A Massachusetts town, acting on a request from a Muslim college student, has voted to raise the Palestinian flag on a public flagpole located in its town common.
The North Andover Board of Selectman made the unanimous decision on Nov. 13 at a crowded public meeting filled with both supporters and opponents of raising the flag.
Among them was Bentley University student Selma Tamer Khayal who filed the application seeking to raise the Palestinian flag after the town displayed Israel’s flag following the Hamas terror attacks on Israeli families that left more than 1400 people dead.
Bentley University is located in Waltham, about 40 miles from North Andover, and is considered a bedroom community for Boston.
Ms. Khayal, who wears a hijab, says she is a resident of North Andover and said she felt slighted that it appeared to be choosing sides in what she referred to as the conflict between Hamas and Israel.
Rabbi Idan Irelander who oversees the Congregation Ahavat Olam in North Andover told The Epoch Times he is outraged by the board’s approval to fly a Palestinian flag “in fairness” to a terrorist group that carried out an “unspeakable massacre”, especially in a community with a large Jewish population.
“To me, this is commemorating an unprovoked massacre of innocent people,” he said. “I don’t see how the human mind of anyone can think otherwise.”
In a memo released prior to the Nov. 13 vote, North Andover Town Manager Melissa Rodrigues cited the 2022 Supreme Court ruling on a flag-raising controversy in Boston that arose when the city denied a Christian group’s application to raise its flag on the city-owned community flag pole.
Gregory Rooney, the commissioner of Boston’s property management division, denied Camp Constitution’s application on the basis that it wanted to fly a religious flag.
“The City of Boston maintains a policy, and practice, of respectfully refraining from flying non-secular flags on the City Hall flagpoles,” Mr. Rooney wrote in denying the application.
In a unanimous vote in the landmark decision known as Shurtleff v. City of Boston, the Supreme Court disagreed with Mr. Rooney’s assessment, noting that it had flown hundreds of different flags on the city pole including religious flags, and that it was violating the group’s First Amendment free speech rights by singling out its flag for exclusion.
Ms. Rodrigues, in advising the North Andover Board of Selectmen, said the ruling would carry over to the Palestinian flag request and could subject the affluent North Shore town to a lawsuit.
“Shurtleff v. City of Boston requires select boards to make content-neutral decisions regarding the raising of flags on flagpoles deemed public forums,” she concluded. “Unless the town enacts a policy restricting flag poles to governmental speech.”
As Boston did following its Supreme Court loss, North Andover enacted such a policy, but Ms. Khayal put in her application just hours before the new policy was to go into effect.
Rabbi Irelander said while he is not an attorney, he believes the Supreme Court ruling is not relative to the North Andover flag controversy because it supports terrorism and violence and not free speech.
“To me, this is no different than flying a flag in support of the Holocaust,” he said.
He also believes Ms. Khayal was acting on behalf of an anti-semitic organization and not alone.
The college student, who is listed on her LinkedIn account as a 2022 graduate of North Andover High School, did not respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times.
Her LinkedIn account also shows she is active in Bentley University’s African Student Association.
Earlier this month, the Massachusetts school received a national award for its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
However, that commitment to inclusion has not extended to conservative students.
In 2019, the college made the news when the president of the Bentley Republican Club was assaulted while collecting signatures to bring a conservative commentator to campus.
The incident was caught on video and shows Alex Christofferson standing at a table bearing a Trump banner.
Turning Point USA posted the video.
Soon after, several other conservative students on the Bentley campus came out with accounts of being attacked and having their dorm rooms vandalized.
One student reported having his posters torn down and replaced with Title IX posters.
According to published news reports, despite complaints filed by the students with the police and with Bentley’s Bias Incident Response Team, there was never an investigation into the incidents.
Following the Hamas attacks, college students around Boston and the country staged shocking protests in support of the terrorist group.
At Harvard University where a group signed a pledge in support of Hamas, students went around campus ripping down signs of people who went missing and presumed kidnapped in the attack.
Rabbi Irelander said he had no plans to attend the raising of the Palestinian flag, which was scheduled to take place sometime on Nov. 14.
Social media like X, formerly Twitter, was abuzz over the flag controversy with droves of vetted users blasting the town of North Andover for agreeing to fly the Palestinian flag.
In mocking the decision one user wrote: “Dear North Andover, MA selectmen: can I fly a Nazi flag over the common there? Can we at least talk about it, or hold a meeting to discuss it?”
The Palestinian flag is scheduled to fly for one month in North Andover.
