Dear Editor,
On behalf of the Brent Friends of Palestine (BFoP) Committee, thank you to everyone who emailed Queens Park Residents Association (QPARA) to express your dismay at BFoP not being allocated a stall at the annual Queens Park Day on 14.9.25. This was despite BFoP having a stall there in 2023 and 2024.
The BFoP stall at Queens Park Day aimed to promote the Palestine Trauma Centre UK and the therapeutic work it delivers with children and families in Gaza, and in particular their Days of Joy project. BFoP has fund-raised for this project for over 10 years. While at the stalls in ’23 and ‘24 committee members and supporters spoke to many interested people and gave out leaflets which informed them about the work of the PTCUK and how to donate to the fund supporting this work. Everything we did focused on the humanitarian issues affecting the children and their families in Gaza.
Above the PTCUK Days of Joy display board on the stall we had the sign ‘Brent Friends of Palestine’; we included this because we are the local organisation that arranges fund-raising events for the PTCUK and publicises their work. We can only surmise that it was this sign that made the stall too political for QPARA. However we cannot find any communication from QPARA to tell us this, or ask us to remove the sign at future stalls.
When QPARA initially rejected BFoP’s request for a stall in 2025, we reached out to them. In July one of the committee members and a QPARA member, who had helped out at the BFoP stall in previous years and is a keen supporter of PTCUK’s work, met with the Chairperson of QPARA. He was sympathetic to some extent and agreed that our committee member could talk to an open QPARA meeting. Unfortunately neither meeting changed QPARA’s decision to refuse the BFoP stall.
In the end a small PTCUK stall was hosted inside the QPARA tent on the day. This was not organised by BFoP and we were not consulted. As we understand it, the QPARA member who had met with the Chairperson in July had been asked by QPARA if he would run the stall, probably as a result of the large number of emails QPARA had received regarding BFoP being denied a stall. As one of our committee members said ‘at least Palestine was mentioned somewhere on Queens Park Day’.
This episode shows that we must continue to speak up on behalf of the Palestinian people. The horror in Gaza and settler violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, both of which are continually being shown on our screens, have to be challenged. Your support matters.
We welcome you to fund-raising events for the PTCUK and at meetings held in the local area about the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. We are finalising details for a meeting in November and we will ensure it is publicised on the Wembley Matters Blog.
Brent Friends of Palestine
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