Columbia U.'s Gates Foundation/Microsoft/Israel Connection

As an article that was posted on the Middle East Monitor’s website on April 6, 2024 observed:

“At least 46 more Palestinians were killed and 65 others injured over the last 24 hours, as Israel continued its onslaught on the besieged Gaza Strip, the territory’s Health Ministry said on Saturday, Anadolu reports.

“`The Israeli occupation (forces) committed four massacres against families in the Gaza Strip, leaving 46 martyrs and 65 injured during the past 24 hours,’ a ministry statement said.

“`Many people are still trapped under rubble and on the roads as rescuers are unable to reach them,’ it added.

“…At least 33,137 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children, and 75,815 injured since Oct. 7, 2023, according to Palestinian health authorities….”

In addition, the same article noted that the U.S. government-armed Israeli government and IDF/IAF’s war for regime change in Gaza “ has pushed 85% of the territory’s population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.”

Yet on April 5, 2024, the president of Columbia University—former World Bank Vice-President, former International Monetary Fund [IMF] Deputy Managing Director, former UK Department for International Development Permanent Secretary, former Bank of England Deputy Governor and 2022-appointed Gates Foundation Board Member Minouche Shafik—announced in a statement that “a number of students have been suspended” by the Columbia University administration; because “on March 24”, 2024, they organized a political meeting “at a campus residential facility,” (which included as a speaker an alleged Palestinian representative of the anti-imperialist secular left PFLP political group) protesting IDF war crimes, “that the University had already barred, twice, from occurring.”

In addition, Gates Foundation Board Member Shafik also announced in the April 5, 2024 Columbia University “Office of the President” statement:

“We notified law enforcement and we hired an outside investigation firm…With their help, we identified organizers and participants and required them to cooperate with the investigation or face immediate discipline….The investigation continues…Yesterday, students, faculty, and other members of our community chose to hold an unapproved event near academic buildings in violation of our rules and policies. We are in the process of identifying participants and they will face discipline under our policies.”

One reason Gates Foundation Board Member Shafik may be so into violating the free speech rights, due process rights and U.S. Constitution first amendment/civil liberties rights of Columbia and Barnard antiwar students who oppose the Israel Defense Forces [IDF] and Israel Air Force [IAF]’s war on people in Gaza and in the West Bank is that in 2022 Bill Gates’s Gates Foundation invested $9 million in an Israeli biotechnology company, Eleven Therapeutics, whose COO and Co-Founder is a “mission commander in active reserve duty” in the IAF and a former “F-16 co-pilot” and “IAF Major”, according to the Eleven Therapeutics website. As an August 4, 2022 article posted on the Philanthropy News website noted, “Eleven Therapeutics, an Israeli biotechnology company, has announced a $9 million investment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation” and “the commitment includes $5 million toward future equity investment.”

According to the Eleven Therapeutics website, the Gates Foundation-backed for-profit Israeli biotechnology company is “a cross-disciplinary group of entrepreneur-scientists…coming from…academic institutions,…pharma companies, and high-stress military environments,” its CEO and Co-founder, Yaniv Erlich, is a former Columbia University Associate Professor of Computer Science and its COO and Co-founder Shaul Ilan is an “F-16 co-pilot”, an ”IAF Major” and a “mission commander in active reserve duty.”

The Microsoft corporation that provided Bill Gates with much of the surplus wealth he used to establish the Gates Foundation, on whose board Columbia President Shafik has sat in recent years, has been investing in a big way in Israel since the 1990s. As Yarden Katz recalled in a March 15, 2021 article that was posted on the Mondoweiss website:

“Microsoft opened its first research center outside the US in Israel, in 1991, and today has three branches as part of Microsoft Israel….Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said that Israel’s developments in `security’ were `improving the world.’…

“During the year [2002] of the Jenin massacre, Microsoft got a three-year 100-million-shekel contract with the Israeli government (roughly $35 million in current US dollars) – the largest contract of its kind for Israel at the time. As part of the contract, Microsoft agreed to provide unlimited products to the Israeli army and defense ministry, and broadly exchange `knowledge’ with the army. According to Israeli newspapers, Israel paid Microsoft from its US `aid’ money – a standard way for US corporations to profit by working with Israel….”

And as a November 9, 2023 article on the Globes website noted, “U.S. software giant Microsoft, which has some 3,000 employees in Israel, informed them by email today that it intends to give each of them $3,000 for their personal use, because of the war in the Gaza Strip.”

Microsoft Founder Bill Gates’s Gates Foundation has also provided “non-profit” Columbia University and the Teachers College of Columbia University with a lot of money in “charitable grants” since the 1990s. In May 1999, for example, “Columbia University's Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health” was “awarded $50 million from Bill and Melinda Gates,” according to a May 19, 1999 Columbia University Record website article.

Then, on Feb. 14, 2003, the Gates Foundation gave another tax-exempt “charitable grant” of $488,200 to Columbia University “to support a forum and broadcast production of a global health dialogue between Bill Gates and Bill Moyers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health,” according to the Gates Foundation’s website. And on July 1, 2006, another $10 million in “charitable grant” money was given to Columbia University by the Gates Foundation “to support the Mailman School of Public Health Building Campaign.,” according to the Gates Foundation’s website.

In addition, between 1998 and Sept. 17, 2019, Gates’s Gates Foundation gave Columbia University and the Teachers College of Columbia University the following other “charitable grants:”

1. An April 1998 grant of $160,000 to Columbia University;

2. An April 10, 1998 grant of $610,000 to Columbia University;

3. A Sept. 1, 2002 grant of $4,746,533 to Columbia University “to support a randomized trial of male circumcision;”

4. A Nov. 2002 grant of $10 million to Columbia University;

5. A Nov. 15, 2006 grant of $240,687 to Teachers College of Columbia University “to carry out activities aimed at helping a national audience of journalists report on issues;”

6. A Nov. 2008 grant of $5,182,505 to Columbia University “to determine the causes of pediatric pneumonia…to inform prioritization of microbial targets for vaccine development;”

7. A March 23, 2012 grant of $2,502,000 to Teachers College of Columbia University “for general operating support;”

8. A July 2, 2013 grant of $273,083 to Columbia University “to examine key aspects of fecal sludge treatment;”

9. An April 1, 2016 grant of $1.3 million to Teachers College of Columbia University “for general operating support;”

10. A July 2016 grant of $7,905,046 to Columbia University “to support development of the Columbia Tutoring and Learning Center as a state of the art technology enabling tutoring program;”

11. A Nov. 2, 2016 grant of $1 million to Columbia University “to provide general operating support;”

12. A Jan. 29, 2018 grant of $1.5 million to Columbia University “for general operating support;”

13. A March 14, 2018 grant of $1.5 million to Columbia University “to support the development of computational methods for optimization of antibodies and vaccines and the application of these methods to important problems in global health;”

14. A March 16, 2018 grant of $1,911,540 to Columbia University;

15. An Aug. 2015 grant of $1,625,009 to Teachers College of Columbia University;

16. A Sept. 5, 2018 grant of $328,850 to Columbia University;

17. An Oct. 22, 2018 grant of $100,000 to Teachers College of Columbia University;

18. A Nov. 2018 grant of $250,000 to Columbia University; and

19. A Sept. 17, 2019 grant of $1.3 million to Teachers College of Columbia University “to provide general operating support.”

And, as recently as October 2023, the Gates Foundation gave another $900,000 “charitable grant” to Gates Foundation board member Shafik’s Columbia University purportedly “to create novel technology platform capabilities,” according to the Gates Foundation website.

In addition, according to the Gates Foundation's Form 990 financial filing for 2022, between Jan. 1, 2022 and Dec. 31, 2022 the Gates Foundation gave at least 12 "charitable grants", totaling over $13 million, to either the Trustees of Columbia University or to the Teachers College of Columbia University.