Unfortunately, it’s not as strong a case as you’d think. One of three cases has to be true: either she was disabled and unable to work, disabled but able to fulfill job duties, or not disabled at all.
In the first case Mongo can likely fire her once FMLA is up (notice that the termination is 12 weeks after she started leave). Disabilities aren’t protected if they leave you unable to perform job duties, which is what Mongo will claim. Notice how the complaint tries to say additional leave is “reasonable accommodation”. Mongo will claim not working at all means you’re not fulfilling job duties and that she used up her FMLA.
In theory if you become unable to do your job due to disability you should get disability insurance, which is mandatory in NY, but it sounds like Prudential rejected the claim, hence the letter from the doctor there.
In the latter two cases, then Mongo will claim that she could come back to work and asking her to was not violating any ADA laws, and that they would have been willing to make e.g. scheduling accommodations for any treatments and so on to accommodate a disability that doesn’t prevent her from fulfilling core job duties.
Israel doesn’t have a plan to clean up the mess. What is the end goal here? Seriously. They’ve invaded and now what?
Options are:
1. Regime change, which I have seen no effort to attempt to effectuate
2. Withdrawal, which seems unlikely at this point.
3. Permanent occupation, which seems like the default. It may end up falling short of full genocide but it’s definitely violently upheld apartheid at a minimum.
If the third option is “cleaning up a mess” then that’s uh… pretty bad.
Israel's plan is, and has always been, to settle the whole of ethnically cleansed Palestine. Their strategy in Gaza was to promote the mess (propping up Hamas, imposing life conditions calculated to fuel anger, dismissing any long-term truce offer from Hamas) in order to have the excuse to "clean it up". Now they're in the last phase of the clean up, they just have to resist the (weak) indignation of the EU and US leaders.
In October 2004, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's senior adviser, Dov Weissglass, explained the meaning of Sharon's statement further:
"The significance of the disengagement plan [from Gaza] is the freezing of the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. That is exactly what happened. You know, the term 'peace process' is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it's the return of refugees, it's the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen.... what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did."
Addendum: In 2005, Israel evacuated approximately 8,000 to 9,000 Israeli settlers from Gaza. Since then, there was an increase of approximately 250,000 settlers in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) since 2005 - or roughly 28 times more than the number evacuated from Gaza.
No, I think you should reflect a bit more. If they have to sacrifice a few settlements in Gaza today to be able to create 30 times more in the West Bank tomorrow, it makes perfect sense. And, it doesn't mean at all giving up Gaza for good: in fact, soon after that, they closed Gaza under a total siege that lasted 20 years, until they found a good excuse to retake that one too.
In chess you sacrifice pieces. Only a really naive player would think "well, if he sacrificed that piece, that proves he doesn't want to win the game".
Israel’s disengagement plan was a huge topic of internal debate before being approved by the Knesset. Arguments for it were about demographics and security. I don’t recall any proponents of the plan saying that it was a temporary measure (though some argued Israel could easily regain control if required, as a backup), so that seems like a farfetched explanation.
Indeed, Wikipedia gives security challenges and demographics as the main drivers:
[WP] According to Sharon, the disengagement plan was aimed at addressing Israel's long-term security challenges by shifting the country's resources to focus on strengthening the areas that "will constitute an inseparable part of the State of Israel in any future agreement" with the Palestinians.
So this was the immediate motivation: to give up some small, expensive and challenging settlements to focus resources on occupying more land in a more important place. Notice: not an ethical argument, not a peace offer. No. "Let's use our resources to take from the same people more, better land somewhere else."
And of course Israel managed to spin this with the US in such a way that basically they got a green light to settle as much as they wanted of the West Bank.
There have always been people, in Israel, who had the long term goal of annexing the whole "Greater Israel". They might not be a majority, but that doesn't matter because they have no meaningful opposition, as most Israelis are indifferent to Palestinians and to the idea of equity and justice.
And what's happening now is clear. There's no military goal whatsoever to the ongoing flattening of the Gaza strip. The purpose is only to make the place unliveable and to kill time in wait for the final green light to the ethnic cleansing.
What they mean by "cleaning up the mess" is killing, starving or displacing all Palestinians in the Gaza strip and developing Israeli settlements while simultaneously expanding into the west bank as well.
I’m not sure there is a government that can surrender at this point. Israel may very well have taken out any “leadership” that they view as being able to legitimately speak for a Palestinian state, if they ever thought there was one.
There has always been a question of what Israel’s strategic goal is here because it doesn’t make any sense. An at least rational answer would be “regime change”, but no evidence has come up to indicate this is the plan.
Since Israel isn’t attempting to stand up a legitimate Palestinian government, all that’s left is permanent occupation and/or genocide.
I agree. It's painfully obvious that nobody has a plan or even an idea what could be done. But that's because all options are garbage. Stay in Gaza? Guerilla warfare forever and more civilian deaths. Pull out of Gaza? Hamas rearms in a few years, starts shooting rockets again, Israel retaliates and more civilians casualties. Regime change? Good luck, all moderate voices are toothless against the Jihadists.
The fundamental problem here is Hamas. There is just nothing in this world you can offer them to stop this suicide mission. All they care about is destroying Israel. No matter the cost. And that has nothing to do with Israels conduct. I'm sure it's compounding after decades of bloodshed but deep down they just hate Jews.
I think it’s reasonable to conclude that Israel is more willing to continue to commit atrocities against the Palestinians than the US was against the Japanese.
Like, I genuinely think Netanyahu is perusing a “ Lebensraum” strategy with Palestine. This is evidenced by their support of right wing Israeli settlers in Palestinian territory.
I’ve come to this realization as a Jewish person who was brought up on “Israel has a right to defend itself” during the second intafada. Israel has genuinely changed for the worse in a way that’s hard for a lot of people to see.
Japan surrendered before the US had the chance to play Israel in Japan. But Japan had the same strategy that Hamas uses - train civilians to attack to put the US in a position of having to decide if that mother is just a mother, or if that mother is gonna pull out a rifle.
I don’t think Israel believes that there is anyone that could “surrender” on behalf of the Palestinians. Also, given the nature of the conflict, surrender would inevitably lead back to the same problems that started it, which is that Israel cannot annex Palestine without either apartheid or genocide, and regime change is unlikely to lead to a stable two state solution since legitimate regimes haven’t been able to reach agreement in the past.
That's an odd point of view. With Operation Downfall, the Americans were planning literal genocide against the Japanese. If they hadn't surrendered after the atomic bombs, the projections were as high as 5-10 MILLION Japanese casualties (with several hundred thousand on the Allied side), precisely because Japanese policy had been to arm the citizenry with rakes and hoes if it came to that - i.e., the Japanese refusal to surrender despite there being no possible path to victory was going to cost the lives of many millions of their citizens. And America had little choice but to pursue that.
That America was willing to do this, if the bombs didn't work, seems to contradict your claim. (And I think the Americans had little choice to do so.)
I fully agree that America was very willing to commit atrocities, especially using atomic bombs (obviously) and firebombing civilian centers.
The key difference is that the US recognized that Japan could surrender, accepted that surrender, and instituted regime change with a goal of democratic prosperity.
I’m not convinced Israel would do the same. They certainly haven’t said anything about actual regime change and setting up a legitimate government.
> Operation Downfall, the Americans were planning literal genocide against the Japanese.
If you're at war and your opponent has lost but is foreign to the idea of surrender and fights to the last man, and you oblige him, you are pursuing war not genocide.
This was less true before Trump’s return. It’s frustrating that people said they wouldn’t support Biden/Harris over this and now instead we get essentially full-throated endorsement of genocide instead.
Like there were always practical limits to how much the US could constrain Israel, especially due to its relative popularity until recently. A bunch of activists didn’t recognize that and tacitly endorsed letting Trump win and now here we are.
Please make your comments productive versus snide.
Here is a more productive way to phrase your comment:
> I personally believe there is not a genocide, and the reason why I believe that is because I heard from ___________ [fill in the blank] that the population has increased over the past 2 years, and I personally believe that makes it not a genocide because ____________ [fill in the blank]
Except they literally just sent Venezuelans to an El Salvador prison without a judge being involved. The reason people are freaking out about this is because it actually happened already.
> Except they literally just sent Venezuelans to an El Salvador prison without a judge being involved
Judge being involved…yet. There is a lot of flexibility within the INA and its subsequent legal modifications to detain a noncitizen while their case is being heard. My guess is the weakest argument for the government in all of this is that they were actually physically removed from the US prior to their hearing being completed. Their detention is lawful. Where they are detained might have to be remedied by SCOTUS.
We don’t know if their detention is lawful. Whether their detention is lawful hasn’t been litigated yet, but the fact they there’s a preliminary injunction against them doing it more that was upheld by the DC circuit court indicates that it is not lawful.
So… people have literally already been deported to jails in El Salvador without due process, with the government claiming that they are from a Venezuelan gang. Others have had green cards revoked and been arrested for deportation for the crime of criticizing Israel. At this point it’s hard to see how worrying about a lack of habeus corpus is an exaggeration.
Detention without bail for the duration of their due process is legal for certain crimes (actually I believe it’s even mandatory) that a non-citizen is accused of in the INA. There also does not appear to be any language in the INA that specifies detention has to be within the US borders either.
For the most part none of the people deported or held have even been accused of one of those crimes.
Most of the Venezuelans have been deported under the Alien Enemies Act, under an extremely tenuous reading of what an “invasion” is, by claiming they are members of a gang which is “invading” the country. If they can read the law this way then it’s not clear we have rule of law anymore. Anyway, the only court case testing this law didn’t turn on determining whether the members were factually members of the class. In this case there are serious questions about whether the people deported were actually members of the gang. Even in WWII relevant nationality individuals went before a civilian board to determine if they were of the nationality to deport.
The people being disappeared from colleges are being held and deported under the theory that they “pose a threat” to the United States, based on the Secretary of State making that determination, which again, not really due process. They are also being whisked to a more favorable circuit for their habeus petitions, which is pretty suspect.
Arguably maybe citizens will be afforded an actual appearance before a judge, but remember that they can just claim you’re a member of a Venezuelan gang and whisk you away. And once you’re gone how do you prove otherwise?
As far as being within US borders, that’s a strange argument given that no statute requires imprisonment within the US borders… I guess it’s legally untested but it seems insane to me that detention could be allowed to be under non-US custody. Among other things, that would move those detained literally outside of US jurisdiction. I don’t think it’s been done outside of espionage situations of dubious legality with people not resident in the US. Even the Guantanamo bay prisoners were under US jurisdiction.
International detention is a pretty straightforward violation of article 13 of the ICCPR, which the us is a signatory to. It's probably also a violation of the due process clause, because the Constitution only applies to non-citizens within the sovereign territory of the US as determined during the Guantanamo bay decisions.
Assuming they are allowed lawyers, I suppose the lawyers have to fly to El Salvador too? When they are brought before judges, are the judges going to be in El Salvador?
Government often tests the boundaries or clarity of a law by taking an action they believe is a valid interpretation of it assuming there is no court or SCOTUS direct ruling on the subject to clarify. Lower courts may intervene, and ultimately SCOTUS decides and sometimes overrides the lower courts.
Just because a judge has a different opinion doesn’t mean they are right. Just like the government’s interpretation might be wrong.
The government is testing boundaries here…soon laws will be clarified and those boundaries will be determined. In the interim the theater aspect of all of this has an effect to discourage illegal immigration and encourage self deportation.
I'm not saying the judges are right, just that it's not so obviously legal if the courts are raising questions about it and if there's a process being initiated to seek clarifications.
> In the interim the theater aspect of all of this has an effect to discourage illegal immigration and encourage self deportation.
Also legal immigration as they've revoked green cards from people who emigrated legally and some of those people have apparently been "disappeared." It's not about "illegals" and it's dangerous at this point to continue spreading this misinformation.
In principle as long as a state has legal hooks into a large enough part of the business it’s probably ok. Data centers are less tricky than phones because they don’t move.
I’m also not sure there’s so much practical difference between a company headquartered in the EU vs USA. The relevant thing would seem to be where operations happen, and what legal and practical hooks each side has into the company, including physical location of servers and the people who operate and write code for them.
In the first case Mongo can likely fire her once FMLA is up (notice that the termination is 12 weeks after she started leave). Disabilities aren’t protected if they leave you unable to perform job duties, which is what Mongo will claim. Notice how the complaint tries to say additional leave is “reasonable accommodation”. Mongo will claim not working at all means you’re not fulfilling job duties and that she used up her FMLA.
In theory if you become unable to do your job due to disability you should get disability insurance, which is mandatory in NY, but it sounds like Prudential rejected the claim, hence the letter from the doctor there.
In the latter two cases, then Mongo will claim that she could come back to work and asking her to was not violating any ADA laws, and that they would have been willing to make e.g. scheduling accommodations for any treatments and so on to accommodate a disability that doesn’t prevent her from fulfilling core job duties.