Author: Soeren Kern
Publication: Hudson-ny.org
Date: December 9, 2010
URL: http://www.hudson-ny.org/1703/uk-anti-semitism-muslim-schools
Muslim religious schools operating in Britain
are using poisonously anti-Semitic textbooks from Saudi Arabia to teach children
as young as six that Jews are descended from "monkeys" and "pigs,"
and that Zionists are plotting to take over the world. The schools are also
instructing children on how to chop off the hands and feet of a thief as per
Islamic Sharia law. These are just a few of the findings of a British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC) exposé of Saudi-run Muslim schools in Britain that
aired on the prestigious Panorama documentary television program on November
22.
The Panorama investigation identified a network
of over 40 such after-school and weekend programs catering to about 5,000
children, from ages six to eighteen. The schools offer the official Saudi
national curriculum and run under the umbrella of "Saudi Students Clubs
and Schools in the UK and Ireland." Panorama says the schools are overseen
by the cultural bureau of the Saudi Arabian Embassy in London, and that a
building used for one of the schools (in Ealing, West London) is owned by
the Saudi government.
Saudi officials quoted by the BBC disavowed
direct responsibility for the schools and clubs, and described the teachings
cited in the program as having been "taken out of their historical context."
But BBC Newsnight exposed similar anti-Semitic sentiments in Saudi textbooks
at a Saudi school in London in 2007. At the time, the Saudi government promised
a "comprehensive" review of all offensive material in its curriculum.
(Saudi Arabia also promotes anti-Semitic hate-speech in the United States.)
According to Panorama, one Saudi textbook
asks children to spell out the "reprehensible" qualities of Jews
and explains that Jews are "cursed by God." Another textbook teaches
that the penalty for sodomy is execution, and outlines differing perspectives
as to whether death should be by stoning, immolation by fire, or throwing
offenders off a cliff.
Yet another Saudi textbook explains the punishments
prescribed by Sharia law for thievery, including the amputation of hands and
feet - a hand for the first offence, a foot for the second. A BBC video shows
a textbook illustration of a hand and a foot marked to show where amputations
should be made.
Muslim teenagers studying the Saudi national
curriculum in Britain in the hopes of getting into a Saudi university are
also being taught that Zionists are plotting to take over the world for Jews.
This harks back to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraudulent anti-Semitic
text first published in Russia in 1903, that purports to describe a Jewish
plan to achieve global domination. Although the "Protocols" were
exposed as a hoax in 1921, the Saudi textbook for tenth-graders insists there
are "many proofs" of the "veracity" of the Protocols.
During its investigation, Panorama also compared
more than 100 websites of schools of all faiths, and was struck by the unequivocally
anti-Western tone of many Muslim schools. Panorama voiced concern about a
Muslim school ethos that reinforces separatism, either by living in separate
enclaves or by rejecting the core values of a liberal democracy, such as tolerance,
equality between men and women and respect for man-made laws.
Panorama says many Muslim parents are sending
their children to the Saudi-run schools to shield them from Western influence.
But by teaching an overly narrow, Islamic-focused curriculum, these schools
are turning out students ill-equipped for life in anything other than a Muslim
ghetto -- which is a recipe for social conflict.
The Muslim population in Britain has been
rising rapidly in recent years, and research (here, here, here and here) by
the Centre For Ethnicity and Citizenship at Bristol University shows that
Muslim children are the most segregated in Britain.
Another study, the Channel 4 Dispatches Muslim
Survey (complete results here), one of the most comprehensive surveys to date
of Muslim opinion in Britain, shows that a new generation of Muslims is being
raised to be much more radical than its parents. It also shows that Muslim
integration into British society has effectively come to a halt. Although
immigrants to Britain usually have tended to become more secular and less
religious than their parents by the second generation, the survey shows Muslims
have gone in precisely the opposite direction.
The Dispatches survey shows that today's young
British Muslims are less liberal and more devout than their parents. Their
beliefs render many of them determined not just to be different, but also
to be separate from the rest of Britain. Although it is often assumed that
those holding the most radical anti-Western views are from the lower socio-economic
classes, the survey shows that the well-off and well-educated are just as
likely to identify with radical Islam.
Among other findings, the survey shows that
an overwhelming number of British Muslims believe free speech should not extend
to insulting their religion, and that nearly one quarter of them believe the
2005 terrorist attacks in London were justified. More ominously, one-third
of British Muslims would rather live under Sharia law, and almost 30% say
they dream of Britain one day becoming an Islamic state.
Michael Gove, the education minister in the
government of British Prime Minister David Cameron, told Panorama that the
government would not tolerate "anti-Semitic material of any kind in English
schools." (Gove is the author of Celsius 7/7, a brilliant analysis of
Britain's wilful blindness in refusing to grasp the true nature and extent
of the Islamist war upon the West). Gove also said that Ofsted, the government-appointed
agency with oversight of education and children's services, would be "reporting
to us shortly" on measures to tighten oversight of part-time schools.
The Saudi schools in Britain have, further,
been able to get away with propagating anti-Semitism for nearly 30 years because,
unlike full-time schools, part-time schools do not have to register with the
Department for Education, and thus do not get inspected.
Not that inspections would make much difference.
An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph recently established that Ofsted
has published positive reports praising Muslim schools for their contribution
to community cohesion, even in the case of a school which openly states that
Muslims "oppose the lifestyle of the West." The Ofsted inspector
responsible for many of the reports has been accused of having links to radical
Islamist organisations. The newspaper also revealed that another Ofsted inspector
is the chief executive of a radical Muslim educational foundation, IBERR,
which describes Islamic schools as "one of the most important factors
which protect Muslim children from the onslaught of Euro-centrism, homosexuality,
racism, and secular traditions."
In one instance, Ofsted inspected the Madani
Girls' School, a private Islamic school in London's East End. In its official
report, Ofsted says the school leaves its pupils "well-prepared for life
in a multicultural society." However, the Madani Girls' School's website
states: "If we oppose the lifestyle of the West, then it does not seem
sensible that the teachers and the system which represents that lifestyle
should educate our children."
In another instance, Ofsted inspected the
Tawhid Boys' School in Hackney, north London. The Ofsted report says the curriculum
is "good
broad and balanced." However, the school's prospectus
says the curriculum is kept strictly "within the bounds of Sharia."
Ofsted has also cleared schools run by supporters
of the extremist Hizb ut Tahrir, which would like to replace the British state
with a dictatorship under Islamic law. The schools, which belong to the Islamic
Shakhsiyah Foundation, teach children key elements of Hizb ut Tahrir ideology,
which says that integration as "dangerous" and says that British
Muslims should "fight assimilation" into British society. It also
states that "those [Muslims] who believe in democracy are Kafir,"
or apostates, and it orders all Muslims to keep apart from non-believers,
and boycott "corrupt" British elections and political processes.
One of the Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation's
trustees is the author of a Hizb ut-Tahrir pamphlet titled Education and Identity,
which attacks the British national curriculum for its "systematic indoctrination"
of Muslim children "to build model British citizens." The trustee
criticizes "attempts to integrate Muslim children" into British
society as an effort "to produce new generations that reject Islam."
She also describes English as "one of the most damaging subjects"
a school can teach, and attacks fairy tales, saying they "reflect secular
and immoral beliefs that contradict the viewpoint of Islam."
Ofsted has also passed responsibility for
the inspection of dozens of Muslim schools to a new private "faith schools
watchdog," the Bridge Schools Inspectorate, which is co-controlled by
Islamic schools' own lobbying and trade body, the Association of Muslim Schools.
The Bridge Schools Inspectorate allows Muslim head teachers to inspect each
other's schools and return favourable verdicts.
A November 22 report published by the center-right
think tank Policy Exchange concludes that the British education system is
currently "not equipped" to prevent "extremist influences"
in faith schools. Titled "Faith Schools We Can Believe In: Ensuring that
Tolerant and Democratic Values are Upheld in Every Part of Britain's Education
System," the report contains a number of recommendations about how to
protect children from religious fundamentalism in the classroom. Among those,
the report calls for abolishing the Bridge Schools Inspectorate and the establishment
of a Due Diligence Unit to assess all schools, their trustees and staff, against
a statutory definition of extremism.