A Palestinian-American woman is hoping the federal government will investigate after she lost her tutoring job and her son was expelled from a South Florida private school over her social media posts about the Israel-Hamas war.
Maha Almarsi appeared with her son in a news conference Thursday with her lawyers, calling for the U.S. Department of Education to investigate after she was fired from her position as a math tutor at Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale.
Some of her Instagram posts included an illustration of an Israeli soldier pointing a rifle at a baby in an incubator and asking, "But do you condemn Hamas?" Other posts equated Nazism with Zionism and another called Hamas' beheadings and rapes fake.
School officials said in a statement they asked Almarsi to stop posting what they considered "hateful and incendiary material" and gave her opportunities to stop her behavior, but she continued posting.
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"I repeat, none of my posts were inciting violence, they were merely shedding light on what was happening, the humanitarian crisis that was happening in Gaza," Almarsi said in the news conference.
Her actions violated the school's employee handbook, officials said. The private institution has its own code of conduct and policies.
"Her behavior was also such that the School believed it could increase the risk of violence in our community and compromise the safety of our students, employees, and families," officials said.
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Almarsi's son, 10th grader Jad Abuhamda, was expelled from Pine Crest because of his mom's behavior on social media.
"They are the people that I’ve seen every day of my life for the past 10 years, and to have that taken away from me for no reason at all is heartbreaking, I am disappointed," Abuhamda said.
Pine Crest officials addressed his expulsion, saying the "appropriate response under these circumstances was to separate the family from the school."
"What did Jad do, other than being a student?" said attorney Omar Saleh of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "Again, we are not here just for a firing, we are here for the expulsion, we believe it is an extra step of aggression, it went too far."
