Fury over Scots nursery ‘teaching kids anti-Israel propaganda’

A children’s playgroup has been accused of encouraging youngsters to produce pro-Palestinian ‘propaganda’.

The Red Sunday School [RSS] operates out of a Glasgow community centre funded by the taxpayer.

But it is tutoring children as young as four to make their own pro-Palestinian literature and to write letters used to lobby workers in the defence industry.

A new online magazine compiled by the pupils states: ‘If they [the Israelis] weren’t occupying someone else’s land there would be no reason to fight.

‘If we say we… are staying neutral on Palestine, then we are not actually being neutral, we are siding with the oppressor.

‘The end of the occupation means the liberation of both Palestinian and Israeli children. From the river to the sea all the children will be free.’

Pro-Palestinian project worked on by children attending the Red Sunday School in Glasgow

The Campaign Against Antisemitism criticised the magazine.

A spokesman said: ‘This is propaganda, pure and simple. But it is all the more alarming because it is directed at children.

‘For a school that seeks to encourage “anti-racism”, it is surprisingly comfortable using rhetoric that plays on genocidal language and implicitly denies a right to Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel.

‘This material is borne of the socialism of fools and has no place in a British classroom.’

The RSS describes itself as a ‘space for children and young people to think for themselves, play with freedom, question the world around them and change it’.

Staffed by ‘activists, educators, parents, carers and cultural workers’, the group boasts of being ‘organised on the principles of socialism and solidarity’ to encourage ‘active participation in the great struggles of our day: anti-racism, the climate crisis, feminism and the revolutionary transformation of capitalism’.

But its monthly meetings are at the Kinning Park complex, owned by a charity that recently bought and developed the premises with £1.2million of Scottish Government cash and £1.5million of Lottery funding.

The owner’s charitable status relies on a pledge to ‘promote community, citizenship…and well-being in the local area and Glasgow more widely’.

But the RSS has staged a series of events to ‘celebrate Palestinian resistance’ and has taken children to participate in demonstrations demanding a ceasefire in Gaza.

It has helped the youngsters produce a magazine as ‘a resource to help people understand what is happening in Palestine’.

It says: ‘When a state decides to take land from another state and say that it’s now theirs, this is called an occupation. Palestine has been an occupied state for nearly 100 years. Children do not get to choose when an oppressor occupies a land.

‘They do not get to choose how the oppressed try to take their land back from the occupiers and gain their liberation.’

RSS pupils have also been called upon to write letters to be handed to defence industry workers at demonstrations organised by political activists.

The Red Sunday School and Kinning Park Complex were approached for comment.

Last November, the RSS called on pupils and teachers to join a national school strike for Palestine. It previously organised a Halloween party with the theme ‘socialist heroes versus capitalist villains’. Children attended dressed as Lenin and a zombie Margaret Thatcher.