Brin shaped Google's China stand

* The Wall Street Journal

* TECHNOLOGY
* MARCH 12, 2010

Soviet-Born Brin Has Shaped Google's Stand on China

By BEN WORTHEN

As a boy growing up in the Soviet Union, Sergey Brin witnessed the consequences of censorship. Now the Google Inc. co-founder is drawing on that experience in shaping the company's showdown with the Chinese government.

Mr. Brin has long been Google's moral compass on China-related issues, say people familiar with the matter. He expressed the greatest concern among decision makers, they say, about the compromises Google made when it launched its Chinese-language search engine, Google.cn, in 2006. He is now the guiding force behind Google's decision to stop filtering search results in China, say people familiar with the decision.

Google acknowledged that the call to stop filtering—which was announced in January and set off negotiations with Beijing—could lead to its withdrawal from the fast-growing market.

The move is the clearest manifestation yet of a tension that has always existed at Google.

The Internet company, on one hand, is analytical: It built its core search business on algorithms that determine the relevance of Web sites and has tried to apply quantitative analysis to traditionally subjective parts of a business, such as hiring decisions. On the other hand, Mr. Brin and co-founder Larry Page have passionately touted Google's ability to spread democracy through access to information, and adopted the unofficial and now-famous motto, "Don't Be Evil."

"At its best, Google is data-driven with an ethical trump card," said Larry Brilliant, who headed up the company's philanthropic efforts until 2009. Always it was the founders, Messrs. Brin and Page, who could play that card, he added.

Google declined to make Mr. Brin or any other executives available for an interview.

Mr. Brin was born in Moscow in 1973. He emigrated to the United States with his family in 1979, he has said, in part because of anti-Semitism there before the fall of the Soviet Union. He has said in past interviews that the move and its circumstances had a profound impact on his life.

Mr. Brin was asked about the compromises necessary to do business in China during a 2004 interview with Playboy magazine. "There are difficult questions, difficult challenges," he said. "One thing we know is that people can make better decisions with better information," he said, adding that he was aware of cases where finding information through Google's search engine had saved people's lives.

When Google launched its Chinese site, it agreed to filter out results that the Chinese government found objectionable, including some political speech and pornography.

Mr. Brin wasn't completely comfortable with that decision and would sometimes say Google should never have agreed to Beijing's conditions, a person familiar with his thinking said. But his objections were never enough to reverse Google's policy.

"I actually feel like things really improved" in the first years after Google entered China, Mr. Brin said at a technology conference in February. "We were actually able to censor less and less, and our local competitors there also censored less and less."

But following the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, he said, "there's been a lot more blocking going on."

In December, Google detected cyber attacks that it traced to computers in China. It said some of its intellectual property was stolen, adding that it had evidence that attackers were trying to access the accounts of Chinese human-rights activists on Gmail, Google's email service.

Mr. Brin personally supervised Google's subsequent investigation, even moving his office into the building where Google's security team was operating, said a person familiar with the investigation.

The Wall Street Journal reported in January that in debates over how to respond, Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, argued the company could do more good by keeping its search engine in China. Mr. Brin said Google had already taken that approach. and that it could no longer justify giving in to China's requirements to censor search results.

A Silicon Valley executive who knows Mr. Brin said his Soviet upbringing made him particularly opposed to state use of technology to spy on citizens. This person suspects that the apparent attempts to spy on Gmail users may have been as important in Google's reaction as the issue of censorship. "That tripped Sergey," this person said.

Skinhead Puts on Skullcap

Adam Lach for The New York Times - Pawel in the Warsaw synagogue. A former truck driver and neo-Nazi skinhead, Pawel, 33, has since become an Orthodox Jew, covering his shaved head with a yarmulke and shedding his fascist ideology for the Torah.

February 27, 2010
Changing Face in Poland: Skinhead Puts on Skullcap
By DAN BILEFSKY


WARSAW — When Pawel looks into the mirror, he can still sometimes see a neo-Nazi skinhead staring back, the man he was before he covered his shaved head with a skullcap, traded his fascist ideology for the Torah and renounced violence and hatred in favor of God.

“I still struggle every day to discard my past ideas,” said Pawel, a 33-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jew and former truck driver, noting with little irony that he had to stop hating Jews in order to become one. “When I look at an old picture of myself as a skinhead, I feel ashamed. Every day I try and do teshuvah,” he said, using the Hebrew word for repentance. “Every minute of every day. There is a lot to make up for.”

Pawel, who also uses his Hebrew name Pinchas, asked that his last name not be used for fear that his old neo-Nazi friends could harm him or his family.

Quite a transformation; from one extreme to another.

Twenty years after the fall of Communism, Pawel is perhaps the most unlikely example of the Jewish revival under way in Poland, of a moment in which Jewish leaders here say the country is finally showing solid signs of shedding the rabid anti-Semitism of the past.


Before 1939, Poland was home to more than three million Jews, more than 90 percent of whom were killed by the Nazis. Most who survived emigrated. Of the fewer than 50,000 who remained in Poland, many abandoned or hid their Judaism during decades of Communist oppression in which political pogroms against Jews persisted.


Today, though, Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, said he considered Poland the most pro-Israel country in the European Union. He said the attitude of Pope John Paul II, a Pole, who called Jews “our elder brothers,” had finally entered the public consciousness.


Ten years after the revelation that 1,600 Jews of the town of Jedwabne were burned alive by their Polish neighbors in July 1941, he said the national myth that all Poles were victims of World War II had finally been shattered.


“Before 1989 there was a feeling that it was not safe to say, ‘I am a Jew,’ ” Rabbi Schudrich said. “But two decades later, there is a growing feeling that Jews are a missing limb in Poland. The level of anti-Semitism remains unacceptable, but the image of the murderous Pole seared in the consciousness of many Jews after the war doesn’t correspond to the Poland of 2010.”


The small Jewish revival has been under way for several years around eastern Europe. Hundreds of Poles, a majority of them raised as Catholics, are either converting to Judaism or discovering Jewish roots submerged for decades in the aftermath of World War II.


In the past five years, Warsaw’s Jewish community had grown to 600 families from 250. The cafes and bars of the old Jewish quarter in Krakow brim with young Jewish converts listening to Israeli hip hop music.


Michal Pirog, a popular Polish dancer and television star, who recently proclaimed his Jewish roots on national television, said the revelation had won him more fans than enemies. “Poland is changing,” he said. “I am Jewish and I feel good,” he said.


Pawel’s metamorphosis from baptized Catholic skinhead to Jew began in a bleak neighborhood of concrete tower blocks in Warsaw in the 1980s, where Pawel said he and his friends reacted to the gnawing uniformity of socialism by embracing anti-Semitism. They shaved their heads, carried knives and greeted one another with the raised right arm gesture of the Nazi salute.


“Oy vey, I hate to admit it, but we would beat up local Jewish and Arab kids and homeless people,” Pawel said on a recent day from the Nozyk Synagogue here. “We sang about stupid stuff like Satan and killing people. We believed that Poland should only be for Poles.”


One day, he recalled, he and his friends skipped school and took a train to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, near Krakow. “We made jokes that we wished the exhibition had been bigger and that the Nazis had killed even more Jews,” he said.


Even as Pawel embraced the life of a neo-Nazi, he said that he had pangs that his identity was built on a lie. His churchgoing father seemed overly fond of quoting the Old Testament. His grandfather hinted about past family secrets.


“One time when I told my grandfather that Jews were bad, he exploded and screamed at me, ‘If I ever hear you say such a thing again under my roof, you will never come back!’ ”


Pawel joined the army and married a fellow skinhead at age 18. But his sense of self changed irrevocably at the age of 22, when his wife, Paulina, suspecting that she had Jewish roots, went to a genealogical institute and discovered Pawel’s maternal grandparents on a register of Warsaw Jews, along with her own grandparents.


When Pawel confronted his parents, he said, they broke down and told him the truth: his maternal grandmother was Jewish and had survived the war by being hidden in a monastery by a group of nuns. His paternal grandfather, also a Jew, had seven brother and sisters, most of whom had perished in the Holocaust.


“I went to my parents and said, ‘What the hell’? Imagine, I was a neo-Nazi and heard this news? I couldn’t look in the mirror for weeks,” he said. “My parents were the typical offspring of Jewish survivors of the war, who decided to conceal their Jewish identity to try and protect their family.”


Shaken by his own discovery, Pawel said he spent weeks of cloistered and tortured reflection but was finally overcome by a strong desire to become Jewish, even Orthodox. He acknowledged that he was drawn to extremes. He said his transformation was arduous, akin to being reborn. He even forced himself to reread “Mein Kampf” but could not get to the end because he felt physically repulsed.


“When I asked a rabbi, ‘Why do I feel this way?’ he replied, ‘The sleeping souls of your ancestors are calling out to you.’ ”


At age 24, he was circumcised. Two years later, he decided to become an ultra-Orthodox Jew. He and his wife are raising their two children in a Jewish home.


Pawel noted that he was still singled out by the same anti-Semites who once counted him among their ranks. “When younger people see me on the street with my top hat and side curls they sometimes laugh at me,” he said. “But it is the old ladies who are the meanest. Sometimes, they use the language I used when I was a skinhead and say, ‘Get out and go back to your country’ or ‘Jew go home!’ ”


And now he is studying to become a shochet, a person charged with killing animals according to Jewish dietary laws. “I am good with knives,” he explained.


Joanna Berendt contributed reporting.

A weird one

This one seems comical, yet it certainly has an eerie feel.

In Riverdale, New Anxieties, and a Resolve to Carry On

The scene on Thursday along 232nd Street in Riverdale. Jewish residents have been drawn to the neighborhood for decades.

In Bronx Bomb Case, Steps and Missteps, on Tape (May 22, 2009)

Suspects in Terror Bombing Plot: Drug Arrests and Prison Conversions (May 22, 2009)

N.Y. Bomb Plot Suspects Acted Alone, Police Say (May 22, 2009)

NYC: Interfaith Understanding Wins Out, and a Plot Loses (May 22, 2009)

Mexican mogul: a Jew

It really is amazing how anti-semitism prevails. Get this sentence from an obituary of a Mexican businessman.

His name also surfaced in Nicaragua, on a list compiled by terrorists of potential Latin American kidnap targets. Handwritten notes in the margins suggested snatching Mr. Saba wouldn't prove harmful to the left's image. "A Jew. He has no social prestige," was how the list's authors dismissed Mr. Saba, according to reports at the time, reflecting a prejudice shared by revolutionaries and reactionaries alike.

Emphasis added.

Mr. Saba was the son of Syrian Jews from Aleppo.

Uncle Joe, the Czar, or the Empress

In the land of Czars, an online poll turns up interesting results.

In the land of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky, an online poll to identify Russian history's "greatest heroes" has two early front-runners: autocratic Czar Nicholas II and dictator Josef Stalin.
That in itself is interesting: both were strongmen, arbitrary rulers with absolute power, and both, clearly, are objects of nostalgic longing for how things used to be. Of course, the dark side of their rules is forgotten, glossed over, or ignored. Under Nicholas many Russians were serfs, under Stalin many Russians were dead.

Catherine the Great, Yuri Gagarin, Czar Nicolas, Stalin.

But this is interesting: "He's like a brand. It's like Coca-Cola," says Alexander Lyubimov, a senior executive with Rossiya TV, the state-controlled broadcaster behind the "Name of Russia" contest.

A brand? As in 'things go better with Uncle Joe'? Oy vay.
The vote has fired people's imagination at a time when the Kremlin is trying to reclaim parts of its Soviet and Czarist past to forge a new nationalism. But as early results have shown, finding suitable historical heroes in a country with a centuries-old tradition of authoritarianism is complex. Elsewhere, the task was less fraught. In the U.S., a similar contest chose Ronald Reagan; in Britain, Winston Churchill; and in South Africa, Nelson Mandela.

Just goes to show how short-sighted and forgetful Americans can be.

Nicholas II's narrow lead comes as monarchists prepare to mark the 90th anniversary of his execution by the Bolsheviks. Mr. Lyubimov says Russia's last czar is unlikely to win. Though Nicholas II is revered by the Orthodox Church, which canonized him, his detractors say his reign was marred by anti-Semitic pogroms, two disastrous wars, a civilian massacre and the near-collapse of the country.

Seems ole Nick wasn't adept at ruling his nation.

And this summary: For much of the Soviet period, there was little examination of the darker side of his rule. This only began in earnest in the twilight days of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev and in the early 1990s when human-rights groups began talking about Stalin's millions of victims.

Sort of a sound-bit interpretation of history: Khrushchev began the exposure of Stalin's horrors, Solzhenitsyn wrote a great deal about those horrors, and Sakharov and other dissidents continued the movement, yet it is all ascribed to Gorbachev. Too simple.

Hugo Chávez's Jewish Problem

Mr. Schoenfeld (who wrote "The Home-Front Battle Heats Up") is the senior editor of Commentary. So I went to look at Commentary.

Its website is described in Google as General, yet Jewish. Highly variegated, with a unifying perspective. On its front page I found this picture. A variation of the old slogan Yanqi go home, it includes the hammer-and-sickle, and the age-old anti-semitic slur. Always the Jews.

... to dismiss Chávez as a lunatic is to wish away his proven political skill. He is, without question, a powerful figure—and one who, thanks to a quirk of geography, is also in possession of dangerously large amounts of oil.

Heavy crude, high in sulfur, but an awful lot of it. 100 billion barrels, perhaps 80 billion; a lot of oil.

Chávez has made common cause with FARC, a narco-terrorist group ... Libya ... Syria, Hizballah, and Hizballah’s patron Iran. Virtually alone among world leaders, Chávez is an impassioned defender of Tehran’s right to pursue nuclear technology and has even hinted he would be willing to finance it.

Quite a cast of characters, his allies.

And the same old crap

Anti-Semitism sells.

Johan Spanner for The New York Times

Hamas’s Insults to Jews Complicate Peace