Hundreds of Google employees hijacked an International Women’s Day event to attack Israel and accuse Jews of victimizing themselves, screenshots provided to The Daily Wire reveal.
Google’s summit for International Women’s Day slated for Thursday was supposed to include on-topic audience questions submitted by employees through an internal platform called Dory. Instead, Google employees seized the opportunity to submit commentary bashing Israel.
Google software engineer Joelle Skaf was the first to post about Israel on the platform, encouraging Google to “avoid complicity in war crimes” and “stop taking money from the Israeli gov.” She received more than 500 upvotes from fellow employees on Dory which allows participants to up or down vote their colleague’s questions.
Google Risk and Compliance Senior Advisor, Zaynab Hararah, joined in, accusing her colleagues of being complicit in “the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians” and victimizing themselves “with feelings of unsafety and anti-Semitism.”
Joelle Skaf started the trend by Google employees of derailing a platform to submit questions about International Women’s Day
Concerns of anti-Semitism within the ranks of Google come as the tech giant faces backlash over discriminatory behavior by its artificial intelligence product, Gemini. Critics say the product’s diversity-obsessed image generator that has been labeled “anti-white,” is the result of political biases of the Google-employed creators.
Last month, The Daily Wire reported on internal anti-Semitic incidents taking place at Google, including the words “kill all jews” found written on a bathroom wall inside its offices and a Jewish employee being assaulted by anti-Israel protesters on one of their campuses.
After Google closed the forum and deleted the “off topic” questions, Skaf, the original commenter, moved her commentary over to another internal chat with over over 2,200 participants, according to the internal screenshots.
“We, Jewish people, are afraid at work,” said an employee who requested anonymity due to fears of retribution by the company. “A large, multinational tech firm that supposedly hires the best and brightest people, and I and my Jewish colleagues have to worry about what we’ll encounter when we go to the cafeteria or if the agenda of a discussion group might be hijacked with antisemitic content.”
“It’s not something I thought we’d feel in our generation, it’s something our grandparents’ generation had to deal with,” the anonymous employee added.
Google employee Zaynab Hararah accused her colleagues of victimizing themselves “with feelings of unsafety and anti-semitism.”
A Google spokeswoman confirmed the incident, criticizing the “off-topic and divisive questions.”
“We were pleased to host an event to celebrate International Women’s Day,” the spokeswoman said. “Unfortunately, before the event, a series of off-topic and divisive questions and comments were posted to internal forums. Our internal community guidelines team routinely removes divisive content that is disruptive to our workplace, and did that here.”
Other comments submitted by employees questioned how the company could celebrate International Women’s Day while working with Israel.
Moe Adel, a Google software engineer, said it’s important to question how the theme of the summit, “Her Power, Her Voice,” can be supported while “ignoring the cries for help from Palestinian women who have been systematically deprived of their fundamental human rights.”
Google software engineer Fayssal Martani criticized Gemini, the company’s AI product, claiming she asked “do women in Gaza deserve human rights,” to which the AI tool told her to “look it up online.”
“Does Google not fear reputational damage when its tools blatantly show such bias?” she added. (The Daily Wire asked Martani’s question as well as if Israeli women deserve human rights to Gemini, to which the product responded to use Google search for an answer.)
Khaled Monsoor, a Google engineer, accused the Israel Defense Forces of deliberately killing more than 8,500 civilian women “whose only crime was to be born in the open-air concentration camp, called Gaza.”
Several Google employees submitted questions for the company’s International Women’s Day summit that were taken down for being irrelevant to the event.
“I don’t expect much from the corpspeak ‘leadership’, because they’re continuing to be aligned with US foreign policy to not get sanctioned; like IBM did with Germany back in 1939~1944,” Monsoor wrote.
Many employees took issue with Project Nimbus, a cloud computing project of the Israeli government and the Israeli Defense Forces that contracts Google and Amazon to use various services such as AI and machine learning.
“[A]s a Google Cloud engineer, I think about whether my work has ever enabled the killing of any Palestinian in Gaza,” Martani wrote in another post. “Leadership is failing us by not providing a clear answer!”
The manager of Google Israel, Barak Regev, was interrupted by one of the company’s engineers last week during a speech who was shouting that he refuses “to build technology that powers genocide, apartheid or surveillance.” In a video, the disruptor who took issue with Project Nimbus was seen being escorted out by security.
A Google Cloud engineer just interrupted Google Israel managing director Barak Regev at Israeli tech industry conference MindTheTech this morning in NY.
“I refuse to build technology that powers genocide!” he yelled, referring to Google’s Project Nimbus contract pic.twitter.com/vM9mMFlJRS
— Caroline Haskins (@car0linehaskins) March 4, 2024
“Earlier this week, an employee disrupted a coworker who was giving a presentation – interfering with an official company-sponsored event,” a spokesperson for Google told The Daily Wire. “This behavior is not okay, regardless of the issue, and the employee was terminated for violating our policies.”