An activist group recently used the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s grant database to uncover the school’s ties to Israeli military programs. As a result, the university has shut down the database.
The MIT Coalition for Palestine recently published a booklet dubbed
“MIT Science for Genocide” in which it lays out the school’s various ties to the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The booklet claims that Israel has invested as much as $3.7 million into the school as a way to seed research into various defense initiatives. The Intercept
reports that those projects include “partnerships to research underwater surveillance, missile detection, and drone algorithms.” The report also shows dense ties between the school and Israel’s defense contractors—including one that makes most of the nation’s killer drones.
As the student activists continued to use the open-access software to probe MIT’s Israel-linked grant activity, the school deactivated the program, Rich Solomon, a Coalition member and MIT graduate student told The Intercept. “MIT has engaged in a sustained and organized campaign of disinformation and propaganda in order to silence and suppress this information,” Solomon added.