Dear Editor,

New York City Mayor Bloomberg has awarded a spy campus contract on Roosevelt Island (plus a $100 million sweetener) to Cornell University and fellow billionaire, Irwin Jacobs.

“I launched Qualcomm’s first international R&D Center in Haifa, Israel, in 1992, staffed entirely with Technion graduates and purposely located near the campus to take advantage of its great education and research,” said Irwin Jacobs. Technion graduates the year before last held 59 of 121 Israeli companies listed on the NASDAQ, and these companies held a combined market value of over $28 billion — Israeli companies headed by Technion graduates employed 85 percent of Israel’s technical workforce. Israel would have become the third largest arms exporter in the world last year behind Russia and America had not its billion-dollar deal with China for an early warning system been blocked by the Pentagon. An obvious conclusion is that Technion is an arm of the Israeli government.

Intellectual property vital to our defense may be whisked out of the country. Admiral Sumner Shapiro, himself a Jew, whom Jonathan Pollard had tried to recruit as a spy or at least align with his rationale for spying (for Israel), stated that he was troubled by the support of Jewish-American organizations in New York for Pollard: “We work so hard to establish ourselves and to get where we are and to have somebody screw it up. And then to have Jewish organizations line up behind this guy and try to make him out a hero of the Jewish people, it bothers the hell out of me.”

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle research has been carried out at Jacobs School of Engineering for a dozen years. “Our challenge in San Diego is access to FAA-approved airspace for flight testing autonomous UAVs,” said Prof. John Kosmatka at the 183,000-square-foot Structural and Materials Engineering Building. Israeli security forces are relying on technological means and developments that facilitate a continuation of the occupation of Palestine with less manpower and government support. Drones allow for the daily operation of instruments of occupation, such as checkpoints, with fewer soldiers. Israel is looking to polish its image in the United States by strengthening economic ties. Ido Aharoni, Consul General of Israel in New York, said that: When Americans think of Israel, overwhelmingly the first thing that comes to mind is the association with conflict, the fact that Israel is in dispute with its neighbors.

UCSD Professor [and] Qualcomm Executive Officer Nathan Fletcher is running for Mayor of San Diego. His election is of strategic importance in terms of positioning Israel not only in America but all over the world as a bastion of creativity and innovation.

How can a municipal executive cede 31 percent of an island on the border, or any amount of property, offshore, inland or elsewhere, to a foreign intelligence gatherer of scientific and technological information?

— Richard Thompson

Alumnus ‘83