A crowd of Muslim students shouted “Allahu Akbar” while protesting the removal of an Imam from their south-west Sydney high school.
The protest outside Granville Boys High School was organised by activist group Teachers And School Staff For Palestine to call for the reinstatement of support officer Sheikh Wesam Charkawi, and included students, teachers and parents.
Charkawi, who is also the convenor for Islamic voting bloc the Muslim Vote, was ordered to work from home over a social media post criticising the response of some Australian politicians to a video of two Muslim nurses talking about killing Israeli patients.
Videos the protest, which began at the school gates at 9am, showed students chanting Charkawi’s name, “bring him back”, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, and “Allahu Akbar”, while waving Palestinian, Lebanese and aboriginal flags.
Muslim Vote endorsed candidate for Watson, Dr Ziad Basyouny, was also present at the protest and told ABC News he believed Charkawi and the Muslim community were being “silenced”.
“The people of Western Sydney are feeling the scourge of the double standards. If you say something that the elites or the big parties don’t like, you get punished,” he said.
“The students don’t like that, they asked people to attend, parents, teachers and community volunteers like me will attend, because of the double standards in dealing with the issues that we’re facing currently.”
Public school teacher and pro-Palestine activist Eppy Najjarine said she attended to support Charkawi and his upset students, and said that while she condemned the nurses’ comments she agreed with the sheik’s response.
“Those statements were wrong, we agree they were wrong, but the hypocrisy is a Muslim woman was attacked in Bankstown, two Muslim women were attacked in Melbourne and we don’t see the outrage there. It’s hypocrisy,” she said.
“We are allowed to have personal political views, we are allowed to speak up against injustice and genocide. They’re just trying to silence us. Who are they going to come after next?”
In the now-deleted video that led to him being ordered to not to attend the school by the NSW Department of Education, Charkawi accused politicians of showing “selective moral outrage” over the nurse video and Israel’s actions in Gaza.
“All NSW Department of Education employees have been reminded of their duty to uphold the reputation of the department as apolitical and impartial,” a spokesman for the department said.
“Any student who did not follow directions from staff will be subject to appropriate disciplinary action.”
Just 31.3% of Granville’s population was born in Australia, and those with Australian ancestry were outnumbered by Lebanese, Nepalese, Chinese and Indian residents at the time of the 2021 Census.
Hindus are the largest religious group, making up 19.8% of the population, while 18.3% are Islamic.
Header image credit: Teachers and School Staff for Palestine – NSW (Facebook).
