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Virginia Student Suspended After Reporting Antisemitic Incident at School, Parents Say
Langley High School students displaying an antisemitic image. Photo: Screenshot
Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), a school division in Northern Virginia, has been sharply criticized for allegedly suspending an Asian-American student who exposed antisemitism at his high school.
School officials accused a student at Langley High School of leaking to the public a photograph of other students drawing and holding for display a US flag in which its stars were replaced with 25 swastikas and the words “Free Palestine” were written in between the stripes, the Fairfax County Times reported. The image had been drawn during a meeting of the Muslim Students Association.
The image was shared across the school, as anti-Israel students staged a “walkout” earlier this month, carrying another sign with swastikas on it and chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — a slogan widely interpreted to be a call for the destruction of Israel, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Langley school administrators reportedly suspended two students: the Muslim student who drew the swastikas on the US flag and an Asian-American student whom school officials said had publicized the photo that was widely circulated on social media.
Parents and local leaders expressed outrage at the school for disciplining a student for reporting antisemitism, arguing it will deter others from coming forward to expose such bigotry. On Friday, parents held a demonstration outside FCPS’s administrative building in Falls Church, Virginia, to protest both the student’s suspension and what they described as unheeded concerns about rising antisemitism in FCPS schools going back several years.
“What really has upset me about this is that the only way that they can prove that there is something is to take a picture, and then the student got suspended for taking a picture,” one parent of a student attending Langley High School told a local CBS affiliate covering the protest. “There’s a history of trying to silence or not allowing these images to come to fruition to show that we have a problem here.
FCPS has denied suspending the student for exposing an act of antisemitism.
“No student at Langley High School was suspended for reporting an incident of antisemitism to school administrators,” FCPS superintendent Dr. Michelle Reid told WUSA. “We will continue to denounce all acts of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and hatred in any form.”
Speaking to WUSA9, Eric Rozenman, a Jewish activist and writer, alleged that the country can plausibly deny suspending a student for reporting antisemitism because its student code of conduct is a mammoth document comprising vague rules and regulations, many of which can be cited as sufficient cause for sending a student home.
“They can make that claim because they have a long list of bureaucratic regulations in the student handbook about what is and isn’t permitted,” Rozenman said, explaining that the incident is an example of the FCPS’ allegedly insufficient approach to addressing antisemitism, an issue that is currently being probed by the federal government.
In Nov. 2022, the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) launched an investigation into a complaint, filed by the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), alleging that Jewish students in the county continually face harassment and a hostile learning environment. Chants of “Heil Hitler,” swastika graffiti, and scheduling of important tests on Jewish holidays are some of the indignities Jewish students have endured without recourse to school officials, the complaint said.
The complaint also alleged that antisemites work for the school board, hampering FCPS’s ability to confront the scope of the problem and enact meaningful reforms. In May 2021, during Israel’s last conflict with Hamas, FCPS official Abrar Omeish tweeted, “Israel kills Palestinians & desecrates the Holy Land…apartheid & colonization were wrong yesterday and will be today, here and there.”
“We want [FCPS] to be able to recognize what is antisemitic and anti-Jewish in the first place,” Rozenman said during Friday’s demonstration. “Take it just as seriously as they would take something that was anti-Black, anti-gay, or anti-Muslim. This is the thing they’re not doing. They can’t recognize it or don’t want to act.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Virginia Student Suspended After Reporting Antisemitic Incident at School, Parents Say first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Germany: 5 Killed, Scores Wounded after Saudi Man Plows Car Into Christmas crowd
Magdeburg Christmas market, December 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Christian Mang
i24 News – A suspected terrorist plowed a vehicle into a crowd at a Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg, west of the capital Berlin, killing at least five and injuring dozens more.
Local police confirmed that the suspect was a Saudi national born in 1974 and acting alone.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz expressed his concern about the incident, saying that “reports from Magdeburg suggest something bad. My thoughts are with the victims and their families.”
Police declined to give casualty numbers, confirming only a large-scale operation at the market, where people had gathered to celebrate in the days leading up to the Christmas holidays.
The post Germany: 5 Killed, Scores Wounded after Saudi Man Plows Car Into Christmas crowd first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Syria’s New Rulers Name HTS Commander as Defense Minister
A person waves a flag adopted by the new Syrian rulers, as people gather during a celebration called by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) near the Umayyad Mosque, after the ousting of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus, Syria, Photo: December 20, 2024. REUTERS/Ammar Awad/File Photo
Syria’s new rulers have appointed Murhaf Abu Qasra, a leading figure in the insurgency which toppled Bashar al-Assad, as defense minister in the interim government, an official source said on Saturday.
Abu Qasra, who is also known by the nom de guerre Abu Hassan 600, is a senior figure in the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group which led the campaign that ousted Assad this month. He led numerous military operations during Syria’s revolution, the source said.
Syria’s de facto leader Ahmed al-Sharaa discussed “the form of the military institution in the new Syria” during a meeting with armed factions on Saturday, state news agency SANA reported.
Abu Qasra during the meeting sat next to Sharaa, also known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Golani, photos published by SANA showed.
Prime Minister Mohammed al-Bashir said this week that the defense ministry would be restructured using former rebel factions and officers who defected from Assad’s army.
Bashir, who formerly led an HTS-affiliated administration in the northwestern province of Idlib, has said he will lead a three-month transitional government. The new administration has not declared plans for what will happen after that.
Earlier on Saturday, the ruling General Command named Asaad Hassan al-Shibani as foreign minister, SANA said. A source in the new administration told Reuters that this step “comes in response to the aspirations of the Syrian people to establish international relations that bring peace and stability.”
Shibani, a 37-year-old graduate of Damascus University, previously led the political department of the rebels’ Idlib government, the General Command said.
Sharaa’s group was part of al Qaeda until he broke ties in 2016. It had been confined to Idlib for years until going on the offensive in late November, sweeping through the cities of western Syria and into Damascus as the army melted away.
Sharaa has met with a number of international envoys this week. He has said his primary focus is on reconstruction and achieving economic development and that he is not interested in engaging in any new conflicts.
Syrian rebels seized control of Damascus on Dec. 8, forcing Assad to flee after more than 13 years of civil war and ending his family’s decades-long rule.
Washington designated Sharaa a terrorist in 2013, saying al Qaeda in Iraq had tasked him with overthrowing Assad’s rule and establishing Islamic sharia law in Syria. US officials said on Friday that Washington would remove a $10 million bounty on his head.
The war has killed hundreds of thousands of people, caused one of the biggest refugee crises of modern times and left cities bombed to rubble and the economy hollowed out by global sanctions.
The post Syria’s New Rulers Name HTS Commander as Defense Minister first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Sweden Ends Funding for UNRWA, Pledges to Seek Other Aid Channels
View of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib / Flash90.
i24 News – Sweden will no longer fund the U.N. refugee agency for Palestinians (UNRWA) and will instead provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza via other channels, the Scandinavian country said on Friday.
The decision comes on the heels of multiple revelations regarding the agency’s employees’ involvement in the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel that triggered the war in Gaza.
Sweden’s decision was in response to the Israeli ban, as it will make channeling aid via the agency more difficult, the country’s aid minister, Benjamin Dousa, said.
“Large parts of UNRWA’s operations in Gaza are either going to be severely weakened or completely impossible,” Dousa said. “For the government, the most important thing is that support gets through.”
The Palestinian embassy in Stockholm said in a statement: “We reject the idea of finding alternatives to UNRWA, which has a special mandate to provide services to Palestinian refugees.”
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel thanked Dousa for a meeting they had this week and for Sweden’s decision to drop its support for UNRWA.
“There are worthy and viable alternatives for humanitarian aid, and I appreciate the willingness to listen and adopt a different approach,” she said.
The post Sweden Ends Funding for UNRWA, Pledges to Seek Other Aid Channels first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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