A secondary school in England has removed the names of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling and British wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill from school houses after teenage students branded the famous Brits as “intolerant”.
Students at the Seaford Head School in East Sussex claimed Sir Winston — the man generally credited with marshalling the efforts to defeat the Nazis and routinely thought of as one of the greatest Britons ever– was a “figure who promoted racism and inequality, unfairly imprisoning and torturing many”. The school claimed that honouring him would go against the school’s policy against “intolerance and discrimination”.
The teenagers also took aim at J.K. Rowling, saying per The Telegraph: “We no longer think that JK Rowling is a suitable representative, because of her recent words about the trans community.”
The houses on the campus named after Nelson Mandela and Florence Nightengale escaped from the woke purge, however, and will remain unchanged.
The pressure from the students successfully forced the administrators at the school to remove the names from the houses, which will be renamed following a student body vote.
A spokeswoman for the school said: “The Student Leadership group decided to consult on the names of the four houses with a view to re-introducing house names that are rooted in the local community. This exercise involves all of the student body.”
The historical accuracy of the allegations against Sir Winston was derided by the author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny, Andrew Roberts who said: “Parents of children at Seaford School, and anyone considering sending their children there in future, need to know that the historical knowledge there is so abysmally low that the teachers believe that Winston Churchill committed crimes of which he was in fact entirely innocent.
“Instead of trying to combat woke ignorance, they have submitted to it without trying to discover the truth. Churchill is in fact an incredibly inspirational figure for youth,” Roberts added.
Britain’s wartime hero has increasingly become a target of the iconoclastic left in the United Kingdom, with his statue in Parliament Square in London being defaced last year by Black Lives Matter radicals who scrawled on the plinth: “Was a Racist” under his name.
Churchill’s former home was also placed on a BLM-inspired shame list produced by the National Trust for supposed ties to British colonialism.
Last year, J.K. Rowling also became a target of leftist witch mobs after writing that only women can menstruate and that: “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased.”
Following criticism from the president of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Foundation, Rowling returned a 2019 award from the organisation, saying that the foundation “has stated that there is no conflict between the current radical trans rights movement and the rights of women.”
“The thousands of women who’ve got in touch with me disagree, and, like me, believe this clash of rights can only be resolved if more nuance is permitted in the debate,” Rowling said.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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