you start to expose the sick world of the likes of Palantir, right? In these conferences. What do you do to start sort of shining a spotlight on that?

**[20:25]** So that people become more aware of the companies that operate behind the companies. The fact is there's nothing we can do about Palantir. And I think it's very much designed that way. In the same way that there's nothing we can directly do about Lockheed Martin.

**[20:41]** Or we can actually do more about Lockheed Martin because they make physical products that they need to ship to places. But when you make AI that ships over the internet, right? It's quite a different experience. One of the major things that we can do, and this is why I push on venture capital so much, is that we can change what company gets funded.

**[21:03]** The companies that get funded at the very start of the process are the ones that are decided by a relatively small group of people that are very right wing.

**[21:18]** Folks like Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel. These are people who are extremely pro-defense and war. And it's hard to back a society away from that when the entire economic engine of the society is based on that.

**[21:44]** People make a lot of money from war. And the fact that we moved a lot of the war machine into the private sector means that the private sector has to make money, has to make more money.

**[22:01]** They trade on the stock exchange and then our pensions get wrapped into it and our public investments and everything gets pulled into the same system. And then people start having conversations like, well, if we divest from Raytheon, the university will make 9% instead of 10% on its investments this year.

**[22:24]** And then the poor students won't have funding for their activities. And we don't want to deprive the students, do we? Here in Dallas, we have General Dynamics, which is one of the weapons manufacturers. It's literally right next door to UTD, which has stock in it. And it's just crazy to think about that process.

**[22:44]** It's like, we're going to need to continue to blow up universities so that you can have a better gym. It's a matter of 1% or 2% in the stock exchange or in the investment, in the ROI. In tech, you have that exact same thing that people talk about, making the world a better place. We're building the future and we're building the companies that are going to change the future and they're going to change our lives.

**[23:11]** And a lot of these companies are going to change our lives in extremely negative ways. And even looking past, they're going to blow up our homes or they're going to militarize the police or they're going to have AI checking on us.

**[23:28]** And you take it back to what has actually happened and what tech has actually done for us so far. They've destroyed our attention, the dopamine economy of the social media networks. They've created this gig economy where people don't have good jobs anymore.

**[23:48]** And people are stringing two or three jobs together in order to be able to make their rent. They're working with landlords to collude to drive rent prices up. The kind of things that tech have done for the world have not been extremely positive for us, even when they do the things that they say are supposed to be positive for us.

**[24:12]** There's an interesting question that I've personally been asked. So I'm sure you know many good people that work at these tech companies. I personally know many good people that work at Google, Muslims and otherwise, right? Palestinians that work at these companies. And they've tried to make change from within. And they kind of have this moral conundrum, right?

**[24:34]** If you think about it in the government sense, you've got people that still talk about how far should we engage? Which politicians should we engage? How much do we engage the system versus fighting the system? And you've seen a number of people resign from this particular administration, the Biden administration, which has proven to be the worst manifestation of everything that Donald Trump would express in regards to Palestine.

**[24:56]** What do you kind of say to people that work in tech? I mean, I get asked this question regularly as an imam, right? People come to me with a faith crisis of sorts, like, look, I work in these companies. I've been trying to move the needle. I thought I was more important to the company than I actually am. Because you see how many, I mean, Google laid off what, like 170 people after those protests, 174 people in one strike.

**[25:18]** I thought I was in good standing with the company and that my expression would mean something. But clearly, that hasn't been the case. Do I continue to stay and keep pushing some sort of ethical boundaries in what is inherently unethical? Do I try to make the best of this situation? Or do I exit and fight from the outside?

**[25:44]** What do you say to young people in tech that come to you with that moral conundrum?

**[26:14]** I think that's a difficult line to step away from. I've talked to dozens of people on the inside and they want to speak up. They know that the things that they're working on are harmful. But they have mortgages and they have kids in private schools. And it's a difficult line for people.

**[26:33]** And I think that a lot of people who want to work on it from the inside, I think they end up massively dissatisfied about their own impact. But at the same time, it is something that's needed.

**[26:48]** And the people who are getting fired for protesting Google, the people who are writing open letters, who are publishing about what Meta does internally, even the people who are talking to me and telling me the story about what really happens within these companies can be massively impactful. And if they're not there, then the only people who are having voices in those rooms are people who are pro-Israel.

**[27:17]** So it is absolutely necessary. But I think it is also, I can only imagine the toll that it takes on them. And I mean, some of those people, frankly, are there. And what's keeping them there is not just, you know, and I'm sure you know this, obviously, and it's not just the mortgage. It's not just it's actually that they feel like this is the best way they can make change. And they usually do. After a few small wins, suffer a massive loss and they wonder about themselves. And, you know, my advice to them has been along similar lines, right?

**[27:53]** Look, I mean, we need people there, you know, obviously continue to be principled, continue to be unambiguous about where you stand, continue to try to push the needle and to be wise and to be calculated, but never to forsake your courage or your conscience in the process of that. And it's a rough conversation. I mean, I come to it from a pastoral perspective, right?

**[28:16]** Like, look, you're doing the right thing, I hope, based upon what you're saying to me. But, you know, at the same time, we need people on the outside as well. What does the outside look like? You started Tech for Palestine. There is a group, No Tech for Apartheid, which is not the same thing as Tech for Palestine, for those that might be wondering, right? What does the outside look like for someone that works in tech and how can they be effective on the outside if that's the route that they choose?

**[28:46]** So fundamentally, tech is a sort of a way of thinking about the world. There is the industry and there's an awful lot that people can do to call out what's happening in the industry. But it's also a place where you can build tech projects that actually help change things. So for example, I was on a call earlier with people who are working on this Blockout 2024 thing, where they're helping influencers feel the pain of not having spoken out for a while.

**[29:16]** For Palestine, and they're helping automate that people are going out and they're unfollowing Kim Kardashian one at a time. And there's people out there who are building software to allow people to unfollow thousands, hundreds of thousands of these influencers for not speaking up. So it's a thing where

**[29:37]** people can have impact the same type of impact that makes tech a lucrative industry for you because of automation, because of AI, all these things can be used to help Palestine and to fight against the system at the same time.

**[29:55]** So with that being said, what can the person who is not in tech do? You know, you've got thousands of people watching this. How do they get involved? Where's the hope in all of this? I mean, obviously, we've all been, you know, you write that you can't sleep. None of us have been able to sleep, right? Anyone with a moral conscience immediately resonates with the words that you wrote. And they're looking for a silver lining. I mean, it's hard to say silver lining in the midst of a genocide. But how do we get involved?

**[30:24]** How can the average person be more conscious with what they purchase with what they consume, how they use their time, how they involve something that is so foreign to them being tech, right? When they're not in that world. I think the main thing that affects people and makes them think that they're not able to do anything is that there's so much going on. And they see so many things that they feel overwhelmed and helpless. And I think that if people do want to get involved, pick one thing that comes by that you see come past you and figure out how you can get more involved in that.

**[31:04]** So, for example, you see things about Israel bonds. Sometimes Israel bonds is a thing where people actually invest. And when I say people, I mean, often cities, municipalities, large companies invest in Israel bonds in order to support the Israeli economy and also to make money because they're an investment.

**[31:29]** This is something that they can start to investigate in their locality, in what town you're in. Is there an investment that has been made by the municipality? Is there one in your state? This information is public. You can do similar investigations on your local politicians, on the companies that are in your area.

**[31:50]** There's so many facets to how Israel has this control in the United States that it actually makes it really easy to get involved because you just have to pick one thing that they're doing and start to spend time on it, find the other people who are working on it and get organized.

**[32:09]** Have you been able to work with anyone from Palestine? Have you been able to take like a young person from Gaza or from Palestine and sort of train them up a tech mind from there? I mean, could you share any stories about that or any particular individual that maybe stands out to you? So that's not the sort of advocacy that we're doing at the moment. We are very much focused on advocacy within the US and in the West. But an awful lot of our volunteers and the people, the people who set up Tech for Palestine, the 25 initial were 80 percent Palestinian, Arab or Muslim. So it's a very, very heavy involvement in it.

**[32:52]** The funny thing about asking about helping Palestinians get technical is that Palestine is incredibly heavily technical. There is a huge number of engineers, software engineers in particular in Palestine. As you know, it's an incredibly well-educated workforce and population. A lot of that is within tech and within software engineering.

**[33:21]** You know, you're Irish, which is obviously something that in some ways, has to be formative to the way that you kind of enter into this arena, you know, I had the pleasure of going to Ireland, to Dublin, in fact, you know, back in February, and I was absolutely blown away by the solidarity of the Irish people with Palestine.

**[33:41]** It's something you hear about. It's something you see. But it's another thing to experience that. And it was absolutely overwhelming. I think that the experience of Palestinian solidarity, finding that within our allies. This time around, as ugly as the genocide has been. As refreshing as the breadth of the allyship has been.

**[34:05]** We're seeing obviously Ireland and South Africa. But if you go to any encampment, you see a pretty large Jewish presence. You see a large presence of people across the board, Black Palestine solidarity. Do you see any hope, you know, in sort of the breadth of the pro-Palestine movement now and the broadening of the pro-Palestine movement? Is that something that gives you hope in particular?

**[34:28]** Absolutely. And I feel that it's barely even started. You know, we're seeing this in the encampments. But the vast majority of the people in America, for example, are not aware of the other side of the narrative. They've only gotten what they've been fed for decades.

**[34:48]** The anti-Arab sentiment and Islamophobia after 9/11, for example. They have very much been only fed the idea of Israel as our ally. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. We need to support them. We need to keep sending money their way. That's the narrative they've been fed.

**[35:10]** And as Gen Z in particular starts to ask questions, they learn very quickly that they're being lied to. And so when you see that narrative break open, as we are seeing now, it is mainstream questioning our alliance with Israel is mainstream.

**[35:31]** Questioning whether we should be bombing children in Gaza and in particular, whether we should be spending our money on that instead of health care is, you know, we're still at the very start of that movement for that to become pervasive within the US. And the amount of supporters that Israel has is actually incredibly low.

**[35:55]** The diehard Zionists in the US, I think you probably have three million Jewish Zionists, maybe 10 million Christian Zionists. It's not representative of a very large portion of the United States at all. It's just in pretty powerful positions like the ADL, like AIPAC, like the tech companies.

**[36:19]** And as the broader population learns, as they are learning, then it's dramatically going to change things. And you can see this in how heavy the suppression is coming down. The students are being attacked by paramilitary police. They're being beaten.

**[36:40]** TikTok is being banned because and they have Mitt Romney and Anthony Blinken sat down in Arizona to tell us why that was. And it's because there were pro-Palestinian voices on it. The suppression that we're seeing is because it has the potential to bring down the whole system, frankly, and they are terrified.

**[37:04]** And that terror is because as people learn what's happening, they immediately say, that's not right. Why are we supporting that? So I want to ask you a deeply personal question that you probably won't be asked on any podcast or in any interview. But, you know, one of the things that many have spoken about not being Palestinian, not being Muslim, is that as horrified as they are by the genocide and our complicity in the genocide, they're also inspired by the resilience of the Palestinian people.

**[37:37]** And perhaps they see their faith, their courage as being generated by something deeper. What have you as Paul Biggar, what have you kind of learned about the Palestinian people, maybe even about Islam as a faith by watching the resilience of the Palestinian people? How does that kind of factor into your own ability to take on these companies and to take this path that you've taken?

**[38:01]** That's an interesting question. I'll say that I knew very little about Palestine and very little about Islam when I started my journey. And I think that probably the narrative that I had was one that was fed by the same US system that's very Islamophobic.

**[38:26]** It's been really interesting to see how peaceful Islam is. That was not something that I've been led to believe my entire life. And, you know, as we're breaking down the narrative, so we're breaking down some of ours as well.

**[38:43]** And it seems extremely important to how the Palestinians, the people undergoing the bombing in Gaza, how they continue their lives. It's not quite lifelong, but most of my life, atheist. It's certainly an interesting lesson in how people can apply religion positively.

**[39:08]** I come from a country that is removing itself from a multi-hundred year suppression by the Catholic Church. And so it's, you know, I've always been in my life going in the other direction. So it's very interesting to see people who are applying religion very positively.

**[39:27]** So five, 10 years from now, let's take 10 years from now and I'll kind of conclude with this. If you were to kind of look back 10 years from now and say you succeeded, we have succeeded. What does success look like in 10 years? You know, considering just how overwhelming and how far gone this all seems.

**[39:48]** What do you hope this conversation looks like in 10 years between you and I and perhaps you and others that have embarked upon this mission? To reign in tech? I mean, I think fundamentally our mission, the mission of all of us in this, is to reign in quite a lot of the system, right?

**[40:13]** We're trying to reign in tech, we're trying to reign in the US, we're trying to reign in Zionism, trying to reign in Israel, of course. If we have succeeded in 10 years, then things will have the potential to look dramatically different. A free Palestine, obviously, being one, but one where a lot of power is pulled out of tech, in particular pulled out of big tech,

**[40:34]** where they no longer have the power to suppress content because it's politically advantageous to them. One where the war machine is not promoted and not funded. And one, you know, ultimately where workers in tech have a lot more power to affect change from the bottom.

**[40:58]** And where that's true of the United States in general, where the actual people who are dramatically pro-ceasefire, who are dramatically against bombing, who are dramatically against funding Israel, are listened to in not only Middle Eastern foreign policy decisions,

**[41:18]** but also in the broad range of things in which we are ignored and in which the US system doesn't work to serve us. Paul, thank you so much for all that you've done and all that you continue to do, and for taking the time out to be with us and to share your insights, to expose us to, you know,

**[41:37]** what we are deeply unfamiliar with at the process level, but unfortunately have been seeing at the outcome level. Thank you for your conscience and thank you for your solidarity. And we look forward to having you on once again and continuing to struggle alongside you. Thank you so much for having me.

## Other Episodes in "Gaza Diaries with Dr. Omar Suleiman"
- [I Was The Biggest Atheist Until Gaza | Gaza Diaries | Dr. Omar Suleiman and Robert Martin](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/gaza-diaries/i-was-the-biggest-atheist-until-gaza-gaza-diaries-dr-omar-suleiman-and-robert-martin.md)
- [He Found His Wife in Gaza | Gaza Diaries | Dr. Omar Suleiman & Dr. Mohamed Mustafa](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/gaza-diaries/he-found-his-wife-in-gaza-gaza-diaries-dr-omar-suleiman-dr-mohamed-mustafa.md)
- [Oct 7th | Why Doctors Beg to Return to Gaza | Gaza Diaries with Dr. Omar Suleiman](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/gaza-diaries/oct-7th-why-doctors-beg-to-return-to-gaza-gaza-diaries-with-dr-omar-suleiman.md)
- [Injustice Won't Stop Us: Mahmoud Khalil with Dr. Omar Suleiman | Gaza Diaries](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/gaza-diaries/injustice-wont-stop-us-mahmoud-khalil-with-dr-omar-suleiman-gaza-diaries.md)
- [The South African Minister Who Took on Israel | Dr. Naledi Pandor | Gaza Diaries with Dr. Omar Suleiman](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/gaza-diaries/the-south-african-minister-who-took-on-israel-naledi-pandor-gaza-diaries.md)
- [Reverend Munther Isaac Calls Out Christian Zionists | Gaza Diaries](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/gaza-diaries/reverand-calls-out-christian-zionists-munther-isaac-gaza-diaries.md)
- [What Eid Was Like in Gaza | Gaza Diaries](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/gaza-diaries/what-eid-was-like-in-gaza-gaza-diaries.md)
- [Microsoft Fired Her For Defending Palestine | Gaza Diaries | Ibtihal Aboussad and Dr. Omar Suleiman](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/gaza-diaries/microsoft-fired-her-for-defending-palestine-ibtihal-aboussad-gaza-diaries.md)
- [The Du'a of Yunus Under the Rubble | Gaza Diaries](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/gaza-diaries/the-dua-of-yunus-under-the-rubble-gaza-diaries.md)
- ["If You Hear Bombing, Say Alhamdulilah" | Gaza Diaries](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/gaza-diaries/if-you-hear-bombing-say-alhamdulilah-gaza-diaries.md)
- [Nasser Hospital to Biden Walkout | Gaza Diaries](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/gaza-diaries/nasser-hospital-to-biden-walkout-gaza-diaries.md)