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MULTICULTURALISM

Outrage as Muslim students ‘bully Jewish classmate out of Berlin school’

The Central Council of Jews in Germany has described bullying allegations at the Friedenauer Gemeinschaftsschule in Berlin as “anti-Semitism of the ugliest form.”

Outrage as Muslim students 'bully Jewish classmate out of Berlin school'
A lesson in the Friedenauer Gemeinschaftsschule. Photo: DPA

After a 14-year-old British Jewish boy switched schools in Berlin claiming he had been violently bullied by Muslim classmates, pressure is growing on the government to react.

The teenager’s parents told the Jewish Chronicle in late March that they had taken him out of the Friedenauer Gemeinschaftsschule in Schöneberg and sent him to an international school instead.

The family had picked the school, which has many pupils from Turkey and the Arab world, after they had read that it was a model multicultural high school.

But according to the family, when the teenager’s classmates found out he was Jewish, they became abusive, with one saying “Jews are all murderers”.

The abuse then became violent, with classmates attacking and strangling the teenager. One even pulled a replica gun on him while the other kids laughed, the boy’s mother claimed.

Aaron Eckstaedt, principal of the Moses Mendelssohn Jewish High School in Berlin, told the Jewish Chronicle that six to ten Jewish parents apply to switch their children to his school every year.

The requests are generally “in reaction to anti-Semitic statements coming overwhelmingly from Arabic or Turkish classmates,” he said.

READ ALSO: German Jewish groups fear rising anti-Semitism

On Monday Josef Schuster the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany told Tagesspiegel that “if the report is true, it is deeply shocking. This is anti-Semitism of the ugliest form.”

Schuster called on Berlin’s education authorities to carry out an investigation of the case, after the teenager’s parents complained that the school had been slow to react to their repeated calls for intervention.

Muslim communities “must also actively fight anti-Semitism among their ranks. It can’t be accepted that hatred of Jews and Israel can be promoted in German mosques,” said Schuster.

The sensitivity of the case, given Germany’s particular history with anti-Semitism, has meant that politicians on the national level have also called for consequences.

“Teenagers from Arab countries who have been raised to believe that Israel should be destroyed need to learn that we don’t tolerate anti-Semitism in Germany,” said Kerstin Griese, the federal commissioner for religious communities.

“These cases are becoming ever more common, and not only in Berlin,” Levi Salomon, a spokesperson for the Jewish Democracy Forum told Tagesspiegel.

“It is high time the federal government set up a commission for anti-Semitism.”

More news from Berlin

EDUCATION

Sweden’s Social Democrats call for ban on new free schools

Sweden's opposition Social Democrats have called for a total ban on the establishment of new profit-making free schools, in a sign the party may be toughening its policies on profit-making in the welfare sector.

Sweden's Social Democrats call for ban on new free schools

“We want the state to slam on the emergency brakes and bring in a ban on establishing [new schools],” the party’s leader, Magdalena Andersson, said at a press conference.

“We think the Swedish people should be making the decisions on the Swedish school system, and not big school corporations whose main driver is making a profit.” 

Almost a fifth of pupils in Sweden attend one of the country’s 3,900 primary and secondary “free schools”, first introduced in the country in the early 1990s. 

Even though three quarters of the schools are run by private companies on a for-profit basis, they are 100 percent state funded, with schools given money for each pupil. 

This system has come in for criticism in recent years, with profit-making schools blamed for increasing segregation, contributing to declining educational standards and for grade inflation. 

In the run-up to the 2022 election, Andersson called for a ban on the companies being able to distribute profits to their owners in the form of dividends, calling for all profits to be reinvested in the school system.  

READ ALSO: Sweden’s pioneering for-profit ‘free schools’ under fire 

Andersson said that the new ban on establishing free schools could be achieved by extending a law banning the establishment of religious free schools, brought in while they were in power, to cover all free schools. 

“It’s possible to use that legislation as a base and so develop this new law quite rapidly,” Andersson said, adding that this law would be the first step along the way to a total ban on profit-making schools in Sweden. 

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