School accused of double standards: boy punished over Palestine flag patch

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An eight-year-old British-Palestinian boy is reported to have been punished by teachers for refusing to remove a Palestinian flag from his coat. The incident, which has sparked protest by parents outside the East London school, comes as a new chilling report finds a 455 per cent increase in cases handled by a UK rights group defending pro-Palestine activists.

The boy at the centre of the row between school and parents has had friends and family killed in Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, where the death toll has exceeded 20,000 making it the one of the worst massacres in living memory. Palestinians are being killed at a higher rate by the Israelis in their so-called “targeted bombing campaign” than Brits killed by Nazi Germany during eight months of indiscriminate bombing.

More than 40,000 civilians were killed by the German Luftwaffe bombing during the war, almost half of them in London where more than a million houses were destroyed or damaged. Under the current rate of death, Israel will have killed 80,000 Palestinians if the military operation were to last eight months.

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The boy’s father, Shahid Achhala, told Novara Media that staff at Barclay Primary School in Leyton forbade his son from playing outside or eating lunch with his year group, ordered him to wear a “ridiculously oversized coat” that saw him mocked by his peers, and informed him he wouldn’t be welcome on school grounds wearing his own coat.

Alarmingly, the boy’s parents were said to have been warned they could be referred to Prevent, the government’s counter-terrorism programme. Achhala argues that what his son has faced constitutes discrimination under the Equality Act 2010. The school denies that any bullying or misconduct has taken place.

Commenting on the TikTok video which sparked the protest the school said: “Over the course of the weekend, a video was published on TikTok which has made and amplified a series of false and malicious allegations against Barclay Primary School and a Lion Academy Trust board member.”

The incident at the East London school comes as a new analysis by CAGE International reveals an alarming increase in the number and types of cases involving an attack on expressions of support and solidarity for Palestine across the UK.

CAGE International said that it has seen a 455 per cent increase in the number of cases it has handled since the last upsurge in 2021. Between October and December 2023, CAGE handled 214 cases, spanning 118 school and college cases, 35 workplace cases, 35 protest and related cases, 13 university cases and 13 mosque cases.

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