PALESTINE solidarity activists have called on mental health practitioners from across Europe to “defend the truth, to support the oppressed” and ditch conference organisers’ “business as usual approach” to the slaughter in Gaza.

As delegates from across the continent arrived in Glasgow for the European Association of Cognitive and Behavioural Therapies conference in Glasgow, members of the UK Palestine Mental Health Network greeted them with a plea to engage with the trauma being unleashed by Israeli forces.

Activists slammed the lack of any mention of Gaza in the conference programme as displaying “nothing to do with us” approach, one that comes hot on the heels of organisers, the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) acceding to Lawyers for Israel demands to remove the phrase “the genocide taking place in Gaza” from an article on Islamophobia in a recent edition of its journal CBT Today.

Denouncing “these acts of appeasement and denial,” activists asked delegates: “Don’t our professional values oblige us to defend the truth, to support the oppressed, to uphold the universal humanism that underlies anti-racist practice? And to proclaim our commitment to international human rights law (including opposing apartheid and preventing genocide)?

“Engage with the genocide in Gaza and the vicious ethnic cleansing taking place in the West Bank, resisting whatever attempts are made to silence you.”

One campaigner, Lynne Watret, told the Star: “We would really like to raise awareness of the plight of the people in Gaza and the West Bank who will have major mental healthcare needs and children who definitely will and may for a number of years.

“We want to know what delegates’ organisations are doing to speak up against this genocide.”

The BABCP was contacted for comment.