Officials with the Atlanta-based Delta Airlines would not comment Monday after a rabbi accused the airline of anti-Semitism.
This, after airline officials barred a group of Orthodox Jewish girls from boarding a flight from Amsterdam to New York last week – and then removed them from another flight the next day, according to BusinessInsider.com
“The 18 teenagers, part of a group that had been visiting religious sites in Ukraine, were initially disallowed from traveling on a flight home because of a dispute over COVID-19 protocols on the KLM-operated leg of their journey from Kyiv to Amsterdam,” according to the website.
“Rabbi Yisroel Kahan told Insider that a day later, Delta Air Lines kicked off the same girls for swapping seats on a Friday-morning flight. Kahan went on to level accusations of antisemitism with regard to Delta’s decisions.”
The rabbi, speaking of anti-Semitism, later said “if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it probably is a duck.”
The Georgia Star News asked an unidentified member of Delta Airlines communications staff about last week’s incident. We specifically asked if anti-Semitism prompted airline staff to remove the girls from the airplane. That staff member promised that another member of his company’s communications team would either call or email us back.
No one from the company replied before close of business Monday.
Delta Airlines told The Business Insider, however, that they had to “remove a group of passengers who refused to comply with crew instructions.”
“The flight departed approximately two hours after its originally scheduled time,” Delta officials reportedly told The Business Insider.
In June an anonymous Delta Airlines employee who said he or she had more than two decades of experience complained about company CEO Ed Bastian and the company’s Woke culture.
The anonymous author sent the letter to political commentator Karlyn Borysenko, who posted about it on her YouTube channel. Journalist Kyle Becker also published the letter on his website. They reported the letter is now in wide circulation.
The author said he or she was writing anonymously for fear of retaliation.
Earlier this year Delta Airlines officials criticized Georgia’s new voter integrity law, Senate Bill 202. This new voter reform law requires, among other things, voter ID on all absentee ballots and secured drop boxes around the clock.
Members of the Georgia House of Representatives in April struck back at Delta Airlines and decided not to renew a jet fuel tax credit that they bestow upon the company. The vote, however, was merely symbolic. Delta still has the tax credit. That’s because members of the Georgia State Senate did not have an opportunity to vote on the matter for this year’s legislative session before it ended.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Georgia Star News and The Star News Network. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
