Mick Hartley

A grim article from the Times – Nazi salutes and swastikas: Jewish pupils ‘routinely bullied’ at school:

After Sarah’s son was surrounded by pupils giving Nazi salutes during a drama class reenactment, the gesture was directed at him in the playground, too. It was just the beginning of a tide of antisemitic abuse.

The class Snapchat group name was changed to “F*** Israel, Heil Hitler” and pupils recorded voice notes accusing the boy of being a paedophile “who thinks he can get away with it because he’s a Jew”.

The pupils, at a secondary school in London, also spread antisemitic tropes that Jews had caused the September 11 terrorist attacks, controlled all of the world’s money and were baby killers.

“He lost trust in his teachers. He got to the point that he felt there was no point complaining about the behaviour because nothing was done. We had to take him out of the school,” Sarah, whose name has been changed, said.

Such abuse is routinely experienced by Jewish pupils, according to a report by Parents Against Antisemitism, a group formed to highlight the issue. PAA has compiled more than 100 accounts of anti-Jewish hatred and sent its dossier to the government’s independent review on antisemitism in schools and colleges.

Its report says that although the majority of reported abuse involved peer-to-peer hostility, many schools simply do not understand either how to deal with such issues or their legal obligations about the partiality of teaching.

The report is anonymous and schools have not been identified, to protect the children subjected to abuse, although PAA has conducted interviews with parents to verify the reports.

Tessa’s children, who attend a secondary school in London, have experienced antisemitism daily since the attacks by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Hostility from other pupils has included verbal harassment such as chanting “Jew, Jew” and hissing “F*** Israel” towards them. Swastikas have been drawn on walls and one student commented in class that “Jewish blood is toxic”.

A teacher started a lesson with a picture of Israeli hostages being released, claiming that reports of poor treatment by Hamas were “Israeli propaganda” and that they were well treated by their captors.

Tessa, whose name has been changed, said that the teacher was spoken to but was still in their post. She said the school’s leadership understood that antisemitism was a problem and took action against individual pupils for the worst abuse, but struggled to get to grips with the wider issue.

“There is a very clear line that is being crossed, including by teachers,” Tessa said. “I think people need to wake up to how deep-seated antisemitism is.”….

Monica, a Jewish pupil also from London, was ostracised by other pupils after the October 7 attacks. Within hours of the terrorist atrocity by Hamas, students in her year had posted the Palestinian flag on her year’s Snapchat group chat.

“There was a massive, massive shift in the way that I was treated in the school, both by the students and by the teachers,” she said.

She received messages from pupils describing reports of the killing of Israeli children on October 7 as “disinformation”. Her classmates used Instagram to spread tropes such as equating Zionists to the Nazis. In class, a pupil called Monica, whose name has been changed, a “f***ing Zionist pig”.

“The school’s leadership was very, very weak on all of it,” she said. “I would show them a post [on social media] and they’d say they would deal with it. And then I would see the girl who just basically called me a Nazi in class the next day. I felt often they were protecting other students over me. They never once said there was zero tolerance for antisemitism in the school.”

It gets worse and worse….