Just days after US Army Major Harrison Mann resigned, the Biden administration has been hit with another major resignation, this time Lily Greenberg Call, special assistant to the Chief of Staff
An interior department staffer on Wednesday became the first Jewish political appointee to publicly resign in protest of US support for Israelâs war in Gaza.Lily Greenberg Call, a special assistant to the chief of staff in the interior department, accused Joe Biden of using Jews to justify US policy in the conflict.
Call had worked for the presidential campaigns of both Biden and Kamala Harris, and was a longtime activist and advocate for Israel in Washington and elsewhere before joining the government.
She is at least the fifth mid- or senior-level administration staffer to make public their resignation in protest of the Biden administrationâs military and diplomatic support of the now seven-month Israeli war against Hamas.
She is the second political appointee to do so, after an education department official of Palestinian heritage resigned in January.Her resignation letter described her excitement at joining an administration that she believed shared much of her vision for the country. âHowever, I can no longer in good conscience continue to represent this administration,â she wrote.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Call pointed to comments by Biden, including at a White House Hanukkah event where he said âWere there no Israel, there wouldnât be a Jew in the world who was safeâ and at an event at Washingtonâs Holocaust Memorial last week in which he said the 7 October Hamas-led attacks that triggered the war were driven by an âancient desire to wipe out the Jewish peopleâ.
âHe is making Jews the face of the American war machine. And that is so deeply wrong,â she said, noting that ancestors of hers were killed by âstate-sponsored violenceâ.
The resignation letter:
1K notes
¡
View notes
Guys, PLEASE help this child however you can! This a vetted, legitimate fundraiser, so please donât worry about that. If you can donate any amount, please do! If you canât, reblog!
115 notes
¡
View notes
Here's a website where Palestine GoFundMes are vetted and shared that you can send out to people. The url is gazafunds.com
Easy to use and simple. Just share the site whenever someone asks for GFMs for Palestine.
80K notes
¡
View notes
Dear Mark Zuckerberg and Leadership,
This letter is a follow-up to the letter that was circulated internally on Dec 19, 2023 and deleted and dismissed due to our Community Engagement Expectations (CEE) on what can be discussed internally. Hence, we are sharing our concerns externally.
We, Meta employees, wish to express our disappointment and astonishment at the lack of acknowledgement and care the leaders of this company have shown toward the Palestinian community and its allies. In private conversations, we hear from our Palestinian colleagues about family members they have lost in Gaza and family they are working tirelessly to find safety for. However, any open support for our Palestinian colleagues or the millions facing a humanitarian crisis in Palestine is met with internal censorship of employee concerns, biased leadership statements showing one-sided support, and external censorship that is raising public alarm and distrust of our platforms.
Internally, we have called out the months of silencing within our workplace forums. While we loudly display âYour voice is valuedâ, CEE is used as a guise to delete dissenting opinions and silence employees that may simply be seeking solace from their coworkers or raising awareness about building safer products. While in other companies, employees within Employee Resource Groups (ERG) are allowed to connect and speak freely with each other, ERGâs such as Muslims@ and Palestinians@ have faced so much censorship that an employee proposed just deleting the ERG altogether instead of giving the illusion that we can freely build community at Meta. CEE claims to reduce disruptions in our workplace, yet censorship from CEE has caused many of us at Meta to feel disrupted, unheard, and unsafe to the point that several of our Metamates have decided to resign. In the words of our former colleague, any mention of Palestine is taken down - Even when the post was from a colleague expressing their grief.
Even when the post was to celebrate the UN International day of support to the Palestinian people.
Even when the post is a link to a fundraiser to help the Gazans.
Even when asking questions about product bugs that affect Palestinian voices.
One of the original core values of Facebook was to âBe Openâ and our current values claim that âWe create a culture where we are straightforward and willing to have hard conversations with each other.â Employees have always been first responders to surface issues raised externally to those internally with the power and knowledge to fix them. However when over 450 colleagues came together to sign a letter similar to this one in December, CEE was used to delete the letter and restrict one of the writers from their work devices for over two months while the workplace, product, and policy concerns brought forth were completely ignored. Employees have attempted to raise product concerns related to the conflict only to have their posts and comments censored or dismissed throughout internal channels. Most recently, questions about investigative reports indicating the possibility of governments, ISPs, and coordinated bad actors using Whatsapp data for military targeting have been met with dismissive and insufficient responses or outright deleted throughout internal forums.
Meta leaders have posted numerous strong statements of support for our Israeli colleagues along with condemnation of the attack on Israel on October 7th that took the lives of ~1,200 civilians, both on internal and external platforms. Mark stated on his public Facebook - âThe terrorist attacks by Hamas are pure evil. There is never any justification for carrying out acts of terrorism against innocent people. The widespread suffering that has resulted is devastating. My focus remains on the safety of our employees and their families in Israel and the region.â
However, bias and inequity is painfully apparent when those same leaders do not similarly share support for our Palestinian colleagues and allies nor condemnation of the attacks on Palestine, which have now taken ~35,000 civilian lives and created a humanitarian crisis of displacement and starvation for ~2 million Palestinians. This has created a hostile and unsafe work environment for hundreds of our Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, anti-Zionist Jew, and anti-genocide colleagues at the company, who have felt consistently alienated and uncomfortable at work. Many have tried to articulate this through posts on Workplace only to be censored, rebuffed, and/or penalized. Feedback shared directly with leadership on Workplace Chat has been met with dismissiveness. Bias and inequity for the human rights and humanitarian crisis in Gaza is also apparent when compared to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, after which there was an outpouring of leadership support on all fronts, including additional resourcing and investment through various social impact initiatives. The lights in the Dublin office were even painted with the colors of the Ukraine flag. Leadership must do better to achieve true equity and inclusion.
Externally, when it comes to Palestine, the dismissive tone and lack of investment by Meta is not new and the company has consistently failed to thoroughly take action on years of evidence of suppression of Palestinian voices on our platforms worldwide. In 2024 the company is still slowly addressing the findings of an independent audit influenced by Human Rights Watchâs (HRW) 2021 letter to Meta on the Palestinian conflict 3 years ago. In the wake of October 7th, Meta has ignored reasonable requests for transparency on our content policies from Senator Elizabeth Warren and other lawmakers around the globe. Numerous civil rights organizations, some of whom are Meta partners, have been met with dismissal on the censorship concerns brought forth - leading to external petitions such as one against Metaâs proposed policy of treating âZionistâ as a proxy for "Jewishâ, which collected over 52,000 signatures.
While Meta denies any Palestinian censorship or bias to the public, internally groups of employee volunteers have found numerous product and policy issues with disparate impacts to Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab communities since October 7th. The few improvements that have been made were achieved only by appealing to isolated product teams, with minimal senior leadership support or resources. Furthermore, in the wake of global criticism of censorship and moderation, leading into the biggest year for democracy in history, Meta has updated its policy to no longer recommend âpolitical contentâ by default across Instagram and Threads without clear guidelines of how this would impact content originating from global conflict zones. Meta has continued to fail the Palestinian community through its policies and lack of investment.
âMeta.Metamate.Me.â We believe we are all Meta and are committed to respectfully working together to address the issues internally and externally, while holding firmly to the demands we have been echoing for months:
We demand an end to censorship - stop deleting employeeâs words internally in order to foster an inclusive environment where all communities feel seen, heard, and safe
We demand acknowledgment - share internal acknowledgments of support for Palestinian colleagues and acknowledge the lives lost in the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza to recognize our shared humanity
We demand transparency and accountability - allocate dedicated resources to investigate issues of censorship and biases on our platforms and openly disclose findings to build trust among employees and the public
We implore you to end the silence - issue a public statement urging for an immediate, permanent ceasefire in Gaza
As tech workers, we have a tremendous privilege to work on products that serve the world, and with that comes tremendous responsibility. We have been proud to work at Meta â and want to continue believing in its mission to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.
If you're a current or former Meta worker please sign the letter here
2K notes
¡
View notes
i really can't overstate how fucking furious i am that corrupt egyptian officials have become millionaires from charging palestinian refugees thousands upon thousands of dollars to escape genocide and not only that, that it comes down to the generosity of normal people like you and me to fund these people, to feel guilty over not being wealthy enough to do more, to feel the pressure of choosing which fund to donate to, to have to shoulder the emotional burden of deciding which lives to save, when politicians will get absurdly rich off of insider trading and taking bribes from companies as they help engineer a worse world for all of us to endure.
14K notes
¡
View notes