The founder of an Islamic school shut down yesterday by the government has claimed he is a victim of demonisation of the Muslim community in the media.
Bilal Patel told the Guardian that unsubstantiated claims that Jameah Islameah had links with notorious extremists such as Abu Hamza so debilitated the institution that it struggled to attract staff and pupils. The school was also the subject of a high-profile raid last September.
Allowing Muslim girls to wear full-face veils to school could make Dunblane-style massacres more common, a judge suggested.
Judge Stephen Silber was hearing a case brought by a 12-year-old Muslim girl against her headmistress’s ban on her veil. The judge suggested veils would make it hard to identify intruders in schools, making murderous attacks more likely.
In the 1996 Dunblane massacre, Thomas Hamilton, 43, burst into a Scottish primary school and shot dead 16 children and their teacher.
The current case began when a Buckinghamshire headmistress spotted the 12-year-old girl in the lunch queue wearing the ‘niqab’ veil – which leaves only the eyes visible – and sent her home when she refused to remove it. The pupil was told “school security” was one reason for the ban.
The girl, who can be named only as Pupil X, has been educated at home since, and is now claiming the veil ban infringes her human rights.
At the High Court Judge Silber said: “Everybody knows these days how conscious head teachers have to be about security at schools. Was it in Dunblane where somebody went in and attacked schoolchildren? Therefore it is vital at all schools for the head teacher to be able to glance around and recognise exactly who is there.”
One of the nine men arrested under anti-terror laws over a much-hyped plot to behead British soldiers branded Britain a “police state for Muslims” on Thursday.
Abu Bakr, who was among eight suspects who were seized from their homes in a series of aggressive dawn raids in Birmingham last Wednesday, asserted that the aim of the operation had been to distract attention from the cash-for-honours inquiry, in which Prime Minister Tony Blair and new Labour are accused of offering honours to fat cats who fork out funds to the cash-strapped party.
Mr Bakr, who is one of two men who have since been released without charge, said: “I personally believe it was to do with the incident around Tony Blair.
“With Lord Levy being arrested and Tony Blair being questioned, to take attention away from that, this big plot was leaked to the press.”
Gory details of the alleged “Iraq-style” plot to kidnap and behead a British Muslim soldier were leaked to a small group of reporters in anonymous briefings that have since been attributed to “Whitehall sources.”
Civil rights group Liberty is concerned that so-called Whitehall briefings about the operation may have compromised “the best efforts of the local police service to brief the public in a timely, orderly, lawful and open manner.”
Liberty has asked Home Secretary John Reid whether special advisers may have briefed certain journalists off the record, thereby prejudicing fair trials.
It is also concerned that, when the same personnel brief journalists on proposals to, for example, bring fundamental changes to the law to extend pre-charge detention in the same week or same breath, party politics may be trumping public safety considerations.
Mr Bakr’s lawyer Gareth Peirce has sent a letter asking West Midlands Police to find out “who made these false, malicious claims” and she reported that she was “awaiting a response with interest.”
“Gina Khan is a very brave woman. Born in Birmingham 38 years ago to Pakistani parents, she has run away from an arranged marriage, dressed herself in jeans and dared to speak out against the increasing radicalisation of her community. ‘There are mosques springing up on every street corner’, she says, pointing them out to me as we drive to her tiny house in Birmingham, near the district where nine men were arrested last week on suspicion of plotting to kidnap and behead a British Muslim soldier….
“Over the past 15 years, she says, there has been an influx of jihadist thinking into her part of Birmingham. Bookshops sell radical literature and the mosques preach separatism and hatred. The Government and the white Establishment have allowed it to happen. And she is outraged about it. ‘It’s all happening on your doorstep’, she says, ‘and Britain is still blind to the real threat that is embedded here now. I truly believe that all these mosques here are importing jihad.’ …
“The trouble is, says Khan, that many of the Pakistanis who have come to Birmingham are all too easily swayed. ‘Most of them are ignorant, uneducated, illiterate people from rural areas. It is very easy for them to be brainwashed, very easy.'”
Writing in the same paper, Mary Ann Sieghart hails Gina Khan as “A courageous voice against the Muslim bullyboys“.
And the Times even devotes its leader to Ms Khan: “In speaking out today in times2 against the extremism, bigotry and hypocrisy she finds among many Muslims, she knows that she risks the contempt of a few of her fellow believers. But she insists that it is time that she, and thousands of others, especially women, sickened at being misrepresented by extremists, spoke out.”
With any luck, a right-wing US think-tank will snap up Gina Khan and the Muslim community in Brum will be rid of her.
Postscript: Predictably, Khan is also enthusiastically endorsed (along with Taj Hargey) by Mad Melanie Phillips.
Richard Littlejohn comments on the recent spate of letter bombs: “I wouldn’t lose much sleep if those wicked dupes, like Red Ken The Terrorist’s Friend, who help glorify politically motivated murder and make common cause with killers, were to find themselves on the end of a bombing. Livingstone is the man who feted the IRA while it was slaughtering civilians on the streets of the capital back in the 1980s and today invites Islamist preachers of hate to tea and biscuits at City Hall, while their disciples are blowing themselves up on crowded Tube trains.”
Those “Islamist preachers of hate” – they would include this man, would they?
See Jenny Jones’ post at Comment is Free, 9 February 2007
Also Osama Saeed at Rolled Up Trousers, 9 February 2007
And for another take on the letter bomb campaign see Lenin’s Tomb, 7 February 2007
Angry parents have staged a demonstration outside a London school after its decision to serve only halal meat.
The change over to halal meat was made after a consultation with parents, which showed that 77 per cent of those were in favour of the decision. Fewer than six out of ten parents responded.
Muslim parents at Kingsgate Primary School in West Hampstead, where three quarters of the pupils are Muslim, accused the protesters of racism. Solveig Francis, a parent, said: “This is just naked racism, it’s got nothing to do with choice. They talk about keeping up English values but the most important value we have is democracy. It’s about time that was upheld.”
Staff at the school were forced to take phones off the hook after receiving abusive calls from people claiming to be from the BNP. Liz Hayward, the head teacher, had to call the police after a father came into the school to challenge her over the decision.
Jacqueline Gomm, the protest leader, said: “I totally deny being guilty of racism. We allow people to come into this country and we end up being in a minority. We accommodate other cultures at the expense of ours.”
See also the Daily Mail, 9 February 2007
And Camden New Journal, 8 February 2007
Yusuf Smith replies to Melanie Phillips.
Irish community leaders in Britain have spoken out in support of Muslim immigrants in the wake of police raids in Birmingham that have seen nine men arrested in connection with an alleged terror plot.
Dr Mary Tilki, chair of the Federation of Irish Societies, told an audience at a regional FIS meeting in Liverpool at the weekend that she was concerned at the series of arrests as well as police raids last year in the East End of London.
She said: “I am particularly saddened by the abuse and hostility targeted at members of the Asian community. We have been there as a community and we know what it is like. I would like to think that Irish organisations and Irish people can support the Asian/Muslim community.”
Dr Tilki said since the terrorist bomb atrocities in the city it had taken more than 30 years for Irish people in Birmingham to feel safe in expressing their Irishness. She continued: “The Asians are no different and like us the vast majority abhor any link with terrorism.”
The FIS chair said that the Prevention of Terrorism Act had made legitimate the labelling of all Irish people as terrorists. She said: “Homes were raided; people were persistently stopped and searched but the level of conviction was low”.
And she warned: “The police and security services have a difficult job to do; their intelligence is arguably more sophisticated. But they do not appear to have learned lessons from the miscarriages of justice against Irish people”.
Central TV pulled the plug on a programme about local Muslims this week after a contributor accused city councillor Salma Yaqoob of supporting terrorism.
Douglas Murray of the Social Affairs Unit, a right-wing think tank, made the allegation in a pre-recorded discussion for the Extra Tonight programme due to be shown on Tuesday night.
Central replaced the scheduled item with a documentary comparing education in Sweden and Britain.
Coun Yaqoob said that she was shocked by Murray’s smear: “He made all sorts of wild claims about me. He said that I was a supporter of terrorism, that I didn’t care about Muslims in Iraq and that I’d taken part in an anti-war riot. It was all such libellous nonsense I thought they would just halt the recording there and then, but they carried on.”
Yaqoob raised the issue with the show’s producers after filming finished on Monday night, but was told they planned to go ahead with the broadcast. It was only cancelled at the 11th hour on Tuesday when Central’s lawyers apparently became concerned the company might get sued.
“I’m glad about it,” Yaqoob said. “I’m willing to have a serious discussion with anybody, but people like Murray don’t want a proper debate, they just want to throw a load of mud and hope some of sticks. That kind of behaviour just clouds the real issues.”
Murray told The Stirrer he stands by his claims and said that Yaqoob’s Respect Party “is as vile as the BNP”.
A Saudi-funded Islamic school at the centre of allegations of extremist teaching insisted yesterday it had “ripped out” the offending pages from all textbooks. The King Fahad Academy, in Acton, west London, which receives more than £4 million a year from the Saudi royal family, has been accused of institutional racism by a sacked teacher.
Colin Cook, a Muslim convert, alleges children as young as five are taught using books which describe Jews as “apes” and Christians as “pigs”. One textbook allegedly asks for “examples of worthless religions … such as Judaism, Christianity, idol worship and others”.
Dr Sumaya Alyusuf, the principal, denied that teachers employed the offensive chapters, which had been “taken out context”. However, she said that the material had now been torn out. “The press interest in these unused chapters has shocked us,” she added. Dr Alyusuf said that, since the claims emerged, pupils and parents had been abused by local residents.
Daily Telegraph, 8 February 2007
See also BBC News, 7 February 2007