A New York City-based fintech CEO said his wife was briefly banned from using Lyft after she reported her driver for a bumper sticker that he claimed read “Free Palestine” in Arabic.
Ken Book, co-founder and CEO of startup Pointwise, posted about his wife’s experience on X, only to be met with a flood of online backlash in defense of the Lyft driver. His X account is no longer available, although screenshots of his post are still circulating online.
“Lyft just banned my wife’s account for reporting a Jew-hating driver,” a screenshot of the now-deleted post read. “The driver had a bumper sticker saying ‘Free Palestine’ in Arabic with a map showing the entire State of Israel in the Palestinian flag’s colors.”
Book, who runs a company that recommends credit cards based on a client’s spending habits, equated the bumper sticker to a call for the murder of Jews, a conclusion that drew criticism and ridicule online.
“This is clearly a call for the murder of Jews in Israel,” Book said, “since every governing Palestinian body actively engages in or financially incentivizes the killing of civilian Jews in Israel as their primary method of ‘freeing Palestine’ (which is code for killing the last remaining Jews in the Middle East and replacing the 1 Jewish country with the world’s 57th Muslim country).”
But the claim from Book might not even be entirely accurate.
The post from the now-deactivated account included a picture of the sticker, which, according to another user, did not even say “Free Palestine.”
“It literally just translates to Falasteen which is just Palestine,” the user told the Daily Dot. He provided screenshots of the thread from Book which included a photo of the bumper sticker and the driver’s plate number.
According to the screenshots, Book said the conversation in the car discussed “the hostages,” likely referring to the over 200 captives Hamas took in the wake of its Oct. 7, 2023 attack.
While some hostages have already been released alive, many have died in captivity. A BBC report said that Hamas recently provided a list of 34 Israelis they would release under the first phase of a potential ceasefire agreement.
“In the car ride, the hostages came up in conversation, and I grew more and more uncomfortable. Our driver had a bumper sticker rooting for people to kill us (we’re all Jewish and my wife’s Israeli), and literally had our lives in his hand, so clearly we didn’t feel so safe,” Book said in the post.
Book said he had his wife report what happened to Lyft over the phone. He also shared a screenshot of a separate email from Lyft’s customer service that said his wife’s account was “deactivated due to alleged safety violations on the Lyft platform.”
“The Lyft safety representative lectured us about how we had no right to feel threatened by a bumber [sic] sticker calling for our death because it’s free speech,” he said.
He later said his wife’s account got reactivated after getting a “generic apology” from Lyft.
“We’re now pushing them in the DMs to explicitly ban all bumper stickers with antisemitic quotes, and to make sure this driver is forced to remove that bumper sticker or be removed from Lyft,” he wrote.
Neither Book nor Lyft responded to a request for comment yet.
But people on the internet were not buying Book’s side of the story, even if his translation of the sticker was accurate.
As one user said: “Free Palestine” is ‘code for kill every Jew’? How do they say this stuff with a straight face?”
Wrote another with a picture of a truck that said “No Fat Bitches,” “Saw this sticker on my Uber and thought, ‘This is about me.’”’ Naturally, I refused to get in, called the FBI, and wrote a screenplay about my suffering. Ken, I’m with you in this trauma.”
“Lyft for the win,” wrote another.
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