![]() In recent weeks, the advocacy group Palestine Legal has been getting “dozens of reports of firings - an exponential increase like nothing we’ve seen before,” according to senior staff attorney Radhika Sainath. “It comes down to her not being okay with my beliefs.” Seeing no way forward, she asked for a termination letter the next day. “I told them that it felt like censorship,” Yasmine says. The owner responded that she had made the comments on a personal page and suggested that Yasmine shouldn’t be working at the salon if she couldn’t stay neutral on the subject. “You deserve EVERYTHING that is coming for you!!!!! You SICK ANIMALS,” the owner had written over an unverified story about Hamas beheading 40 Israeli babies. Yasmine also brought up the fact that the owner herself had posted incendiary comments on Instagram. The aesthetician made it clear that she didn’t support Hamas and that she had taken down her Stories. The salon owner unexpectedly showed up to say she was disturbed by Yasmine’s initial posts that seemed to condone terrorism. The following week, Yasmine - who, like others interviewed for this story, asked to use a pseudonym to avoid further professional repercussions - had a performance review with her manager. ![]() ![]() She then made an effort to stick with less controversial messaging, like “How to Get Through the Day: For My Palestinian Friends, Activists and Fellow Arabs.” “Religion and politics are no no’s in general on business pages.” That evening, Yasmine deleted the posts from her Instagram, where she mostly features her makeup, brow work, and skin care. “If a Jewish client saw that they would not want to book w you,” the manager wrote. The manager explained that the issue is particularly sensitive given that the salon’s owner is Jewish and her husband had two friends taken hostage by Hamas. In her Stories, Yasmine featured a photo of a Palestinian raising his country’s flag atop an Israeli tank, as well as a screenshot of a post on X reading, “Gaza just broke out of prison.” She works as an aesthetician at a salon in Columbus, Ohio, and later that day, Yasmine’s manager sent her a DM urging her not to post anything about the war on social media. “I was just thinking of the civilians because that’s who is suffering,” she says. As a Yemeni Muslim whose husband has family in the West Bank, she wanted to remind people of Israel’s decades-long oppression of Palestine. Photo-Illustration: The Cut Photos Getty ImagesĪfter Yasmine heard about Hamas’s brutal attacks on Israel, she started posting on Instagram.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |