Tright here’s been an enormous enhance in scary airline incidents lately. Final week, there was one more one when passengers on a Delta flight from Boston to West Palm Seaside skilled excessive turbulence. No, this wasn’t a Boeing-related security glitch; it was way more critical than that. A flight attendant was sporting a tiny Palestine flag pin on his uniform.
Terrifying, proper? Simply unbelievable that, 9 months into Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza, somebody would possibly really feel the urge to publicly categorical solidarity with a gaggle of people who find themselves being bombed into oblivion. Completely mindboggling that somebody would possibly really feel moved by the truth that, in accordance with United Nations rights specialists, Israel has carried out a “focused hunger marketing campaign” in Gaza and infants are dying of malnutrition. Actually chilling that an American felt upset by their taxpayer cash getting used to fund an assault which is killing civilians at a scale and tempo many specialists have known as “unprecedented”.
Fortunately there was a courageous passenger on the airplane to name this foolishness out. Somebody snapped a photograph of the flight attendant and posted it on social media. Varied anti-Palestinian accounts shortly mobilized to uncover the person’s id and stress Delta to get him fired. A Twitter account known as iliketeslas then discovered one other image of a Delta worker sporting a Palestine flag and tweeted: “think about getting right into a @Delta flight and seeing employees with Hamas badges within the air. What do you do?”
Nicely, personally, the very first thing I’d do is clarify to the particular person complaining that the Palestinian flag shouldn’t be a “Hamas badge”. However I’m not the particular person manning Delta’s official Twitter/X account. As a substitute that particular person replied from Delta’s official X account: “I hear you and I’d be terrified as properly, personally. Our workers replicate our tradition and we don’t take it calmly when our coverage shouldn’t be being adopted.”
Let me simply spell that out. Somebody on Delta’s communication workforce thinks the Palestinian flag is terrifying and had no downside tweeting that out from the corporate’s official @Delta account.
And this, by the way in which, isn’t the primary time that Delta has been within the information for cracking down on pro-Palestinian messages. This week the non-profit information group Truthout revealed a bit alleging that an anti-Zionist Jewish American man known as Louie Siegel was informed to take away a pro-ceasefire T-shirt throughout a latest Delta Airways flight from São Paulo to Chicago. The T-shirt mentioned “Not in Our Title” on the entrance facet and “Jews Say Ceasefire Now” on the again. Actual extremist stuff, eh? Siegel needed to cowl it as much as keep on the airplane and was warned he could be placed on a no-fly record if he didn’t comply.
Delta’s tweet in regards to the terrifying Palestinian flag, by the way in which, was shortly deleted. However a correct apology from the airline hasn’t been forthcoming. “Delta eliminated a mistakenly posted touch upon X Tuesday as a result of it was not according to our values and our mission to attach the world,” a Delta spokesperson informed me through e mail on Thursday. “The workforce member answerable for the submit has been recommended and not helps Delta’s social channels. We apologize for this error.”
Delta’s spokesperson additionally clarified that neither flight attendant was fired for sporting the pins and mentioned they’d been supplied assist. They added: “Nevertheless, as of [Thursday], Delta is shifting its pin allowance coverage efficient July 15. Starting then, solely US flags will likely be permitted to be worn on uniforms. Beforehand, pins representing nations/nationalities of the world had been permitted.”
Whereas it’s encouraging that Delta’s flight attendants haven’t been terminated for the crime of sporting a Palestinian flag pin, minimizing this incident as an “error” is insulting. Writing an necessary e mail that claims “I hope you want tit!” as a substitute of “I hope you prefer it!” (which is one thing I’ve sadly completed) is what you name an error. Utilizing an official company social media account to name the Palestinian flag terrifying, then again, is a hell of much more than that.
Slightly, it’s one more instance of simply how widespread and normalized anti-Palestinian bigotry has grow to be within the US. Certainly, racism in the direction of Palestinians is so acceptable that when Donald Trump used “Palestinian” as a slur towards Joe Biden within the latest debate, there was barely any outrage. Biden definitely didn’t name Trump out on his racism.
Gaza is hell on earth in the intervening time. Maybe there will likely be a ceasefire at one level, however Gaza won’t ever be the identical. Based on a latest piece by the Israeli paper Haaretz, “The IDF has taken management of 26% of the Gaza Strip … [and] the expulsion of lots of of hundreds of Gazans to the southern a part of the Strip is changing into everlasting. This, an IDF soldier informed Haaretz, is ‘an effort at extended occupation’.”
In the meantime Israel is loudly and proudly annexing the occupied West Financial institution, lately approving the most important seizure of land in additional than three a long time, in accordance with a report by an Israeli anti-settlement watchdog.
We’re witnessing ethnic cleaning and mass homicide in actual time and but talking out about these horrors – doing one thing as little as sporting a Palestinian pin in public – places you vulnerable to being smeared, harassed and fired out of your job. It’s grow to be troublesome to even converse in regards to the dying toll in Gaza now. The Home lately handed an modification stopping the state division from citing the Gaza well being ministry’s dying toll statistics for the conflict. That’s the solely official entity monitoring dying knowledge in Gaza; banning these figures successfully halts any dialog in regards to the dying toll.
“They need to erase the Palestinians who’re dwelling,” mentioned US Consultant Rashida Tlaib in response to the modification, “and now they’re attempting to erase the Palestinians who’re useless.” As Tlaib says, there’s a widespread effort to “dehumanize Palestinians and erase Palestinians from existence”. It’s this that ought to terrify you. Not a tiny Palestinian flag.
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