Fairfax County Public Schools, a district in Northern Virginia with almost 183,000 students in nearly 200 schools and centers, condemned videos that two Muslim Student Association chapters posted depicting staged kidnappings of those who refused to attend chapter meetings.
A spokeswoman for the district, which says that it is the ninth largest in the nation, told JNS that the district “has been made aware of social-media videos featuring high school student organization members that are neither school- nor division-approved.”
“These videos depict violence, including kidnappings, with victims being hooded and placed in the trunk of a car, among other things,” she said. “Acting out these types of violent acts is traumatizing for many of us to watch and, given world events, especially traumatizing to our Jewish students, staff and community.”
The spokeswoman told JNS that the district “would never consider these videos to be appropriate or acceptable content,” and anyone found to have violated student conduct rules “will be held accountable for their actions.”
The videos reportedly show students putting a keffiyeh on the head of a “captive,” someone donning a sweatshirt with an apparent map of Israel with colors of the Palestinian flag and a student’s head covered with a bag as he is placed in a car trunk.
Tali Cohen, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Washington, D.C. region, told JNS that the nonprofit is “shocked by recent videos of students in Fairfax County mocking kidnapping and murder” and is “disgusted” by the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ “despicable description of the videos as ‘playful.’”
“Having an official Muslim Student Association’s social media used to promote kidnapping is traumatizing and insulting to the Jewish community and the Muslim community alike and plays into Islamophobic tropes,” Cohen said.
“ADL is offering support to the Fairfax County Schools to prevent another incident and educate students on how videos promoting violence are received by communities,” she added.
