Delta Airlines this week investigated a flight attendant for wearing a badge. His metal pin bore a Palestinian flag which he wore on his uniform during a domestic flight service in the US. It was May, complaints soon surfaced, and Delta’s Human Resources apparatus responded.

Last Friday the company warned employees that as of Monday July 15 any flag worn other than the Stars and Stripes of the USA will breach employment conditions.

I hold a degree in HR. Well, I studied it when it was still called Personnel Management back in the late 1980s and only two universities in Victoria, Australia, offered the major. Soon after graduating, the profession’s peak body, the Institute of Personnel Management Australia changed its name to the Australian Human Resources Institute. The notion of “manpower” was shifting from the 1950s accounting department to humanitarianism and the legal profession settled in to copilot its journey alongside the new age “human resources” manager.

I started studying Law then moved to HR sensing this time of change. In 1983 Australia embarked on what commentator Paul Kelly called a path to “the end of certainty” moving away from complex industrial awards to enterprise bargaining.

Governments on both sides of the pendulum watered down militant trade unionism. The concept of privatisation was born. Without knowing it, they were inventing Neoliberalism. The irony is that concurrent with that embrace of Capitalist flexibility, came a highly Socialist push for a broad freedom from discrimination.

Henceforth, enshrined in statute, all Australians regardless of race, gender, marital status, disability, religious affiliation or political standing would be treated equally. That equality would apply when looking for a job, buying goods, seeking services, or securing accommodation.

Yes, I was proud to be part of that moment. Of my short time at the recruitment coalface, it meant something integral to place candidates based on their merit and promise rather than their surname, appearance or physical capacity.

On graduation I won the IPMA Award for Academic Achievement, I was AHRI’s youngest Senior Associate, I won the industry’s award for academic excellence too. I say all this to set the credentials for what I’m about to say.

There is a paradigm shift in Western demographics at present. It began with a refugee crisis ten years ago from civil unrest in Syria, Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2014 German Chancellor Angela Merkel took a gamble and imposed a multi-million-strong illegal Muslim migration on Europe, North America and Oceania. Her bet was that ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Republican Guard of Iran weren’t hidden within it.

And she lost, because they were.

These extremist Islamist cadres then embedded themselves in Western democracies and waited. Anyone who has studied Al Qaeda will know that its hallmark is patience.

They festered and agitated; they drew funding from extremist fronts and laid low as sleeper cells; they infected academia and drew on a Leftist anti-Murdoch media shift; they saw in the Covid denial of Gen Z a weakness and crafted propaganda along Stalinist and Hitlerite lines to exploit a devastating groupthink.

The mobs they fuelled exploded on our streets on October 7 2023 when Hamas invaded Israel. Their fury and accompanying publicity were pre-planned. Under the pretence of Gaza these Islamists called for a “global intifada”. That’s another term for “religious jihad”, also known as “death to the infidels”.

Hence, we come to May 2024 when a Delta employee went to work flaunting a Palestinian flag at unsuspecting customers—and here’s the crux.

An employer cannot discriminate against an employee based on their private political opinion, jihadist sympathiser or not.

But an employee cannot take that political sympathy and cosplay it at work.

The red triangle on the Palestinian flag is now a propaganda symbol of death against Jews and Christians. So much so, that Berlin outlawed it a week ago alongside the already banned Nazi Swastika.

Unless your employer specifically allows it, you cannot wear the Palestinian flag in the workplace regardless of your stance on the war in Gaza, your misunderstanding of Jewish history or your desire to wage anarchy in support of your god.

Note how this differs to wearing the Christian cross, the Jewish Star of David, or the Muslim hijab at work. So long as they are reasonable and apolitical, no employer can prevent signs of religious affiliation.

Simply put, you can’t use your employer’s time, assets, or premises to promote your political allegiances.

You can’t cosplay for Palestine.

Extremists hate it when the West enforces its laws. When the West says no to hate speech, no to verbal assault, and no to the abuse of citizenship—its values come alive.

We in the West have not yet surrendered our right to protect these values from infiltration. For within them, our universal truth is defined.

We declare that all people have the right to realise their potential. In doing so they are ensured an absolute freedom from fear.

© 2024 Adam Parker. 

Picture credit: X July 7 2024, public domain.