I sent this email to Microsoft about the October 7th attacks

Kineti readers, have you talked to your co-workers about what's going on in Israel?

The Monday following Hamas' October 7th attacks in Israel, I sent the following email to my division at Microsoft:

Shalom, APS!

As you may have heard, over the weekend Jewish people woke up to a gruesome horror: the greatest single-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. 

The terrorist group Hamas infiltrated southern Israel, opened fire at a music festival, then took over homes and small communities in Israel. They proceeded to murder civilians and kidnap many others. 

At the time of this writing, over 700 Jews have been murdered, many of them executed in front of their own family members. Thousands more were injured. Over 3,000 rockets have been fired on Jewish homes in the last 48 hours. And perhaps worse yet, over 100 civilians have been kidnapped, with dozens of videos surfacing online of their abductions, beatings, torture, and worse.

I have family and friends in Israel. They are all safe, thank God. But these last few days have been difficult for them, for the whole nation of Israel, and for the millions of Jews around the world who love and support Israel, our homeland for 3,500 years.

If your heart is moved by any of this, here are some ways you can help:

• Pray. If you are a praying person, please pray for peace and an end to the violence. Psalm 122 says, "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem...For the sake of my brothers and my friends, I will say, 'Peace be within you!'"
• Give. Please donate to charities like the Microsoft-matched American Friends of Magen David Adom, which supports the life-saving medical efforts of Israel's version of the Red Cross. I also help run Bless Israel, a Jewish-Christian charity that provides aid to the dwindling population of Holocaust survivors in Israel.
• Learn. Understand that there is no context in which kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder is justified. Avoid framing these war crimes as mere political resistance; avoid "both sides-ism."
• Speak up. Let folks know you support Israel and the Jewish people against terrorism and anti-Semitism. We are so grateful and thankful that we're not alone in this dark time.

Thank you for your love and support of the Jewish people in this hour of need. 💗

Attached is a picture of me and my 3 beautiful nieces in Israel: Chavah, Sivan, and Tzipporah.

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I sent this email because I knew that soon there would be a strong, anti-semitic push to demonize Israel for the war against Hamas, even within Microsoft itself.

Indeed, in the past month there have been various internal threads and emails pushing for Microsoft to condemn Israel for supposed genocide and "persecution of the indigenous people of Palestine." I often joined those internal conversations and reminded folks that Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel going back nearly 4,000 years. I spoke up that Israel's fight is not against civilians or any race, but against the Hamas organization that carried out the murderous attacks that resulted in hundreds of rapes, beheadings, torture and exections. I reminded my colleagues that Hamas is recognized as a terrorist organization by the United States and most western nations. And in many cases, defending or aiding a terrorist organization is against the law and can even result in jail time.

To its credit, despite some internal pressure, Microsoft has made no such condemnations of Israel or its war on Hamas.

Corporations today are strong on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Microsoft specifically encourages employees to be our authentic selves. The company reminds us through yearly trainings to be allies of minorities. While I think DEI is often times harmful, here we can use it to help the Jewish people: Jews are a tiny minority in the world and often persecuted by much larger groups, including  millions of Islamic radicals around the world. This hatred of Jews is often reinforced by short-sighted progressives and intellectuals in the West who view the war with oppressor-versus-oppressed glasses on, unwilling to weigh the immorality of Hamas into the equation.

In this light, DEI can be useful to encourage our co-workers to not only support the persecuted Jewish people, but to stand against the evils of Islamic terrorism and anti-semitism. No corporation will support violence against Jews, and we can use DEI to leverage this point.

I'm glad to report that this email I sent in October has since spurred tens of thousands of dollars in donations to Israeli charities. It's a tangible good work.

Friends, have you considered writing an email to your co-workers about Israel, and how they can help?