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Politics : Middle East Politics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (5929)	3/4/2004 11:18:03 PM
From: rrufff	Respond to of 6945

Nah - you just have no comprehension either of history or reality. Am Yisroel Chai. Get used to it.

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (5929)	3/5/2004 5:38:26 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 6945

No Arabic at McDonald's Israel Discrimination against Israel's Palestinian citizens has been expanding to include a total ban of the use of Arabic language by workers, reports Jonathan Cook A photograph of Abeer Zinaty shows the 20-year-old student from the mixed Arab and Jewish city of Ramle in central Israel wearing a T- shirt branded with the logo "Excellent Worker 2003 -- McDonald's Israel". Less than a year later she is unemployed, fired by the world's most famous fast food company. Her crime, according to the branch manager, is that she was caught speaking Arabic to another Arab employee. Zinaty's treatment at the hands of the Israeli management of McDonald's is a stark illustration of an ever-swelling tide of discrimination against Arab workers, director of Mossawa -- a political lobbying group for Israel's one million Palestinian citizens -- Jafar Ferah told Al-Ahram Weekly. Nominally, Arabic is an official language of the State of Israel, but it has been long-standing practice in many Israeli firms to ban its use among staff. It is the first time, however, that a company of McDonald's stature has implicitly acknowledged that speaking in Arabic provides grounds for dismissal. The decision to fire Zinaty for speaking Arabic was confirmed by McDonald's Ramle branch manager to Al-Ittihad, a local Arab daily newspaper, last month. In a subsequent letter to Mossawa, the company's Human Resources Director Talila Yodfat said that all workers are instructed "to use only Hebrew when talking among themselves or in front of customers to avoid uncomfortable situations". However, faced with threats of legal action, Yodfat is now also arguing that the ban on Arabic was not racist in intent but to avoid possible "miscommunication" between staff of different ethnic groups. The sacking of an Arab worker for speaking her own language is only the tip of an iceberg of decades-old discriminatory practices against the Palestinian minority in the workplace, said Wahbe Bidarne, director of the Arab workers' pressure group Voice of the Labourer. "It doesn't matter whether we are talking about small private firms, like restaurants, or governmental institutions: the racism is the same," he said. "However well-qualified, most Arabs can only find work -- if they can find work at all -- as day labourers in roles such as olive picking, or working in construction or in factories." [...] weekly.ahram.org.eg