,
12 tweets,
4 min read
Read on Twitter
You may remember the Syrian refugee Jamal – the video of him being attacked in a Huddersfield playground last year went viral.
Having been chased out of town, he’s living in a new city and is still without a school to take his GCSEs.
Having been chased out of town, he’s living in a new city and is still without a school to take his GCSEs.
We spoke to the family five months on, who want to keep their new home town a secret following death threats from Jamal’s bullies and far-right activist Tommy Robinson supporters. torto.se/2ZIBQOL
In Syria, “Christians and Muslims could co-exist happily”, said Jamal’s father. “I’ve only known racism here.” 
In the wake of the attack, Tommy Robinson used a common far-right tactic of pouncing on local stories to spread racial resentment, spreading lies that Jamal had attacked the white children himself alongside a sit-down video interview with the attacker, Bailey McLaren.
Jamal’s father installed CCTV cameras around the house. Jamal and his younger sister Farah didn’t go outside for days. “Shut your windows, close your doors,” police told them. “Don’t let anyone know you are inside.”
Scared of the backlash, Jamal and his sister stopped attending school for months. The stress of life in the UK has triggered a combination of health problems in Jamal’s father that have made him disabled and unable to work.
Some blamed the school, some blamed the people of Almondbury, some the council. Over several months we spoke to people inside and outside the story, to work out how refugees should be protected in potentially resentful and hostile host communities.
Bailey McLaren’s family was known by some locals as notoriously far-right. His mother Terri called a fish & chip shop owner a ‘Paki’ in 2017; his older brother Reece was convicted of violent disorder at a 2015 Britain First march, clashing with a group of British Asian men.
The council resettled refugees themselves, rather than directly using a refugee charity, which can lead to problems. When the family appealed for help with the bullying, a council worker told them: “When you’ve been stabbed, then you’ll have a reason to move.”
In 2015, the UK went from taking 750 refugees a year to taking 5,000. Crucial support networks often sit side by side with xenophobic sentiment, and with climate disaster on the horizon, the resettlement of refugees in the West this decade may be a mere preview of what's to come.
A lot of the responses to this story wonder whether this incident typifies attitudes towards refugees and migrants in Britain today. This graph shows that hate crimes have risen in London by 167% in three years, 81% in Yorkshire, only the South East has seen a fall.
This reporting is part of our mission to revisit and understand the driving forces behind these viral stories that explode into the public consciousness and then are forgotten. To help us with this and read more, become a member of Tortoise. torto.se/2FZv8vW
