German headmaster tells
blonde-haired Christian girl she should “cover up” with a headscarf.
By Emma R.
A school in Frankfurt has come under fire
after its headmaster told a young girl she should wear a hijab if she doesn’t
want to get bullied.
The student’s mother told the Bild newspaper that her daughter was “beaten and verbally
attacked on the way to school” by a group of Muslim girls.
She explained that her daughter was targeted
because “she has blond hair, no headscarf, has a German-Hebrew name – and we
are Christians”.
The bullying was so bad it left the fifth
grader with a “massive fear of going to school”.
When she took her concerns to the schools
headmaster, she was told her daughter should ‘cover up’ if she doesn’t want to
get bullied.
“Your daughter does not have to say that she
is German”, the headmaster reportedly told her. “Besides, you can give her a
headscarf.”
The school in question didn’t respond to
Bild’s request for comment, however, the mother confirmed that their situation
is a lot better now she has removed her daughter from the school.
There have been other recent cases of
religious bullying in other schools across Germany.
The Bild also cited one in Bavaria in which a
father said his son and daughter came home one day panicked because another
child had told them he would cut off their heads because they are Christians.
In Bonn, another mother said her daughter had
shared a similar experience saying, “Our daughter and several classmates of the
third grade were put under pressure by a classmate. They were threatened with
the words, ‘Your parents will burn in hell if they do not believe in Allah’.”
Religious bullying has been especially
prevalent in Berlin where many schools have high populations of
migrant-background students.
In 2018, a group of Berlin teachers spoke out
about religious bullying saying that German students could be bullied for as
little as bringing a ham sandwich for their lunch because pork is forbidden in
Islam.
The group advocated the Pro Berlin Neutrality
Act which backs up existing legislation to ban religious symbols, such as the
headscarf, from classrooms to combat religious bullying.
Austria, meanwhile, has implemented a
headscarf ban in kindergartens and has been considering similar bans in
elementary schools as well.
Many schools in Berlin “have
high populations of migrant-background students.” Why not say those are almost
all Muslims? Might we guess there are no Ukrainian Christians, no Croatian
Catholics, no Greek Orthodox?
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.