Microsoft has fired two employees who organized an unauthorized vigil at the company’s headquarters for Palestinians killed in Gaza during Israel’s yearlong war with Hamas.

Another fired worker, Hossam Nasr, said the purpose of the vigil was both “to honor the victims of the Palestinian genocide in Gaza and to call attention to Microsoft’s complicity in the genocide” because of the use of its technology by the Israeli military.

Nasr said his firing was disclosed on social media by the watchdog group Stop Antisemitism more than an hour before he received the call from Microsoft. The group didn’t immediately respond Friday to a request for comment on how it learned about the firing.

The same group had months earlier publicly called on Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to take action against Nasr for his public stances on Israel.

Nasr, an Egyptian-raised 2021 graduate of Harvard University, is also a co-organizer of Harvard Alumni for Palestine.

Google earlier this year fired more than 50 workers in the aftermath of protests over technology the company is supplying the Israeli government amid the Gaza war. The firings stemmed from internal turmoil and sit-in protests at Google offices centered on “Project Nimbus,” a $1.2 billion contract signed in 2021 for Google and Amazon to provide the Israeli government with cloud computing and artificial intelligence services.

  • sp3ctr4l
    39·
    2 months ago

    Because this would actually have significant actual costs to the business were these people taken seriously and MSFT divested from military software to Israel, and because they are stating that MSFT is complicit with and facilitating genocide.

    BLM? LGBTQ? Those market demographics can be successfully pandered to and placated with some marketing and fairly minor, localized changes to HR policies.

    MSFT is not directly, simply, grotesquely obviously making money off of harming blacks or queers in a way that a very simple business decision could immediately remedy.

    People who know that your company is currently aiding and abetting a genocide?

    Tougher market demographic to appease. They have specific, black and white demands that would hurt the bottom line if addressed as seriously as they want them to be.

    So…

    … Fire the whistleblowers, disavow their claims, distract with whatever you can, cast them as Anti-Semitic, destroy their reputation however you can.

    If you don’t… you have to actually answer to their accusations and … you know, stop making money, ruin a profitable long term partnership.

    Corporations are psychopathic and sociopathic. They don’t have feelings. They don’t have morals.

    They have the profit motive. They have goals, situation management meetings, and potential outcomes assessments.

    They will always choose what is the least costly, or most profitable solution to a threat, and they’ll turn on a dime toward whatever solution is optimal from a profitability and reputation public image standpoint.

    (Reputation implies trust built over time. Public Image is more vague, but usually more oriented towards right now)

    … They’re already axing DEI initiatives and employees, btw. They made the determination already that eh, we think public sentiment has shifted such that … this is all now more costly than the benefits of good PR.

    https://www.ign.com/articles/microsoft-dei-lead-blasts-company-in-internal-email-after-team-is-reportedly-laid-off

    They don’t give a fuck about giving people from diverse backgrounds a more equal opportunity, as some kind of heartfelt conviction that they truly owe this to society… they never did.