Heathrow staff are allowed to wear Palestine flag badges
by Emily Jane Davies, Daily Mail:
…because it tells travellers they can speak Arabic, airport bosses tell angry Jewish passenger.
Heathrow staff are allowed to wear Palestine flag badges because it illustrates that they can speak Arabic, the airport bosses have told an angry Jewish passenger.
On May 26, a Jewish passenger had his bag pulled for an extra security check by a female worker wearing one of the badges.
And while staff at the airport aren’t allowed to wear political or religious items, the passenger was told the badge was an exception to this rule.
This is because it was used to ‘indicate an employee speaks a particular language or dialect from a certain region’, according to The Telegraph.
This comes after the Home Office professional standards unit began an investigation into a complaint that Heathrow Border Force staff ‘harassed’ Israeli passengers arriving in the UK.
Passengers complained that they were targeted after staff noticed the Israeli flag on their luggage and were ‘shunted’ into a separate room.
When passengers asked why they were being treated differently, staff reportedly told them that as customs officials they could do whatever they wanted.
After the passenger complained about the flag badge, Heathrow’s passenger customer support department replied: ‘If a person speaks a language or dialect from a certain region as a secondary/tertiary language, a flag representing the region or country would be present which is provided by Heathrow.’
The Telegraph reported the letter as saying: ‘The flag is used to be more easily identifiable from a distance.’
But a spokesperson from UK Lawyers for Israel told the newspaper that passengers would assume staff were Palestine supporters amid the conflict in Gaza.
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