A passenger on Friday’s Delta flight 1245 from Boston to West Palm Beach shared a photo of a flight attendant wearing a Palestine flag pin. This has seemed to be more common among Delta employees than other airlines. It violates their uniform standards but they also haven’t spoken to enforcing those – whether because they want to avoid controversy amongst cabin crew during a unionization drive, or out of fear they would alienate customers at their Detroit hub.
Hey @Delta – did you add Palestine as a new summer route?
Your customers on a Boston to West Palm Beach flight yesterday were perplexed to see your flight attendant adorning a flag of Palestine pin. pic.twitter.com/Ia79COL2ea
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) July 6, 2024
I’ve written about a Delta flight attendant with a Palestine flag pin a few weeks ago. Indeed, several Delta employees have been spotted wearing Palestine pins, such as this one at Washington’s National airport.
Last time we checked @Delta, your airlines is American based with no flights to “Palestine”.
Why is your employee at Ronald Reagan Airport wearing a Palestinian flag? pic.twitter.com/qyguQ7KLWn
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) May 1, 2024
It is possible to wear a Palestinian flag and believe you’re advocating for two states. That isn’t usually what it means. Spain, Ireland and Norway now recognize a Palestinian State. The Catalan independence movement would like a word!
The Biden administration backing off of support for Israel is largely a function of Michigan being a battleground state, and concerns of Muslim voters staying home. Delta has a hub in Detroit, and the city’s Dearborn suburb has the largest Muslim concentration and largest mosque in North America.
After JetBlue called the cops and banned a Jewish passenger who complained about a flight attendant wearing a Palestine pin, the airline updated its uniform policy to ban pins they have not approved.
Delta, on the other hand, has not spoken out on what’s already uniform violations. The airline might have a problem with an important local constituency if it were to do so. But flight attendants are clearly not supposed to wear pins that take any position other than an official Delta position. Unlike JetBlue, they didn’t even need to change their policy over this.
There’s a real concern with front line airline employees voicing political positions and aiming those at passengers. The issue is asymmetric speech. Airline employees exercise power over passengers – power over whether they’ll board and fly, or whether they’ll be considered “disruptive” for expressing their own contrary opinions. And bringing politics into the cabin is already enough of a problem with passengers.
“ It is possible to wear a Palestinian flag and believe you’re advocating for two states. That isn’t usually what it means.” You have absolutely no information about personal motivations. What a horrible message to send.
Another good reason to avoid Delta, as if their outrageous prices for mileage redemption weren’t enough. I used to fly over 100,000 miles a year on Delta.
Really Roger E Kelly?-
That’s a reason not to fly Delta? There are 1,001 other reasons to choose to fly Delta!
Using a single employee infraction to disparage the airline because of your discontent with the mileage program is absurd.
Perhaps you should set your sights on flying Spirit- that seems to be more your style.
What a whiner.
There is really nothing new with this kind of issue. I remember about 55 years ago there was controversy when some UPS drivers began wearing Black Panther Party pins. The company tried to split the difference by saying their drivers could wear pins…provided they only showed the logos of UPS or their union! Eventually the whole thing petered out.
But symbols can be powerful things and they creep in by many ways. Probably the airlines should ban everything for uniform wear that isn’t preapproved, and stick hard to that rule. That wouldn’t stop employees from putting what they want on their personal items and carrying them on board, but it would defuse a lot of the issue. Now what they displayed would clearly be a personal opinion, not something that (at least by implication) the company stood behind.
Reasons not to support Palestine
1. Hamas instigated this war and killed innocents.
2. Women are second class citizens.
3. Homosexuals are outlawed and killed.
4. Hamas / Islam advocates for the total destruction of Israel.
The best Content Moderators allow criticism of the Issue at hand, but not of fellow Commentators. On this score, @MikeL crossed the line bigtime. For example on this issue, it would be OK to trash the wearing of Palestine Pins, but not the trashing of someone else who commented about it. @MikeL first criticized @Roger for abandoning Delta due to their Mileage Program (he didn’t say that, only that it was a contributing factor). He went on with a major snub regarding Spirit Airlines and concluded with “what a whiner”. That latter comment would be better attributable to him, we can hope he acts more responsibly next time.
This is an easy one. If you work for a US airline, you can wear an American pin, and no other. Period. One warning and then you face serious discipline. Period. Same rule for other political pins.
Great line on Catalan Gary! Hypocrisy at its finest.
Just don’t come crying when your fellow crewmembers wear an Israeli flag pin.
I love to see how the most radical LGBTQ@#$%^ folks support the Islamonazis (Hamas, Hezbollah, Iranian regime etc). Especially when they sport their rainbow & trans flags right next to these orgs flags, or the PLO flag. Amazing visual of how demented forces attract to each other.
In the eyes of these fanatics from the left (and this is a global thing) they are “allies” in struggles against “oppression” (everything is “oppression” also naturally). In reality, if they just were to visit random social media (and legacy media) from the arab & muslim world they would see the intense level of hate the overwhelming majority feels towards anything that in “non binary” LOL
Michael m. You do know many of your points apply to many countries.
Desantas of Florida has outlawed Gays. black history.
Southern Baptist do the same
Women are second class city in the Mormon church and many Christian religions
The south KKK and white supremacy groups have started many wars and killed innocent
USA has killed Indians slaved blacks abused minorities had child labor abuse under pay women and abused homosexuals. So get off your high horse and start apologizing. No one is perfect
I had a flight booked Delta to Asia and I just canceled this reservations. I’ll be sure to let other people know why they may want to not support Delta Airlines
I don’t understand why any flight attendant would wear a pin that is effectively in support of a violent, dangerous terrorist organization. I also don’t understand how doing so could possibly not result in immediate termination of employment. This shouldn’t even be a discussion.
There is one, and only one reason for a US Flight Attendant working a domestic US flight to wear a so-called “Palestine Flag” pin: to antagonize Jewish passengers and to let them know that they aren’t welcome in the United States or on his aircraft.
If one has trouble conceiving of the above and maintain that it’s “just a pin” or “just a national symbol,” imagine a white Flight Attendant wearing an Apartheid era South Africa Flag Pin and how that would be received by African American passengers, and try and rationalize it as a harmless symbol.
@MichaelM
Your points are well taken and the greatest irony is that this ignorant person proudly wearing his “Palestine” pin wouldn’t last 10 minutes in Gaza or the West Bank without being tortured to death as a gay presenting man. He expresses blind solidarity with people who would gladly throw him off of the nearest high building, because he hates Jews more than he loves himself.
People will have to test this situation by wearing Israel flag pins and pro Israel shirts. They will have to wait until it is inconvenient to turn around to put them on. If enough controversy is created, Delta will start enforcing their policies.
“ The Biden administration backing off of support for Israel”? That’s like slowing down from 35 miles over the speed limit to 34 miles over the speed limit in front of a school zone at “class is out” time — not material and not even necessarily even a product of a real backing off from the dangerous speeding.
The reality is that no previous US Admin has provided as much military support and political cover for Israel as the Biden Administration has provided Israel. And in 2023 and this year, Israel hasn’t even been facing anything close to an existential threat as a sovereign state.
The Biden Administration doesn’t really care about American Arab and Muslim voters this year. Even when Arabs and Muslims get killed by racist in the US, the Admin sends out low-level tokens and focuses on enabling the war machine in Israel like never before in the history of US-Israeli relations.
The Biden Admin is more concerned about keeping its AIPAC-supporting supporters. And the Biden campaign is so down in support and enthusiasm among potential campaign-supporting ground-workers in battleground states in particular that they are not counting on the Israeli war on Palestinians in Gaza to move the dial when the alternative is Netanyahu’s favorite Trump.
Maybe we ought to have the Jewish passengers wear some identifying mark so we can observe how they’re treated. How about a large yellow star of David, sewn onto their clothing? Bet the Delta employees wearing the Palestinian pins could get behind that!
I always take my political opinions from flight attendants. I mean, they took 3 weeks of training to do their job so effectively, they must know what they’re talking about. If flight attendants can’t tell me what to think, I would just have to get my knowledge from Hollywood stars and musicians, the next wisest people on the planet.
A homosexual/queer stewardess who supports Palestinians. You can’t make that up.
You guys are insane. This is not a religious war. It’s a decades long ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians. Many people, including Jews are against this genocide. Wearing a Palestinian flag pin does not mean you support what Hamas did on October 7. It’s in support of the innocent people, many displaced into Gaza in the Nakba, who are being slaughtered unjustly. It’s inhumane. People around the world agree that it is inhumane and needs to be stopped.
“asymmetric speech” must be a newly-minted term circulated in talking points issued by (___?) because the google results for that exact term are medical-related
kind of like the creation of the word “re-accomodated” for dao
here in the post-truth era, i look forward to seeing “speech with no axis of locution, propagating from nowhere to everywhere”
People would do well to remember gay people did what they could to support the jews during the holocaust despite jewish people being just as homophobic.
Indeed some of the worst abuse was at the hands of jewish people themselves in concentration camps.
So the absurd argument that gay people shouldn’t advocate for the the victims of Israel’s genocide in gaza due to some tangential education issue is… bizarre.
Should we be supporting genocide if it kills more homophobes?
Honestly this place is the gutter…
If he/she/it wears that pin, he/she/it should be able to speak the Arabic dialect spoken in the West Bank.
DL and LY codeshare on TLV flights. Is LY management aware of this behavior? Let’s make sure LY management is informed.
@James “Some of the worst abuse was at the hands of jewish people themselves.”
In 1936, Himmler created a Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality (Reichszentrale zur Bekämpfung der Homosexualität) which gave the police power to jail those suspected of homosexuality indefinitely and without trial as dangerous to Germany’s moral fiber . . . as it was. Around 90,000 men were arrested for homosexual activity until 1939 and ~10,000 imprisoned in concentration camps.
So obviously “the worst abuse of Homosexuals was by Jewish people,” right? Or is this rationalization for antisemitism which proves the point that everybody else is making?
Can they wear Trump pins since we are putting our politics on display?
That guy would be murdered within minutes of arriving in Gaza.
@James
You need to be either naively stupid or evil to support hamas. If you really believe that advocating for hamas (who has for their entire existence indiscriminately targeted Israeli civilians, and did so with spectacular barbarism on October 7th, and their reason for existence is to kill Jews and destroy Israel) is “being an advocate for Israel’s genocide”, then you’re obviously incredibly naïve.
Ask yourself why you would so willingly believe the civilian death toll reported by a terrorist organization that just murdered and took hostage of so many civilians, unprovoked. Is it because you want to believe anything that is anti-Jew? Seems that way to me. Then ask yourself how amazingly Hamas has zero combat casualties, and 99% of their civilian casualties are all young males. Weird statistical anomaly I suppose. Ask yourself also why all Gazan civilian deaths are in your mind Israel’s fault, despite Israel doing everything possible to avoid civilian casualties, while hamas does everything possible to maximize Israeli civilian casualties, and uses its own people as human shields. All of this is to say that you, and people like you who get their political views from poster slogans, are nothing more than useful idiots to evil people…truly the gutter.
And your little gay holocaust storytime is just made up nonsense that shows your bias even more.
I have no problem flying Delta because of this, though I rarely do, it’s a single individual. But I might be severely tempted to loudly tell a FA on my disembarking from the plane that I love their Nazi-adjacent pin and congratulate them (in a sarcastic tone) on publicly proclaiming their support for solving the Jewish Problem.
Meanwhile, I have no desire to fly Qatar, no mater how nice it is or tempting the redemptions are. The Maldives were never on my radar, I have no desire to be trapped on a single island and pay exhorbitant prices, despite it being “free”. Now I really don’t need to go there.
Thanks for posting the DL dress code.
Pink, red, yellow ribbons: no. Wow, but I guess some of them become allowed while DL itself supports its cause.
BLM, MAGA, Go Brandon, LGBTQ, etc: no. Same as above, I guess? A small rainbow can be worn anytime, even when DL isn’t supporting LGBTQ, because it can be interpreted in many ways?
Flags of countries (and regions): yes? I don’t see it in ‘don’t’ list, it makes a stronger case when the person happens to speak the language of the country in question, or the flag of the destination or origin) of the flight (this I oppose unless the person speaks the language. On Mexico bound flight, only to discover the person with the pin doesn’t speak Spanish, it’s too confusing.). However it gets interesting wearing flags of Russia, Israel, or even Hong Kong, Taiwan, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, etc.
The delta clown is straight out of central casting
@Rae B “Wearing a Palestinian flag pin does not mean you support what Hamas did on October 7.” No, some who wear it do support the Oct 7 attacks. And, there’s the rub, as Gary has always addressed, the wearer could just be wishing for peace to all the way to the destruction of Isreal. No political pins, etc. On customer-facing employees, please.
What really frustrated me about the coverage of the university protests post Oct 7 is they never grilled these people. I want to know two things. 1) How do you feel about the events of Oct 7? 2) Do you want the state of Isreal to continue to exist? If the answer is “bad” and “yes” your support for the Palestinians takes a much different feel from the answers “about time”/”great” and “no.” I suspect many whose opinions match the latter pair don’t want these questions asked, and thus, they hide under “support for Palestinians.” “We’re just for peace,” shouted loudly with “and death to Isreal and her people” whispered to your fellow protesters.
My original post was going to be that I too have seen people wear a Palestinian pin and not be Pro Hamas or anti-Israel or anti-Semitic .
Then I went through all of the post on here and realized that we don’t live in that world anymore. So, yes Delta we are no longer in a world where people can have different opinions unless it’s one opinion and they should strongly demand that all Delta employees refrain from any political statements but even if I’m typing that, does that mean no more American flag, no more US flag and Puerto Rican flag? It’s just best to wear that tacky gray uniform and move forward
First,
don’t be so sure that Delta didn’t take action against the FA esp. after the story ran here. Just because an employee violates standards doesn’t mean they get away with it or don’t receive some sort of reprimand. And, no, you don’t fire someone for a single violation of the dress code – if this was the first time and they have a good record.
And the issue is simply that everyone wants to be offended by everyone else and, at the same time, expect to be able to speak their mind about everything. The two are incompatible.
Keep your thoughts to yourself. and don’t be so offended by someone’s statement even if it is not something with which you agree.
Gary blows everything out of proportion in order to garner page views. The FA violated DL dress standards which given the state of service in the US – and not just on airlines – is a pretty minor grievance in the perspective of all of life.
C_M is “Nazi adjacent” with his racism and support for barbarity against even pre-pubescent civilian children.
Oh, no, he’s wearing a flag pin. How can I possibly survive?
@GUtlessWonder has left a long enough trail across various sites that with a dedicated effort, he wouldn’t be too hard to track down IRL, then reveal to his clients what he really thinks. Might be time to start deleting your history. Make sure you don’t become Antisemite of the Week on Stop Antisemitism. You and Jesse Williams.
This is especially troubling given the history of hijacking and terror in the air from Palestinian groups.
Ironic that twinkles here would be thrown off the roof of a building in Gaza….
Guess its time to add another stripe to the flag and some more letters to the acronym!
#LGBTQHAMAS+++
@CHC. You have no idea what you’re talking about. The pin absolutely symbolizes Palestinians over Jews. If someone wants to show support of a two state solution, they would wear two pins side by side showing support for both states.
C_M is showing his brownshirt thuggish nature in his hopes he can try to intimidate people into silence in the face of racism and atrocities of a sort he supports. Go waste your time trying to intimidate others, it won’t work on me.
The FA was only wearing this pin because he couldn’t find his “Queers for Hamas” pin.
All the anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry is showing in the comments. And this all over a national flag pin of a nation given state recognition by over 100 countries in the world in a world where most of the rest of the countries had previously expressed support for a “two state solution” with an Israel as a Jewish-majority state and a Palestine as a multi-denominational Palestinian-majority state.
This website really is a gutter.
If you really have a problem with a uniform policy, or lack thereof, address it with the CEO if the company. Taking a picture of an employee, presumably without their consent, and posting it online for mindless virtue signaling is about as cowardly as it gets.
Further, there is nothing to suggest that the employee is a homo. It is equally cowardly to assume such a thing and further disparage his character.
You weak-minded mill-idiots gotta figure out that there is a formal method for addressing a complaint. Go to the company’s public relations department.
The bottom line: You work for an American airline, they hired you for your talents. Delta has the final say regarding your uniform. If it’s their policy to not deviate from the issue uniform, then that’s final worrd. Delta is paying you to work at their airline. If you’re blatantly breaking their rules, then you will suffer the consequences. Deal with it or find another job. You are not to inflict your political beliefs on your paying passengers.
Michael M.
Well, I am a gay man who is proudly voting for President Trump. I do not know how this gay man can support “Palestine,” but he’d probably be the first person to lambast a gay man for supporting Trump lol
“ It is possible to wear a Palestinian flag and believe you’re advocating for two states. That isn’t usually what it means.” You have absolutely no information about personal motivations. What a horrible message to send.
No, it’s really very clear. It means the wearer hates Jews.