Google announced on Wednesday that the tech giant was removing its global head for diversity maneuvering and research, Kamau Bobb, after a 2007 blog post he wrote about Jews’ “insatiable appetite for war and killing” in which he’d made anti-Semitic remarks emerged on the internet and brought in widespread condemnation from the Jewish community.
Kamau Bobb, who served as Google’s global head for diversity strategy and research in 2018, wrote in a now-deleted 2007 blog post that if he were Jewish, he “would be concerned about my insatiable appetite for war and killing in defense of myself,” and referred to Jews’ “growing insensitivity to the misery of others.”
The news was first published by conventional political news site the Washington Free Beacon, the timing of the 2007 blog post followed the 2006 Lebanon War, a violent conflict between the Israel Defense Force and militant group Hezbollah that concluded in a death count of over 1,000.
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Furthermore, Google in a statement stated that the tech titan “unequivocally rebukes” Bobb’s prior writings, continuing that he was dismissed from his position on Google’s diversity team and will now onwards “focus on his STEM work” at the company.
In addition to it, Bobb personally apologized to a group of Google’s Jewish workers, according to a recent article, his blog post “crudely defined the whole Jewish community,” and what was meant as a review of particular military activity fed into anti-Semitic tropes and prejudice.
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Moreover, the transit occurs as the firm faces criticism for its dedication to diversity and inclusion and those who direct it. It also appears as tech firms grapple with how to manage remarks made by employees in the years before their hiring — especially for corporations like Google, which has highly promoted an open dialogue with employees.
However, Jewish Google workers have complained regarding the company’s handling of internal disputes, claiming it doesn’t implement policies fairly.
Source: Business Insider
