UK Schoolchildren Face Punishment for Supporting Palestine

Date: 28 May 2021 - 21:54

News ID: ۹۰۷۱۴

LONDON (Dispatches) – The Zionist regime’s most recent attacks on Palestinians in the occupied territories of the Gaza Strip and East al-Quds have not only stirred mass demonstrations on the streets of the UK but also within its schools, Anadolu Agency reports.
Pro-Palestinian protests erupted in a number of schools across the UK in response to the Zionist regime’s attacks on Palestinian worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque and compound as well as airstrikes on the Gaza Strip.
Students, however, have faced repercussions from school authorities with one headteacher labeling the Palestinian flag a “call to arms” and a “symbol” of anti-Semitism. Such remarks and comments have attracted anger and rebuke and questions are being asked as to why children are being punished for expressing their thoughts.
“The problem is by using a symbol such as the Palestinian flag, that message is lost because for some people, they see that flag and they feel threatened, they feel unsafe and they worry and for other people that flag is seen as a call to arms and seen as a message of support for anti-Semitism and for being anti-Jewish and it was never meant to be like that in the first place,” Mike Roper, headteacher of Allerton Grange school, said in an online message.
Meanwhile, according to a new report British media coverage on the recent escalation of violence in Israel-Palestine was “biased” against Palestinians and “skewed” public perceptions.
On Thursday, the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) published a 44-page report entitled “Media Reporting on Palestine 2021”.
The report came after two weeks of Zionist violence against Palestinians.
CfMM stated that between 7 May and 20 May (when the regime gave in to a ceasefire), there were 62,400 online print articles and 7,997 television broadcasts reporting on the events. The report focused specifically on the British media.
Its authors found that while there were some examples of balanced coverage, the narrative was unbalanced due to “skewed language, misleading headlines and problematic framing”.
Rizwana Hamid, director of CfMM and co-author of the report, told Middle East Eye that the “overwhelming amount of complaints” received by the monitoring organization about “British media’s biased coverage of events in Palestine” aligned with its own analysis and evidence base.
The report cited several examples of media referring to the situation in Sheikh Jarrah as an “eviction” or “real estate dispute”, which it said implied a legal basis for forced displacements which were in contravention of international law.
CfMM found that 50 percent of broadcast media clips between 7 and 10 May referred to “evictions” or similar terms to describe illegal settlement plans in Sheikh Jarrah.
Meanwhile, two-thirds of broadcast segments between 7 and 10 May referred to events at al-Aqsa as “clashes”, or similar derivatives, according to the findings.
It also cited several news reports speaking of an “intifada”, which it said played into “fear-mongering” and “framing Palestinians as violent aggressors”.
Another area of concern surrounding reporting on Jerusalem was an over-emphasis on religion. The report found that nearly two-thirds of 90 clips between 7 and 10 May referred to Palestinians’ religion, in some cases explicitly referring to them as Muslim.