Exclusive:Head of Edinburgh's Palestine Museum felt 'violated' by CCTV footage of hate attack
Faisal Saleh said the attack had happened late at night
The director of Edinburgh's Palestine Museum has told how he felt "violated" when watching CCTV footage of a hate crime attack on his premises.
Faisal Saleh said the museum had been targeted twice by anti-Palestinian protesters in the past two months, with one of the attacks clearly caught on the museum's security cameras.
Mr Saleh said: “I felt like we had been violated. This is our property and we see someone doing that here. So far, what they are doing is just a nuisance, but if they do anything else, it would be awful.”
In the first attack, at 10.45pm on July 27, a man superglued a poster bearing the words "Hamas Murder" over the museum's sign. The footage clearly shows the man, wearing an oversized coat and mask, pulling out the poster from a cardboard tube, before carefully covering the back with glue and sticking it to the wall sign.
Passers-by who had seen the attack quickly removed the poster, but the glue had already caused irreparable damage to the sign.
“That should be a message to the people who did this that by doing that, they are upsetting Scottish people, not just Palestinian people,” said Mr Saleh.
In the second attack a few weeks later, five small, round stickers with an anti-Palestinian slogan were stuck over the sign. Visitors to the museum, waiting outside before it opened, removed the stickers and disposed of them before Mr Saleh was able to examine them.
The museum, on Edinburgh’s Dublin Street, was opened earlier this year, after the organisation, which has run a Palestinian Museum in Connecticut, in the US, for eight years, decided to expand to Europe.
An initial attempt to open in Dublin, Ireland, in the vacated premises of the Israeli Embassy, failed. The Edinburgh museum displays a selection of art by Palestinian artists - both about the conflict and on other topics, as well as a small number of works by Scottish artists, which deal with the situation in Gaza.
A new exhibition by Gaza-based artist Mohammed Alhaj is due to open in the coming weeks. The exhibition will use prints of art he has created while living in Gaza since the Israeli attacks began. Meanwhile, the museum has also backed a play, The Invaders’ Fear of Memories, which is to be performed at the Scottish Storytelling Centre this weekend.
“By opening the museum, we are trying to show that Palestinians are human too and they should be treated as humans,” Mr Saleh said. “We are using art as a means to humanise Palestinians.”
He said he hoped to open more Palestinian museums in Chicago, Toronto, London and Ireland in the coming months.
Mr Saleh said the attacks had clearly been premeditated, from the level of preparation.
He said: “It looks like he [the man with the poster] has ordered it online, it is in a cardboard tube. He rolls it out carefully and sticks it up.”
Mr Saleh said he had told the police about the CCTV footage and had been told to upload it through a Police Scotland system, but had been unable to get it to work. He subsequently contacted the police officer he had spoken to after the incident, but had not been offered an alternative for officers to be able to view the video.
“They don’t seem very interested in finding out who did this,” he said. “They should have made a big effort.”
Police Scotland has been contacted for comment.