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Debra Markell Kleinert and Nadine Sebag offer some intriguing observations as they face racial and antisemitic discrimination by colleagues who think it is okay to discriminate against everyone but themselves.
Markell Kleinert, who had the gall to be born white, gripes that she was fired without explanation as manager of Queens Community Board 2 in New York City last month after 18 years on the job. The move will cut into her pension, and other district managers are speaking up in her defense.
“I’m a middle-aged white woman and I’ve been clearly told that the demographics have changed and this board will never go back to the way it once was by the chair (Anatole Ashraf),” she said, according to The New York Post. “Those were his words: Demographics have changed and the board itself will never go back to the way it is.”
The Post reports that her job involves running the office, collecting complaints and concerns from the community, and facilitating the volunteer board and its committee meetings.
Ashraf, who has been described as “super socialist,” refused to specify the cause of her termination, but said the decision was “all performance-based and following proper procedures and protocols.”
Markell Kleinert charged that she was being ousted to make room for a more left-leaning and nonwhite staffer who would be willing to bend the rules for the board, according to the Post.
She accused board members of repeatedly hounding her to release passwords to which only district managers can obtain access, and she declined those requests.
That means that the board members wanted her to violate an established process.
She asserted that “they…didn’t let me qualify for 28 years in the city of New York. It’s less money in my pension. These are people that talk about how they want to make sure everybody is served, and people have jobs and people have food on the table and serve their family. They actually decided they didn’t care how that affects one’s livelihood.”
It begs the question as to why they would hire someone for a non-policy-making job who serves their political agenda.
The board is making the same kinds of assumptions as white racists. White people caused their suffering or enabled it, and cannot possibly be part of the solution. Since they are privileged whites, cutting their pension will show them how it feels to be oppressed, or so they think.
Across the East River, in midtown Manhattan, Jewish French native Nadine Sebag claims in a lawsuit that a Muslim teacher identified as Nehad Soliman would say that “Jews are driven by money, that Jews controls UNIS and New York, and that French people are inherently racist” when they shared an office together, according to a suit filed on Sebag’s behalf by attorneys with the National Jewish Advocacy Center, also reported by the Post on the same day.
The French are racist? I always heard that the French had a reputation for being rude, not racist.
In addition, the school where they both work as French teachers – the elite United Nations International School – is accused of retaliation. “Rather than examine reported antisemitic conduct, UNIS turned its investigatory machinery against the Jewish faculty member who reported discriminatory behavior,” said Lauren Israelovitch, senior litigation counsel at NJAC.
A curious sample of the Muslim teacher’s warped worldview is depicted in these passages: “In one incident on Feb. 13, 2023, Soliman entered the teachers’ shared office and demanded that Sebag respond to a cartoon from the French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo that Soliman found offensive, the suit said.
“When Sebag didn’t immediately respond, Soliman launched into a tirade regarding France’s restrictions on religious attire in public schools and accused the plaintiff of taking issue with her hijab, according to court documents.
“Sebag said she sought to de-escalate the situation by explaining that she did not object to Soliman’s hijab, but that, as a feminist, she opposed circumstances in which women were compelled to wear religious attire against their will when men were not subject to comparable requirements, the lawsuit said.”
Soliman wants the right to wear a hijab, which Sebag respects, yet Soliman is okay with religious leaders who discriminate against women within her internal culture and probably against all women.
Sebag is fair and sensible about the issue, and Soliman either misunderstood Sebag or didn’t care what she thought. Soliman lodged a formal complaint against her over the incident, and Sebag filed her own discrimination and harassment complaint with the school’s human resources office.
The suit suggests that Soliman was an equal-opportunity pest since other teachers raised concerns about conduct that was described as aggressive and inappropriate, according to the Post.
UNIS rep Lupe Todd responded that “we are confident that this matter will be addressed through the proper legal process and that our institution’s integrity and reputation will be upheld.”
They call it reverse discrimination. Let’s call it, simply, discrimination. I recognize that actions of socialists and nonwhite accusers do not reflect on others in their communities, but they make it so much harder for all of us.
