New CBS owner David Ellison met with top Israeli general in scheme to spy on Americans

Israel’s former top general sought donations from David Ellison and his father, Larry, as part of a billionaire coterie to fund digital paramilitaries aimed at sabotaging pro-Palestine activists. The leaked documents show one planner explaining, “In the jungle, we need more guerrillas and less IDF.”

With Paramount and CBS News now under his control, the younger Ellison has installed self-described “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief.

In the emails, Hollywood talent agency executive Adam Berkowitz identified Ellison as “very interested” in “helping out with [undermining] the BDS movement.”

Berkowitz introduced Ellison to the Israeli general in a group email: “Benny meet david. David meet Benny,” Berkowitz wrote on December 23, 2015, explaining that he “told david briefly about your [Gantz’s] 12 tribe idea which you can expound on to him which he seemed very interested in.”

Two days later, Ellison replied, “Mr Gantz it is a pleasure to meet you over e-mail. I very much look forward to discussing everything you are working on, and in the mean time hope you are enjoying the holiday season.”

He added, “I will be back in LA on January 3rd and look forward to connecting in the New Year.”

A planning spreadsheet names other Zionist billionaires sought for the Israeli effort. They included David’s father, Oracle founder and Friends of the IDF board member Larry Ellison; Israeli-American billionaire and top Democratic Party sugar daddy Haim Saban; and Google founder Sergey Brin, whose “Israel-support” was still “tbd.” One of those named, Canadian bookchain owner Heather Reissman, had “already agreed” to donate.

The document also listed the following hyper-wealthy Zionist activists as potential 12 Tribes members, alongside the following descriptions:

• Eli Broad ($5.7 billion, real estate giant, philantropist [sic] supporting pro-Israel causes),

• Selmo Nissenbaum (Art collector, Partner of Personale Investimentos Ltda since 2008. Director of Uhf Incorporated; financ. supports Weizmann Institute)

• Dorothea Steinbruch ($5.8 b, steel industry)

• Safra family

• Kevin Bermeister (technology innovator, real estate investor, philanthropist, founding investor of Skype)

• Frank Lowy (co-founder of the Westfield Group, operator of over 100 shopping centres in Australia, NZ, the US and UK, net worth US$4.60 bn)

• Anthony Pratt (a net worth of about US$7.1 billion, packaging industry)

• Édouard Cukierman (French-Israeli business man)

• Rotchild [sic] family (Banking dynasty)

• Lord Stanley Fink (Net worth $180m, former hedge fund manager, pro-Israel philantropist [sic])

• Sir Ronald Cohen (British businessman and political figure, known as “the father of British venture capital)

• Lord George Weidenfeld (British publisher, philanthropist, newspaper columnist; pro-Israel supporter)

• Poju Zabludowicz (Finnish-born London-based business magnate, investor, art collector and pro-Israel philanthropist (one of the main supporters of UK pro-Israel group BICOM))

Those afforded the dubious honor of being selected to donate $1 million to the official Israeli propaganda slush fund would be anointed one of the “12 Tribes” of Israel, all of whom would be guided directly by the Israeli government, according to a promotional document.

“Funding for this initiative shall be provided by an exclusive group of the twelve most influential Jewish philantropists [sic], symbolizing the twelve Jewish tribes; Israel’s government shall act as a thirteenth, facilitating ‘tribe.’”

Internal planning documents from Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, a nominally independent thinktank which serves as an extension of the Israeli military, show how the 12 Tribes envisioned itself: “strategically, we want to be a non-hierarchical mothership, working for the people and the state” of Israel.

However, the effort’s masterminds were heavily preoccupied with maintaining a facade of independence from Tel Aviv. “Government money is also a political constraint,” one organizer stated, adding, “in order to act on all target audiences, independence is required.”

Another planner agreed that the scheme would be more effective if it posed as autonomous: “In the jungle, we need more guerrillas and less IDF.” A third volunteered, “This will not be a covert project, but the connection to the state and the government needs to be very controlled.”

With funding from the 12 Tribes, Israel would deploy “state-of-the-art cyber technology as a soft weapon” through firms like Black Cube — the notorious Israeli intelligence cut-out best known for stalking the accusers of disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.

Black Cube also acts as an attack dog for the makers of highly invasive Pegasus spyware, Israel’s NSO Group. As President Barack Obama closed in on a nuclear deal with Iran, Black Cube sent agents, again under false cover, to investigate administration officials involved in the negotiations.

Internal Black Cube documents boast that the Israeli company has “developed several unique methods, especially social engineering” to “move freely… in limited access environments,” while harvesting data from the darknet.

The email exchanges also offer a glimpse into the early stage of David Ellison’s emerging role as one of Silicon Valley’s top Israel enforcers. It’s a role he was seemingly born to play, given the zeal displayed by his billionaire father, Larry Ellison, in defending the apartheid state.

Paramount’s pro-Israel pedigree

Further emails from the Handala tranche reveal that Larry Ellison was tasked by Israel with evaluating current Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s allegiance to the apartheid state a decade ago, with Tel Aviv’s then UN Ambassador, Ron Posor, asking Larry in 2015: “How was the conversation with Mario [sic] Rubio? Did he pass your scrutiny? Did you have a chance to talk about Israel?”

Larry Ellison responded in the affirmative, declaring, “Marco will be a great friend for Israel.”

The elder Ellison has maintained an extremely close relationship with Tel Aviv, funneling tens of millions of dollars to Israeli militants via the “Friends of the IDF” group over recent years. In fact, a decade before the International Criminal Court indicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes in Gaza, Ellison attempted to place him on the board of directors of Oracle.

Now, Larry Ellison is at the helm of a consortium of Israel-tied billionaires taking over major US media properties from TikTok to Paramount, which controls CBS News. With their takeover of Paramount complete, the Ellison family are not only poised to dictate Israel policy to US viewers, but are well-positioned to dictate the situation on the ground in Gaza as well. Indeed, Ellison pledged over $350 million to the Tony Blair Institute, whose founder was named by President Donald Trump as the future director of the so-called Gaza International Transitional Authority – a neocolonial occupation entity that will provide an inevitable windfall to Blair’s tech backers.

Meanwhile, as the new owner of Paramount Skydance, Ellison’s son, David, has installed Bari Weiss as the new editor-in-chief – and Zionist enforcer – of CBS News.

From ‘cancel culture victim’ to ethically conflicted CBS News chief

The 41-year-old Weiss began her career as a pro-Israel activist hounding Palestinian professors on the campus of Columbia University before working for a number of Israeli media outlets. An admitted “Zionist fanatic,” she rose to prominence as a columnist as a neocon diversity hire at the New York Times opinion section before a stormy resignation in which she branded the paper as a woke hive infected with cancel culture – while omitting her long history of attempting to cancel Israel critics.

(Her final attempt to cancel Israel critics at the NY Times apparently resulted in the assassination of one of her targets, the Palestinian scholar and pundit Refaat Alareer, who was murdered by an Israeli drone strike after Weiss falsely accused him of mocking a non-existent dead Jewish baby).

As she struck out on her own, Weiss basked in support from techno-feudalist financial angels like David Sacks and Marc Andreesen, founding an “anti-woke,” ultra-Zionist outlet ironically entitled the Free Press. Today, the Free Press partners with an Israeli propaganda cutout called Center for Peace Communications which attempts to foment divisions within Arab societies, and promotes the militia of ISIS-linked Yasser Abu Shabab, a notorious smuggler in Gaza who operates alongside the Israeli army.

With support from Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Weiss has also launched an “anti-woke” quasi-university, the University of Austin (UATX), where students read passages from Palantir CEO and university trustee Alex Karp’s harshly panned book, The Technological Republic, alongside Plato’s The Republic. Upon entering the university’s gates, visitors are greeted with a bust of Weiss, the founding mother, donated by Lonsdale.

While journalists have traditionally sought to speak truth to power, Weiss has made a career of doing the opposite, and has been hailed as a kind of scrooge whisperer among the conservative establishment. “She doesn’t just speak to the 1%,” Republican pollster Frank Luntz said of Weiss. “She speaks to the one-hundredth of 1%. And they’ll listen.”

To complete Ellison’s Paramount takeover, his company is purchasing Weiss’s Free Press at an eye-popping price of $150 million. His appointment of Weiss as CBS editor-in-chief raises serious issues about the network’s editorial independence, especially given her proclivity for using Free Press as a vehicle for promoting the interests of her tech donors.

Who were the Free Press investors who profited from the sale to Paramount? Was David Sacks among them? Now that Sacks is a Trump White House Special Advisor on AI and Crypto, his financial relationship with Weiss creates a clear conflict of interest at CBS.

In her first act as CBS editor-in-chief, Weiss issued an October 6 letter to all employees of the organization pledging to advance a commitment to “journalism that is fair, fearless, and factual.”

Zionist David Ellison is continuing to buy up the media to turn it into a mouthpiece for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its demand for endless American wars in the Middle East.

For context, David Ellison, the founder of the production company Skydance, has bought Paramount.

David Ellison’s father, the founder of the tech company Oracle, Larry Ellison, is the largest private donor to the IDF.

As the Times of Israel noted in 2017, “The largest single gift in FIDF’s (Friends of the Israel Defense Forces) history was announced at the event as $16.6 million from Oracle Co-Founder, Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison.”

As Haaretz reported in 2021, Ellison, “who has known Netanyahu for a considerable time, invited the Netanyahu family to come on vacation last month on Lanai, the Oracle founder’s privately owned Hawaiian island. The tech billionaire is known to have personally entertained the Netanyahus at least once during the visit, but sources said that he and the prime minister also held several other conversations in private.”

Ellison even “asked Benjamin Netanyahu to join the board of directors of the company (Oracle) ”.

Furthermore, as Haaretz noted in a separate investigation, in 2020, Ellison had “come forward to help Netanyahu with his legal representation in Case 2000, in which Netanyahu is charged with trying to strike a deal that would have given him positive coverage in Israel’s second largest newspaper”.

As journalist Alan Macleod reported, Ellison’s company, Oracle, is “intimately tied to the State of Israel” and “has signed multiple lucrative contracts with the Israeli national security state”.

As he reported:

Oracle sees itself as an activist organization, one whose goal is the advancement of the Israeli colonization project.

Safra Catz, the company’s Israeli-American CEO, bluntly explained that any employees uncomfortable with supporting a genocide should simply quit. “We are not flexible regarding our mission, and our commitment to Israel is second to none,” she said, adding “this is a free world and I love my employees, and if they don’t agree with our mission to support the State of Israel, then maybe we aren’t the right company for them. Larry and I are publicly committed to Israel and devote personal time to the country, and no one should be surprised by that.”

Similarly, sources close to David Ellison have told the Jerusalem Post that he “loves Israel”, “has Zionist values,” and “quietly donates quite a bit to the State of Israel and the IDF”.

Since buying up Paramount, Ellison has begun turning its subsidiary, CBS, into a propaganda outlet for his family friend, Benjamin Netanyahu.

According to the New York Times, David Ellison is installing Bari Weiss in “the job of editor in chief or co-president of the network”.

Bari Weiss is a lifelong propagandist for Israel who has previously bragged about connecting “my Zionist activism to my journalism”.

Weiss’s outlet, the Free Press, has put out multiple articles claiming that IDF massacres at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation centres “never happened”.

This is despite the fact that multiple IDF soldiers stationed at the fake aid centres have admitted to committing the massacres.

Two IDF soldiers told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz :

It's a killing field, where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They're treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.

and

I was at a similar event. From what we heard, more than ten people were killed there. When we asked why they opened fire, we were told it was an order from above and that the civilians had posed a threat to the troops. I can say with certainty that the people were not close to the forces and did not endanger them. It was pointless – they were just killed for nothing. This thing called killing innocent people – it's been normalized. We were constantly told there are no noncombatants in Gaza, and apparently that message sank in among the troops.

Furthermore, New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote, referring to the Haaretz piece, “one former (Israeli) security official I spoke to didn’t dispute the substance of the report”, quoting the Israeli security official saying, “the way young soldiers and commanders sometimes use their weapons is terrible. They don’t care about the rules. They think, ‘Kill them all! They deserve it after what they did to us, they are not human beings, don’t ask your commander’”.

Furthermore, the Free Press has put out multiple articles denying the Israeli-imposed mass famine in Gaza, even after the Israeli paper Haaretz put out a lengthy article proving beyond a doubt that there was mass famine in Gaza.

After taking hours-long tours of multiple hospitals in Gaza, Haaretz wrote, “We saw children whose bodies were blighted by hunger, with bones jutting out. Their hair had turned yellow or fallen out, their faces were wrinkled, and their abdomens bloated. Their bodies were limp; many had marks on their skin. Some looked totally apathetic”.

As the article noted, “Anyone who claims that the images of starvation in the Gaza Strip are a result of acute genetic or other diseases (which the ‘free press’ claimed), and not due to a grave shortage of food, are lying”.

Along with Weiss, David Ellison installed Kenneth R. Weinstein as the Ombudsman for CBS News.

Weinstein was formerly the head of “the Board of Governors of the US Agency for Global Media, which encompasses the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and Middle East Broadcasting”, U.S.-state-funded propaganda outlets that the New York Times called, a “worldwide propaganda network built by the C.I.A”.

Weinstein was also formerly the head of the ultra-hawkish neo-con and zionist think tank the Hudson Institute, which has been funded by “Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and General Atomics to research a U.S. Department of Defense drone program” and has started the careers of ultra-hawkish neo-con Zionists, including Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley.

The think tank has put out articles saying Israel should “ignore ceasefire calls” , denying the famine in Gaza, and articles claiming that “the Israel-Hamas war has changed American foreign policy for the better”.

The think tank also cheered on Trump’s bombing of Iran, which he bragged about doing for Israel, by putting out articles claiming that “striking Iran made Americans safer”.

As journalist Max Blumenthal noted :

During a 2021 Hudson event with Mike Pence,(Kenneth R. ) Weinstein touted his Israel lobbyist creds, describing how he'd been groomed by the Tikvah Fund, the Likudnik training network which will award Bari Weiss its Herzl Award this November. Weinstein also described the right-wing Israel lobby financier Roger Hertog as his "mentor."

During Q&A, after Pence called for the US to wage an unprovoked war on Iran on Israel's behalf, Weinstein chimed in to endorse the proposal.

As support for Israel plummets among American youth and Democratic voters amid a gruesome live-streamed genocide, the stage is set for CBS News' takeover by unabashed Likudnik propagandists desperate to turn back the tide of dissent.

Now, David and Larry Ellison are expanding their Zionist media empire beyond CBS.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, “Paramount Skydance is preparing a majority cash bid for Warner Bros. Discovery that is backed by the Ellison family”.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the “bid will be for the entire company, including its cable networks and movie studio,” which includes “HBO Max ” along with “CNN, TBS, and TNT”.

No doubt, just as they are doing with CBS, the Ellison family will turn the news outlets owned by Warner Bros into even more blatant propaganda arms of Israel.

Speaking to Business Insider, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison made a startling assertion about the future of artificial intelligence, stating that AI could be used to ensure citizens are “on their best behavior.” While this may sound like a benign or even positive statement, the implications are troubling and deeply concerning. It raises critical questions about privacy, autonomy, and the role of technology in governing human behavior.

At its core, Ellison’s vision reflects a dystopian outlook where AI becomes a tool for surveillance and control. The idea of using AI to monitor and regulate behavior is not new—governments and corporations have already begun deploying AI-driven systems to track, analyze, and influence individuals. However, framing this as a way to enforce “best behavior” is a dangerous oversimplification. It assumes that there is a universal standard of behavior, ignores the potential for abuse, and disregards the fundamental rights of individuals to privacy and freedom.

The Slippery Slope of Surveillance

When AI is used to monitor behavior, it creates a system where every action is subject to scrutiny. This level of surveillance can lead to a chilling effect, where people alter their behavior not out of genuine moral or ethical conviction, but out of fear of being watched or punished. History has shown us that unchecked surveillance often leads to authoritarianism, where dissent is stifled, freedom of speech is curbed, and individuality is eroded.

Additionally, it raises the question of the concept of behavior. Who defines what “best behavior” means? Standards of behavior are not universal; they are shaped by cultural, social, and political contexts. What one group considers acceptable, another may see as oppressive. Handing over the power to define and enforce these standards to AI systems—or the entities that control them—risks creating a society where conformity is valued over diversity, and where marginalized voices are further silenced.

The Threat to Privacy and Autonomy

Ellison’s vision also raises serious concerns about privacy. AI systems that monitor behavior rely on vast amounts of personal data, often collected without consent. This data can be used to build detailed profiles of individuals, predicting not just their actions but their thoughts and intentions. Such invasive practices undermine the right to privacy and create a world where individuals are constantly under the microscope.

In such a case, AI could be used to undermine personal autonomy. It reduces individuals to data points, stripping away the complexity and nuances of human decision-making. It assumes that people cannot be trusted to make their own choices and that they need to be guided—or coerced—into behaving in a certain way. This paternalistic approach is dangerous, to say the least, as it shifts power away from individuals toward those who control the technology and Big Tech.

Ethical AI

Ellison’s comments highlight the urgent need for a broader conversation about the ethical use of AI, even though such conversations are abundant in the Western world. AI must be developed and deployed in ways that respect human rights and dignity for all. This means prioritizing transparency, accountability, and consent in the design and implementation of AI systems. It also means resisting the temptation to use AI as a tool for control and instead harnessing its power to empower individuals and communities.

As we navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of AI, we must remain vigilant against visions like Ellison’s that prioritize control over freedom. The future of AI should be one that enhances human potential, not one that diminishes it. Technology should serve not control all of humanity.