A 15-year-old British-Palestinian schoolgirl faced backlash after a prominent public speaking competition for youth in the United Kingdom for fervently speaking up for the Palestinian cause.
Leanne Mohamed recently won the Redbridge Regional Final of Jack Petchey's Speak Out Challenge! in London with a moving speech about the injustices Palestinians are forced to endure as a result of Israeli occupation.
"I am Palestinian and I am human, I shouldn't have to remind the world of that," Mohamed said in the speech that ended with an earnest call to "free Palestine," accompanied by her waving a Palestinian flag.
Following her win, the video of Mohamed's speech, which went viral and attracted both online support and abuse, was temporarily removed from both the competition's official website and the official YouTube channel of the organization that runs it .
In addition, the organizations that run the competition, Speakers Trust and the Jack Petchey Fundation, did not choose Mohamed as one of the 15 winning regional finalists who will progress to the Grand Final, the national stage of the competition.
In a joint statement they released Tuesday following a whirlwind of online uproar, which included the launch of an online petition and the trending hashtag "Let Leanne Speak," both organizations refuted the claims that their actions were because of Mohamed's topic.
They stated that the video was removed "following vile and hateful comments posted online" in order to "protect Leanne by temporarily suspending the regional videos," saying that Speakers Trust is "a small charity without the capacity to moderate comments 24 hours a day."
"All 37 talented Regional Final champions were entered into the semi-final on Saturday 21st May. Only 15 of these can reach the Grand Final stage. A panel of judges selected the top 15 speeches without any external influence or input and prior to any of the issues that emerged this weekend," the statement added, saying that each speech was "judged on its own merits."
However, prior to the statement's release, an email Speakers Trust CEO Julie Holness sent to an infamous anti-Palestinian blogger, who had contacted the organization complaining about Mohamed's speech, was made public and told a different story.
In the email, Holness said that the speech violated two fundamental rules of the competition: "The speech must have a positive and uplifting message," and that "a speaker should never inflame or offend the audience or insult others and this, by definition, means that propaganda is ruled out absolutely from the outset."
She added that Speakers Trust and the Jack Petchey Foundation shared the blogger's concerns and that they had already "decided unanimously against sending Leanne Mohamed through to the next stage and she will not be speaking at the Grand Final."
Titled "Birds not Bombs," Mohamed's speech, which was re-uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo by a variety of sources, started by comparing the children's game hide and seek to the "life or death" alternative of the game that Palestinian children must play.
Mohamed said: "How would you feel if you were awoken every morning by bombs and not birds? How would you feel if you didn't even feel safe in your own home? How would you feel if you witnessed your own family die in front of you? If for 68 years they bombarded your land, took away your genuine human rights and killed your families and children, how would you react?"
"Palestine is my country, my land and my home, their pain is my pain, and their freedom is my freedom," she said, concluding her speech with a famous Nelson Mandela quote, in which he spoke of Palestinian freedom.