It's Not Just Schools - Britain Has Let Islamists Run Riot The Spectator

Whos up, whos down?
Whos in,
whos out? While Westminster
spent last week gossiping about
which ministers special adviser
said what, in another city, not far
away, a very different Britain was
unveiled.
On Monday, the Chief Inspector of Schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw,
published his damning investigation into the Trojan Horse affair. Ever
since allegations about an organised Islamist plot to take over
Birmingham state schools emerged this year, they have been the subject
of furious claims and counter-claims. The original document (a widely
accepted forgery as the BBC keeps calling it) seems most likely to have
been written by a disgruntled Muslim teacher. Nearly every Muslim group
and spokes-person in the UK has spent recent months crying
14 June 2014
It's not just schools Britain has
let Islamists run riot
The Birmingham schools row is the logical outcome of years of weak policy
and political correctness
Douglas Murray
LI STEN
Matthew Parris vs Douglas Murray on the
Birmingham Trojan Horse plot
It's not just schools Britain has let Islamists run riot The Spectator http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9230681/save-our-children-from-th...
1 of 8 19.06.2014 22:21
witch-hunt and Islamophobia. Yet, whatever their origins, the claims
now turn out to be mirrored by the facts.
The report found that Islamists had used fear and intimidation to
infiltrate school governing bodies in order to impose a narrow
faith-based ideology. Children as young as six had been taught that
western women are white prostitutes. Non-Muslim pupils were excluded
from certain activities, including a trip to Saudi Arabia. There are
accounts of anti-Christian chants being encouraged in morning
assemblies. In one primary school, music was banned, along with raffles,
tombolas and other un-Islamic activities.
Further reports will be published, including one from former Met
counter-terrorism chief Peter Clarke, which is expected to be even more
damning. For his part, Sir Michaels report concluded that the active
promotion of a narrow set of values and beliefs in some of the schools is
making children vulnerable to segregation and emotional dislocation
from wider society. Indeed. A generation is at risk. But it is not just the
Islamists, but this country, which is letting it happen.
Since the moment protests erupted over Salman Rushdies Satanic
Verses, Britains authorities have been caught off guard. It was a
Conservative home secretary (Michael Howard) who disastrously
encouraged British Muslims to organise as a community rather than as
citizens, believing it best if government had a go-to group for the
Muslims in Britain. The result was to embed community differences and
encourage radicals to believe their horizon was closer than it ever should
have seemed.
Under the Conservative and then Labour governments, radical preachers
toured Britain trying to rally and isolate Muslim youth. They said that to
be a Muslim you had to sympathise with your Muslim brothers
anywhere in the world. What you should not do was to feel any of that
gratitude or desire to assimilate which had existed in their parents
generation.
Everywhere, this madness was allowed to spread. Religiously segregated
areas were accepted, separate values were allowed to thrive and,
eventually, even separate rules of law tolerated and encouraged. All the
time, we pretended to ourselves that this was simply diversity. I
remember one Muslim woman in particular, who I interviewed in
Birmingham some years ago. Born and bred in the area, she had been
2 of 8 19.06.2014 22:21
horribly mistreated by her local sharia court. All my life, she told me, I
have been told what my rights are as a Muslim woman. No one ever told
me what my rights are as a British woman.
Amid this tolerance of anything and everything, the first major attacks on
the West 9/11, the 2004 Madrid train bombings, 7/7 were a jolt. But
if government was concerned by the acts of violence themselves, it was
confused and reticent over what lay behind it. Clever counter-terrorism
strategies like Prevent were developed. But they had almost wholesale
push-back from the Muslim leadership and some funds ended up
promoting the very ideologies they were meant to counter. What few
people spotted was an opening that many Islamists were themselves
perfectly frank about an ambition to control the minds of the next
generation of British Muslims.
Of course, there were examples of what could go wrong. In 2007, a
disgruntled Muslim teacher blew the whistle on the privately run King
Fahad Academy in Acton, West London, alerting us to the fact that
extreme textbooks in Arabic were being used at the school. The materials
(from the Saudi ministry of education, incidentally) called Jews and
Christians apes and pigs and included test questions such as Give
examples of worthless religions such as Judaism, Christianity,
idol-worship and others. An Ofsted report a year earlier had declared the
schools teaching of Islam to be mostly good.
If such views and teachings came as a surprise to politicians and public
alike, then they should not have done. Islamist groups had been
completely open about their ambition. In a September 2003 piece
(Education Dilemma) in their Khilafah magazine, the global Islamist
group Hizb ut-Tahrir (which is banned in many countries) railed against
UK schools, including Muslim schools, for being too compromising and
secular.
They criticised the older generation of British Muslims for doing little to
challenge what the indigenous population held as norms and values and
3 of 8 19.06.2014 22:21
complained that in a society dominated by capitalist values and ideas,
curriculum education will inevitably be used to indoctrinate children with
notions such as freedom and democracy . HT said that parents must
be careful to filter out any negative influences that children are exposed
to from the wider society and proposed that Muslims can try to establish
Islamic schools that are not deficient.
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Just two years later, in their April 2005 manifesto, Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain
boasted of helping existing Islamic schools to develop appropriate
curricula, and said they were supporting new schools being established
across the country, adding, We have set up bodies to aid Muslim
governors of state schools, to be aware of their rights and to cater for
Muslim children.
After the London Tube and bus bombs were detonated, Prime Minister
Tony Blair promised to ban HT. But not only was the group not banned,
its members were allowed to set up schools in Slough and Haringey.
Again the inspections failed. A 2005 Ofsted report for the Slough school
said, the schools provision for the pupils spiritual, moral, social and
cultural development is very good. Two years later, the schools were
receiving over 130,000 in government grants.
Challenged on this another two years later, the then education secretary
Ed Balls furiously deflected attention from the reality. In November
2009, Balls told Newsnight, The question is, were the schools promoting
terrorism or extremism? Weve sent in the Ofsted advisers, who said no. I
have looked at the curriculum, the answer was no.
Perhaps, like Ofsted, he didnt know what to look for. The HT constitution
and the curricula for the Slough and Haringey schools are identical.
Pupils were to be taught Sovereignty to Allah and Authority to the
Ummah. Lessons for nine and ten-year-olds included lessons on the
need to establish an Islamic state and Jihad fi sabeelillah [fighting in the
path of Allah] as a form of worship. As the author of the schools history
curriculum had previously written in HTs magazine that the world will,
inshaAllah, witness the death of the criminal capitalist nation of America
and all other (infidel) states when the army of jihad is unleashed against
them, it seems safe to suggest we are not talking about inner personal
struggle here.
4 of 8 19.06.2014 22:21
In 2007, one of Michael Howards creations, the Muslim Council of
Britain (MCB) published a 72-page blueprint on how to Islamicise secular
state schools. It called for schools to avoid teaching any art involving
three-dimensional imagery of humans, and discourage any play
associated with celebrating aspects of other religions. There was no
particular complaint. One of the two authors of the MCB report, Tahir
Alam, is now a central figure being investigated in the Trojan Horse plot.
Yet still the Birmingham case has shocked everyone. Perhaps it is because
the schools in question are not private schools or Goves academies.
These are state schools being subjected to clear Islamist takeover.
Perhaps that is why Mondays debate in the House of Commons was
striking for its relative lack of partisan point-scoring. There can hardly be
a person in Westminster who thinks Michael Gove either incompetent or
especially soft on Islamic extremism. Perhaps politicians of both parties
now realise what one Labour frontbencher admitted in private this week,
that we are now running up against the limits of multiculturalism in the
state education system.
That is an unpopular thing to say. The follow-on point is more unpopular
still. Which is that the numbers matter. The 2011 census showed that
almost a quarter of Birminghams population identified as Muslim.
Several Birmingham constituencies, like other parts of England, either
currently have, or soon will have, majority Muslim populations. The
repercussions are obvious. What happens when a minority request
becomes a majority request?
This is going to be a problem for children born into Muslim families first.
They risk having the worst possible start in a life being born in a
country where they should have access to any and every opportunity,
where instead their own community will seek to cut them off from wider
society. But it is a problem for all of us down the line.
Of course, there are technical solutions: improved inspections, no-notice
inspections and more. But this is not just about policing, it is about a
battle for hearts and minds. This week, Michael Gove stressed the
importance of teaching British values in schools. Many people will
shudder at that. What does it mean? Until recently, we were a Protestant
Christian country now, Britishness is meant to be about being tolerant
and diverse. Do such vague and abstract ideas stand a chance against a
determined and fixed ideology?
5 of 8 19.06.2014 22:21
We must be willing to confront the challenge. In recent days, some
pointless secularists have aimed the discussion in the wrong direction.
They have tried to distract everyone by pretending that all faith schools
are Trojan Horse schools in waiting as though the way to deal with
Islamic radicals is to close Church of England schools. It is a bad sign. If
we are to present an appealing counter-narrative to that of the Islamists
we will have to do better than this. We will have to delve into deeper and
more serious terrain about what we, and this country, uniquely offer.
Many Muslims came to this country precisely to leave their religions
medievalists behind. It would be a tragedy if we stood by while their
children British children to whom we have a duty of care were
indoctrinated by a reconstituted version of that medievalism here.
This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 14 June 2014
Tags: Birmingham, Michael Howard, Muslim communities, Muslim Council of Britain, Ofsted, Trojan horse
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6 of 8 19.06.2014 22:21
456 Comments

Ronayne Maher
Sharp, logical, and informative article. This episode is deeply concerning, not least
when one glances towards events over the last 24 hours in the Middle East.
This barbarism is being taught in British schools, and naive liberals are carping
about tolerance and diversity. There is nothing more intolerant than Islam, so even
if we're to name 'tolerance', rather flaccidly I must say, as one definable British
value, Islam most certainly isn't it!

Shazza
Tolerance for islam is a one way street, their way.

Kitty MLB
Indeed our own children have to go to school with
other children whose parents might not think twice about
sending these innocent children to oblivion just because
of their intolerance, barbaric and medieval influences.

Kennybhoy
"...and naive liberals are carping about tolerance and diversity."
I used to think that they were naive man. Their elevation of Islamophobia to
top trump forced me to the the conclusion that their self-hatred, in the case
of sic' as Maister Parris amounting to an actual death wish, is only
explicable in psychological or even psychiatric terms. I hesitate to write this
because I am only too aware of the foul use made of this particular
explanation by evil regimes during the C20th...but the facts speak for
themselves...

global city
The likes of Matthew Parris will make his way to the executioner
profusely apologising for his and the west's sins of simply existing.
Dutchnick
I agree, good article and at last a chance to discus what is a major problem.
The idea that we have to treat all faiths as one entity is a mistake. Doing
business in Norway and Sweden over several years I can see the benefits of
7 of 8 19.06.2014 22:21
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