(Jewish Group) Google Exec Out After Admitting He Used to Be Antisemitic
Google Cloud’s Vice President of Developer Relations Amr Awadallah is no longer with the company following a post he wrote explaining how he used to be antisemitic.
The June 13 post, titled “We are one!” was posted to Awadallah’s LinkedIn Pulse page; the Pulse option allows for users to post their own written thoughts. “‘I hated the Jewish people, all the Jewish people’! and emphasis here is on the past tense,” Awadallah wrote. “Yes, I was anti-Semitic, even though I am a Semite, as this term broadly refers to the peoples who speak Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, among others.” He added that the post was about his “redemption story.”
Awadallah explained that growing up in Egypt, “the only narrative I heard from everybody around me was that the Jewish people are here to kill all of us” and that “there was widespread anger over the many Palestinians slaughtered in the Nakba of 1948, and the many Egyptians killed during Israel’s occupation of [the] Sinai [Peninsula] from 1967 to 1973.” Awadallah claimed that his Israeli friends have told him that the Israeli narrative at the time was that the “Arabs want to kill all of us so that the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean sea becomes theirs.” “We were both taught to fear the other, and adding some really horrendous wars of rage in the mix, hatred became entrenched deep in our hearts and minds from a very young age. In retrospect, I blame our governments and elderly for doing that to us, for letting their prejudiced ideologies shape us in that manner, but they didn’t know any better either, and they did lose a lot of loved ones in those wars, regardless of intention.”
Awadallah said his views started changing after being mentored by his research advisors at Stanford University, including Mendel Rosenblum, a Jew. “Mendel was my first ‘Jewish angel’, he solidified the elimination of prejudice from my heart. Because of him, I learned not to fear the other, and not to label a whole group of people by the vile actions of the few.” He then “started to see all the other amazing Jewish people that I encountered in my life” and “in the arts.” Awadallah also said that he’s no longer an anti-Zionist but stated that “the Jewish people aren’t any more special than” anyone else and lectured the “prejudiced among Zionists” that “there is nothing humane in displacing and oppressing another entire population that are indigenous to that land to guarantee your own safety”; he did acknowledge though that “prejudice like that exists in the Arab world.”
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How's that saying go?
'Tis better to keep one's mouth closed and thought the fool, then open it and remove all doubt.
