Employees at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel are used to high profile VIPS, and regularly handle CEOs and foreign leaders. But when Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak rolled into town last weekend, suddenly the hotel's Muslim employees were explicitly barred from doing their jobs.

Muslim employees of the hotel were told that their shifts had been rearranged or that they were forbidden from going to the eighth and ninth floors, where Mr Barak and his entourage were staying.

"They're Israelis there, and they don't want no face-to-face with Muslims," one supervisor reportedly told a Muslim hotel worker whose job involves going to all the hotel's floors.

One hotel employee, who has worked in close proximity to other VIPs (including former US President George W. Bush) with no problem, said he was mocked by other workers as a terrorist after the incident.

Racial profiling is an open part of security procedures in Israel, but for a US hotel supervisor to be telling employees that the Israeli delegation does not want to see Muslims is deplorable, and indicative of a racist, under-the-table understanding reached between the delegation's planners, the hotel and perhaps the State Department as well.

The hotel should, in the least, publicly apologize for the supervisor's statement, and conduct a thorough and transparent investigation into the incident, with publicly reported results.