Microsoft fired two employees after they organized a non-permitted vigil at the company’s HQ in honor of “victims of the Palestinian genocide,” The Associated Press first reported this weekend.
The two men held the vigil at the Microsoft HQ in Redmond, Washington on Thursday, and were fired later that day by phone call, they told AP.
Abdo Mohamed and Hossam Nasr were part of a coalition of Microsoft employees who called themselves “No Azure for Apartheid,” in alleged protest against the sale of the Microsoft cloud-computing technology to Israel’s government.
On Friday, Microsoft released a statement saying it remains “dedicated to maintaining a professional and respectful work environment. Due to privacy and confidentiality considerations, we cannot provide specific details.”
Mohamed, a data scientist originally from Egypt, told AP that Microsoft had “failed to have space for [employees] to come together and share [their] grief.”
Mohamed added that he now needs to find new employment in the next two months, or he may face deportation.
Nasr said that the vigil was in honor of Palestinian victims in Gaza, and to “call attention to Microsoft’s complicity in the genocide” because of the IDF’s use of its technology.
In a post to Instagram, Nasr called Microsoft “an evil Zionist corporation facilitating and empowering a genocide.”
Nasr was previously subject to internal investigations by Microsoft on more than one occasion, including for posting antisemitic memes online, according to his social media.
According to Nasr, he learned of his termination an hour before he received a call from Microsoft, as he saw it posted on social media by the group Stop Antisemitism.
Stop Antisemitism had called on Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella months before to take action against Nasr, who co-founded Harvard Alumni for Palestine, and was co-president of the Palestine Solidarity Committee at the university.
Canary Mission has a page dedicated to Nasr’s history of anti-Israel activity.
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Nasr’s social media features multiple posts showing opposition to both Israel and the US.
In one post on Instagram, featuring a US flag being burned at a Palestine rally, Nasr writes that the flag “represents death, murder, destruction, pain. This flag represents genocide, mass murder, mass graves. This flag represents beheaded babies, torn limbs, scorched bodies.”
“Death to the US empire and its killing machine,” he added. “Free Palestine from the river to the sea.”
In a public statement, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and its Washington state chapter (CAIR-WA) called on Microsoft to rehire and formally apologize to the two employees.
“This is yet another illustration of how employees of conscience, who are standing up for the human rights issue of our time, are being silenced in the corporate world,” said CAIR-WA Executive Director Imraan Siddiqi.
CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad said that, im “any other context, a corporation would celebrate its employees standing up for human rights and against genocide – ‘except for Palestine.’”
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