A self-described “Palestinian-American Muslim” nurse at New York University Langone Medical Center was reportedly fired after delivering a speech decrying the “genocide in Gaza.”
Hesen Jabr, a nurse at NYU Langone Health, said she was terminated on May 22, the first day she arrived back on shift after delivering a speech on May 7 during Nurse’s Week for her work with bereaved mothers who lost their children during pregnancy or childbirth. Under the handle @iknowwhythejaybirdsings, Jabr shared a clip of her speech on Instagram on Monday, according to the New York Times.
“As a Palestinian American Muslim woman in this country, I am proud to represent my mother’s and my grandmother’s upbringing through our tradition which obliges us to always hold space for warmth and compassion for all humans. It pains me to see the women from my country going through unimaginable losses themselves during the current genocide in Gaza,” Jabr said on stage to a gathering of nurses. “This award is deeply personal to me for those reasons. Even though I can’t hold their hands and comfort them as they grieve their unborn children and the children they have lost during this genocide, I hope to keep making them proud as I keep representing them here at NYU.”
When Jabr came back to work in her unit on May 22, she said she was brought into an “impromptu meeting with the President and Vice President of Nursing at NYU Langone to discuss how I ‘put others at risk’ and ‘ruined the ceremony’ and ‘offended people’ because a small part of my speech was a tribute towards the grieving mothers in my country.”
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“I was sent back to work my shift while the hospital spent the day ‘figuring out’ what to do with me. After working almost the entire shift, I was dragged once again to an office where I was read my termination letter by the director of human resources, Austin Bender, and escorted off the premises by a plain clothes police officer,” Jabr wrote on Instagram. “You’re not going crazy and you’re not missing anything…. This is the paradox that is NYU Langone Medical Center.”
A spokesman for NYU Langone, Steve Ritea, confirmed to the Times that Jabr was terminated following her speech.
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“Hesen Jabr was warned in December, following a previous incident, not to bring her views on this divisive and charged issue into the workplace,” Ritea said in a statement. “She instead chose not to heed that at a recent employee recognition event that was widely attended by her colleagues, some of whom were upset after her comments. As a result, Jabr is no longer an NYU Langone employee.”
In an interview with the Times, Jabr, who had worked at NYU Langone Health since 2015, said what she said in her speech “was so relevant,” given “it was an award for bereavement; it was for grieving mothers.”
Jabr did not mention any prior incident in her post on Monday.
According to the Times, however, Jabr has detailed on Facebook heated exchanges over politics on the labor and delivery floor of the hospital in recent months.
“The pure psychological warfare NYU has waged on me as a nurse, Muslim, Palestinian, and woman, has only left me resolute,” Jabr wrote in one post.
Jabr’s activism has dated back decades, according to the Times. When Jabr was an 11-year-old growing up in Louisiana, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 2001 filed a lawsuit on behalf of the “Muslim girl who was humiliated when she refused to accept a Bible handed out by her public school principal.”
