My school - a large Grammar School in the North of England - has been working with Solutions Not Sides (SNS) since 2016. The mission statement of the organisation encapsulates the reasons why my school signed up with SNS:

The internet has never been a particularly safe place for our children, but over the last few weeks it has become close to catastrophic. Just this morning, I opened X (Twitter) to access our SNS account, and the first thing that popped up in the ‘home’ feed was a video of violent actions being committed that was so graphic and disturbing that it left me shaken. If I, as an adult, react like this, how are our children supposed to manage?

The SNS team is watching events in Israel and Palestine with deep concern for our speakers and partners in the region.

The violence is against SNS’ principles. These are our fellow human beings who are suffering missile attacks, bombings, and unimaginable horrors. Celebrating the appalling desecration of human life on either side is abhorrent. Stop and think before you post, like or share. 

1. NO TO THE CELEBRATION OF VIOLENCE AGAINST HUMAN BEINGS

To take Shakespeare’s approach to language, ‘if music be the sound of love, then play on’ we can already see the significance of our language choices in various contexts. But I'm going to edit that a little – ‘if communication is the sound of survival, then oracy is necessary for communicating’ – see what I did there? Admittedly it’s not a great explanation of today’s topic but we are going to break it down further, so hopefully my dubbed Shakespeare quote won’t seem quite so bad.

[Note: It was our pleasure to take part, for the first time, in the London Interfaith Fun Run. Solutions Not Sides (SNS) was able to raise almost £300 to go towards running this year's youth educational programmes - our workshops in schools, and our lesson plans, resources and training for teachers. Thank you to everyone who donated, and who we met at the fun run. We're really looking forward to the race again next year!]

Sharon Booth, SNS Founder & Executive Director: