Heathrow security guard loses discrimination suit over Palestinian pin

The tribunal found that Heathrow made serious efforts to address Saiyed’s concerns throughout the dispute.

By JNS

A Muslim security officer who sued London Heathrow Airport for discrimination over being told to remove a Palestinian flag badge from her lanyard lost her case last month before an employment tribunal in a unanimous decision.

Zara Saiyed was approached by a colleague about her badge in Nov. 2023, weeks after Hamas massacred 1,200 people, mostly Israeli citizens, and took 251 hostage during a rampage through southern Israel.

The next day Saiyed submitted an official grievance and subsequently sued Heathrow Airport Ltd., claiming her co-workers and managers had discriminated against her on grounds of race and religion.

“Demanding the removal of the Palestinian flag from my lanyard is tantamount to finding my hijab offensive and insisting on its removal,” she said in the complaint.

She then filed another complaint accusing Heathrow of being “complicit in the killing of Palestinian babies.” (She argued the manner the airport handled her concerns amounted to support for oppression against Palestinians.)

Saiyed filed additional complaints, including “allegations relating to internal meetings, diversity events, communications with managers, and the decision not to publish a Ramadan video in which she had appeared,” The Telegraph reported on June 29.

The employment tribunal rejected all her claims, concluding, after reviewing more than 1,600 pages of documents, that the evidence didn’t support the allegations.

The tribunal found that Heathrow made serious efforts to address Saiyed’s concerns throughout the dispute.

Judge Naomi Shastri-Hurst, who sat on the tribunal with two others, said they had found that Saiyed was “susceptible to hyperbole,” capable of “misinterpreting, misunderstanding and/or misremembering” events and had been “swept along with her own inaccurate narrative,” The Telegraph reported.

“We find that the claimant is capable of saying something and believing it is true, and yet is shown to be wrong when you look at the contemporaneous documents,” the tribunal said in its ruling.