Don't forget while you buy your next KubeCon ticket that organizers shut down…

My statement related to the incident in the current #KubeConNA

I was supposed to attend one of - used to be - favorite conferences to my heart called #KubeCon. The event is all about an #opensource community under an organization called #CNCF that reports to The #LinuxFoundation.

#CNCF organizers offered me a room to support and communicate with the #Palestinian people as a community effort for the current inhumane situation in #Gaza. They offered another room for the #Israeli community as well. I prepared an event titled "All about Humanity" and made sure not to state any group name, region, or country. I stated in the description this event is to support Palestinians in Gaza for the inhumane conditions and against the ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Then, I shared this event on Twitter on Saturday, mentioning the @CloudNativeFdn official account to thank them for providing the room and security. I received no feedback from the organizers for two days, except the photo is very inclusive, and they loved it.

Two days later, Some of the Israeli community knew about this event, and they started to harass me on Twitter and LinkedIn, calling me antisemitic and many more, with mention to my employer calling to fire me.

I had a call from CNCF organizers asking me to remove ethnic cleansing and genocide, as some find these words offensive. Although this was against my personal opinion, I agreed and removed them as I understand this is not political event but just to support victims and their families. After a few hours, I received another call informing me that they had decided to cancel the event.

This incident caused a huge harm to me within the open source community where I worked so hard for almost six years to build connections and have a trusted name within.

Many have reached out to me privately as they fear they will be affected by the same group of people.

I submitted a code of conduct violation report to CNCF; they asked me to sit with a mediator, which I did. The mediator was furious by the end of the meeting as I shared all harassments screenshots and called a higher-level person to come and listen to me. They promised they would get back to me ASAP. The organization didn’t even bother to reply back till now. (Notice that the conference will end in few hours)

I am very disappointed, feeling I have been thrown under the bus with no support. Everyone is afraid of backing me up. My volunteering effort for years has no value to the organization or the community.

I have been shut down and not able to practice my right to freedom of speech as I will be “antisemitic”. I have many lovely Jewish friends, and I am actually an Arab who is within semantic people, by the way…

Later, I received a private message stating that all that was a coordinated attack to ensure CNCF would cancel the event. Here is the message:

“
Hi! I noticed some of my coworkers celebrating your event's cancellation--I think they were part of the coordinated attempt to get it shut down, as I look at some GChat history.

I wanted to say that what's happened to you is absolutely disgusting. Completely wrong. The silencing of pro-peace and (gasp) pro-Palestinian voices right now is so wrong. I hope you get your apology if nothing else.
“

It was apparent how CNCF has a double standard when many of us saw Israeli flags in the showroom, and many submitted code of conduct violation reports with no action. They care 0% about D&I and don’t care about their members equally.

What happened won’t only affect @CloudNativeFdn reputation but unfortunately will affect #Kubernetes community as well.

Here is my invitation: eventbrite.com/e/stand-for-humanity-kube…

Here is the Israeli invitation: lu.ma/StandwithIL-Kubecon

@linuxfoundation @KubeCon_ @kubernetesio #KubeCon2023