Katherine Birbalsingh, Secularism, Palestine and the Islamicisation of British Schools

Two schools have been in the news this past week or two, one because of threats made to staff over the prohibition of ‘free Palestine’ badges and the other because of attempts by Muslims pupils to overturn its secular culture and allow Muslim prayer. These events have been particularly reported and commented on by GB News, the channel that has two political biases: right and far right. This piece is a response in particular to the channel’s Patrick Christie, who has had a few things in particular to say about it.

One of these schools is Berkeley school, which has been the subject of a mass protesters outside its gates denouncing it. This is because the school stopped a pupil from wearing a ‘free Palestine’ badge. Rumours then spread, which have been denied by the school, that the lad was then bullied. The school states that it has a rule banning political badges. However, the badge’s prohibition has provoked angry protests. Free Palestine stickers and posters have appeared all over the surrounding area, including on private individual’s houses. One resident said that it happened on her house, and that there had been people driving around the area staring at her and other residents in an intimidating manner. This particularly upset her, because previously the area had been well-integrated and harmonious. Staff at the school itself had received death threat. It has been closed, and may never reopen, because it received a bomb threat along with a racially abusive phone call. In the meantime the school has resorted to distance learning for its pupils.

The other school is Michaela school, run by ‘Britain’s strictest headmistress’ Katherine Birbalsingh. This has very high academic scores, although listening to the discipline imposed on its pupils it sounds like a soul-crushing nightmare to me. Among other rules, pupils have to be silent in the corridor. Before I fell ill with the myeloma, I used to help out doing voluntary work with one of the local junior schools in my area. My job was simply to sit there and listen to the kids with reading difficulties read. The school at the time was run by the local authority, and was full of the stuff you’d expect and want on the walls of primary school. It had the children’s art and craft on display, as well as the rules commanding respect, tolerance and firmly banning bullying on the entrance lobby. It seemed the kind of happy school I remember when I was an ickle sprog. Then it was taken over by an academy chain against the wishes of the headmaster and staff. The head resigned, as did many of the ordinary teachers, and the ethos of the school changed. The art came off the walls, leaving them bare except for the school rules and safety regulations. Pupil behaviour was also clamped down upon. Like Birbalsingh’s school, talking in the corridors was banned. It changed from a cheerful learning environment to a grim, repressive place. I don’t know if the school’s scores improved, but it seemed to me that its joylessness was more likely to stop children wanting to come and learn than encourage them. Especially if work they and their teachers were proud of no longer appeared on its walls.

Birbalsingh is a secularist. She believes that for multiculturalism to work, religious differences, at least in her school, have to be minimised and removed. Hence she does not permit prayer. Some Muslims therefore started praying outside in the school playground using their jackets as prayer mats. This was duly forbidden as well. One pupil therefore took the school to court stating that the ban was unfair as it particularly affected Muslims. Muslims are required by their religion to pray five times a day. However, this seems to have been part of general attempt to enforce Muslim religious observance on the other pupils. Muslim girls wearing their hair free faced pressure to wear the hijab, for example. I think the court ruled in favour of the pupil. Birbalsingh as now announced that she is going to launch an appeal to ban prayer in school generally.

There are a number of aspects to these events and the reporting by GB News. The channel is especially keen on ‘culture war’ issues, such as the trans debate. It also gives due coverage to the news about the Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs. Christie compared the intimidating behaviour and the death threats made against Berkeley School with the mass protests against the teacher at the school in Batley, who was hounded out and is now in hiding because he showed his pupils the cartoons of Mohammed as part of a debate on freedom of speech. As obnoxious as Christie is, I think he’s right here. The same venomously intolerant forces are at work and need to be clamped down on. This is not about denying the protesters their rights to protest. It is about stopping threats and intimidation from an intolerant section of the Muslim community, especially when it involves death threats and reports of masked men hanging around the premises.

But I’m also aware that this is part of a wider campaign from the right-wing news channel to smear the left and the pro-Palestine campaign. The right-wing media have been running the line that the demonstrators against the genocide in Gaza are anti-Semites and Muslim supremacists, and this is an attempt to cow non-Muslim Britain with a series of shows of strength. As when they turned up to pray outside 10 Downing Street or Whitehall. For decades a section of the Conservative right has been spreading the idea that the left and militant Islam will combine to suppress traditional European freedoms and establish an Islamic state governed by sharia law. Anthony Burgess, the writer of A Clockwork Orange and author of the first Proto-Indo-European dictionary, wrote a book in the 1980s as a response to Orwell’s classic 1984. This book, with the rather obvious and unoriginal title 1985, was set in a Britain where the trade unions united with militant Muslims to start a revolution. This showed me exactly where the political sympathies of the man dubbed ‘Britain’s most pretentious writer’ lay. Then in the first years of this century the Spectator reviewed an SF book, set round about now in France, where the remains of French socialism had united with the Muslims to establish an Islamic state and had started a new Holocaust against the Jews. Because to the person who wrote this piece of literary trash, Socialists and Muslims are all anti-Semites. This line is being pushed now because of the attitude among the militant Zionist right that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. Even if it comes from proud, principled Jews deeply involved with their community and their gentile friends.

Birbalsingh’s case is slightly different. As it is developing, it appears to be becoming a contest between the forcible observance of Islam in the school environment, and a forcible secularism. I am not a secularist. I am very much a person of faith. This blog was initially set up for Christian apologetics, to defend religion in general and Christianity in particular against the attacks by the New Atheists in the first decade or so of this century. Mike and I went to an Anglican church school. I have Roman Catholic cousins who went to the Roman Catholic schools in Bristol. I also have Methodist and Baptist friends. I have not noticed any sectarian prejudice and hatred among the peeps in my part of Bristol, although I am aware of the situation in Northern Ireland and in Glasgow. The teachers at my old school included Methodists, Roman Catholics and Presbyterians and they all had a horror of religious bigotry and violence. I support parents’ right to bring their children up in their religion and to send them to a faith school if they so wish. Provided, of course, that the teaching in that school conforms to British values of democracy, freedom of belief and conscience, religious tolerance and genuine racial equality.

Here I differ from Talk Radio Tory mouthpiece, Julia Hartley-Brewer, who also took it upon herself to weigh in on this subject. She wanted religion to be kept out of schools altogether and didn’t want children to be divided according to their parents’ religion. I dare say that if this came from a woman or man of the left, the Daily Mail would have heart attack and condemn it as an attack on traditional British belief and culture. But as it comes from her, the Mail and other right-wing organs and personages will remain silent.

But I think this part of a strategy by some militant Muslims to impose Muslim belief and observance on non-Muslim schools and organisations. And I think it probably has its ultimate origin in Pakistan. A few years ago I heard from a Christian Pakistani lady about the immense pressure Christians in Pakistan are under to convert to Islam. Her father had been the headmaster of a Christian school. The leading schools in Pakistan are Christian and Muslims are desperate to get their children into them. But they also put pressure on the headmasters to convert.

A few years ago there was a case in this country where a Muslim had been desperate to get his son into the local Christian school. When he succeeded, he then sued the school demanding that all the Christian iconography and ethos be removed, because it went against his Muslim beliefs and sensibilities. And I’ve heard of other cases like it in the charity sector.

I honestly don’t want prayer or religion removed from schools or the public sector. A presumably Muslim commenter to one of these videos noted that Roman Catholic schools provided prayer rooms for Muslim pupils, claimed that praying only took five minutes and ‘had many benefits’. That may be so, but I gather that Birbalsingh’s school is in a very ethnically and religious mixed area and that she felt that secularism was necessary for multiculturalism to work. My sympathies here are with her school. If the school rules ban prayer and this applies to everyone, then pupils coming to the school voluntarily should obey it. If they cannot, then they should perhaps choose another school.

And those choosing to practise their religion should not force it on those that don’t.

TYT Nation on Calls for the Deportation of Jews & Immigrants and ‘Liberal Genocide’ at Trump Rally

More militant racism and hate from Trump’s Fascistic supporters. In this piece from TYT Nation, Jeff Waldorf, the host, comments on a video produced by Dan Cohen of the Real News of a pro-Trump rally at Maricopa County. This is only part of a much longer report by Cohen, which Waldorf urges his viewers to see. The clip shows some of the attendees, speakers and the emcee, Tim Horn, pouring out their hatred of the above groups. One man states that America is a Christian country, and that if immigrants don’t like it, they should leave. Another man, a Vietnam War veteran, claims that the Communists and ‘sharia law Muslims’ are in cahoots to bring down America, and that when ‘Sharia law Muslims’ enter a classroom, they kill all the children and other people in it. One of those interviewed is the 13 year old boy, who proudly claims to have started the chant ‘Build that wall!’ at one of the Orange Generalissimo’s rallies. As he’s speaking, the lad looks aside for one moment, and casually comments, ‘If she’s really that Jewish, she should go back to her own country’. One man also rants about how gays should go to Gaza. One of the speakers also declares that if they want to take their country back, they should free a few people from prison, and jail some others.

Horn claims that the Democrats are really ‘the Socialist Party of America’, because ‘liberals hate this country’ and have got into the schools and universities to brainwash its children and destroy it. One man even comments that he ‘can’t wait for that Liberal genocide’.

Waldorf makes some highly incisive observations on the way these people have themselves been misinformed and deliberated deceived by their leaders, the rich. The Left doesn’t hate America. They want to introduce free healthcare and better opportunities for the poor and immigrants, because they love their country and its people, and want everyone to benefit, including Republicans. He also points out that there are no plans to murder Republicans, but if we’re talking about Communists and Muslims, well, Ronald Reagan and the Republicans armed the Mujahideen to fight the Russians when they invaded Afghanistan. He goes on to say how these people are terribly afraid, afraid of anyone different from themselves, to the extent that they want to build this wall around America. It’s a fear based on ignorance. And as for that wall, it’s supposed to cost $25 billion, although no-one knows how that money is going to be raised, and it may well cost more far more. And that wall is not going to protect the rest of the country. ‘Good luck with building ‘sky-walls in New York to defend the city from planes’, Waldorf remarks sarcastically.

As for the Jewish girl, who’s supposed to go back to her own country, well, how can she? She’s an American. This is her country.

He also makes the point that the rich are behind this, deliberately creating and stoking this fear in order to keep the poor and middle class divided, so they can pick their pockets.

There are a number of points that leap out looking at this video. The first is the conspiracist thinking that believes that ‘the Left’ hates America, and has a deliberate policy of infiltrating America’s educational institutions. This is the old rubbish about ‘cultural Marxism’ trying to introduce ‘Communism’ by attacking European and American Christian, capitalist White culture. As for the stupid theories of an alliance between Islamists and Communists/ Leftists, the British novelists Anthony Burgess believed in that load of nonsense. Back in the 1980s he wrote a riposte to George Orwell’s great dystopian novel, called 1985. In this wretched book the trade unions ally with radical Muslims to bring about a totalitarian revolution. Burgess was one of the great figures of 20th century British literature, and used to make a great show of his erudition. Thus Private Eye called him, ‘the most pretentious man in English literature’. Well, it doesn’t matter how great a literary giant he was, he was still talking nonsense with that book. More recently, writers like Frederick Raphael have been spouting the same nonsense about how the remains of European Socialism will unite with the Muslims to start another holocaust of the Jews. Raphael gave a glowing review of a book with just this theme, set in the 2020s, about a decade ago in the page of the Spectator.

As for ‘sharia law’ Muslims killing children in American schools, no, they won’t. From what I’ve heard over here, much of the information warning the authorities of possible attacks from the Islamists comes from Muslims, who would like to live under Islamic law. There is clearly a problem here, as implementing such law would be divisive and deprive liberal or secular Muslims of the opportunity and ability to integrate into wider British society. Nevertheless, the point needs to be made that just because a Muslim believes in sharia law does not mean that they automatically support terrorism.

But if we are talking about extremely conservative Muslims, who have killed schoolchildren, then we should mention Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is a country governed by an extremely narrow and intolerant version of sharia law. Its armed forces have deliberately killed children, and other civilians in attacks on mosques, hospitals, factories and schools in neighbouring Yemen as part of their campaign against Shi’a Islam. The weapons they have used in these atrocities, including cluster bombs, which are banned under international treaty, have been sold to them by America and Britain.

Waldorf is also correct when he says that these fears are being stoked by the rich to divide America in order to pick the pockets of ordinary people. This is absolutely correct. Since Margaret Thatcher in England and Ronald Reagan in America took power at the dawn of the 1980s, there has been a massive transfer of wealth upwards from the poor and middle class to the rich as welfare programmes have been closed down, and industries privatised and deregulated. Wages have been deliberately kept stagnant. The earnings of the rich 1% have been massively inflated as they have enjoyed generous tax cut after tax cut. Meanwhile, those taxes have been transferred to the poor.

This policy is continuing under Donald Trump. Trump is repealing Obamacare, which will see millions of poor Americans deprived of affordable health insurance. He has done this in order to give even more tax cuts to the rich, while the poor will receive absolutely nothing of the kind. This is because corporations and the rich fund America’s politicians, who respond by doing exactly what their paymasters want. And what they want is a poor, cowed workforce deprived of all but the most minimal rights. It’s also the guiding vision of the British Conservative party.

The way to give prosperity back to ordinary Americans – and Brits – is for the ordinary people to unite, and not let themselves be deceived by lies and fearmongering about ‘liberals’, non-Whites, Jews and Muslims. We need to stand together, whatever our race or religion, to make sure that ordinary people, of whatever religious or non-religious persuasion or colour, have decent jobs, a proper welfare support infrastructure, and proper healthcare. Everything, in fact, which Trump in America and Theresa May in Britain wishes to deprive them.

Thatcher’s Role in the Radicalisation of British Muslims

With Britain now facing the renewed threat of an Islamist terrorist attack, and the rise of ISIS in Iraq, the Tories will no doubt once again be trying to present themselves as the true protectors of the British people and their liberty. It’s a risible claim. The Tories are actively reducing the unemployed to helots – state slaves – through the introduction of workfare and their use as unpaid labour for private enterprise. See the article I’ve reblogged this morning about a man refusing to perform unpaid work under the new workfare legislation for the firm that sacked him. They are also actively pressing those from the working and lower middle classes fortunate enough to be in paid unemployment into wage slavery in the Marxist sense by denying them rights in the workplace and forcing them into zero hours contracts, along with pay freezes and reductions. Traditional British justice is also being sold and denied, contrary to Magna Carta, as the government has severely cut legal aid, and, with their Lib Dem enablers, set up secret courts to try those accused of terrorism. These are truly Kafkaesque kangaroo courts, where vital evidence may be withheld from the defendant’s attorney if its disclosure is deemed a threat to national security.

Moreover, far from defending Britain from terrorism, Margaret Thatcher herself directly contributed to the growth of radical Islam in Britain. Firstly, by encouraging foreign Muslim terrorists to seek asylum in the UK, and secondly by removing the state welfare net, thus making already inward-looking Muslim communities in the UK even more introverted and disconnected from mainstream British society.

Islamist Terrorism Blowback from Campaign against Soviets in Afghanistan

Many political commentators have discussed the rise of domestic Islamist terrorism in the West as blowback from the Gulf War and the unprovoked invasion of Iraq, and the assistance given by the West and Saudi Arabia to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. America and the Saudis provided them money and weapons as part of Reagan’s global campaign against Communism and the Soviet ‘evil empire’ to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan. Margaret Thatcher herself saw them as valuable allies in the war against Communism. In return for their assistance battling the Soviets, she allowed a number of radical Islamist terrorists to settle in Britain. Private Eye pointed out the immense immorality of this policy several times, noting that one of the terrorists given asylum here in the UK was a man, who had bombed an airliner taking schoolchildren to Moscow in order to kill the Soviet officers also aboard. The Soviets themselves were in absolutely no doubt who the Islamist terrorists would target next after they had succeeded in their aims of expelling them. A few years ago the Daily Mail even ran a piece on the role of the Afghan War in the rise of radical Islamism. This quoted a former high level Russian diplomat to the US as telling his American counterparts in no uncertain terms that ‘after they have finished with us, they will come for you’: a prediction that has come all too true.

Thatcher Gave Asylum to Islamist Terrorists

The favour shown by Thatcher to her mujahideen allies also goes some way to explaining why the police were initially completely uninterested in cracking down on radical, viciously intolerant Islamist preachers and mosques. A few years ago the police finally acted against the mosque in Finsbury Park, after the imam and preachers there were revealed to be actively preaching and recruiting jihad and terrorism, including the enslavement of non-Muslims if they travelled to the Dar al-Islam, the Islamic world. Despite clear evidence of terrorist activities, the authorities were extremely reluctant to close them down, to the horror of moderate British Muslims. The authorities were warned about the mosque by an Algerian Muslim, who contacted the police something like five times about the dangers they posed. His warnings were repeatedly ignored. Some of this reluctance to act against foreign terrorists on British soil may derive from traditional British attitudes dating back to the 19th century. The authorities were content to allow foreign terrorists and radicals, such as Russian revolutionaries, to seek asylum in Britain, so long as they didn’t pursue a terror campaign against Britain herself. The granting of asylum here by Thatcher herself to Islamist terrorists also suggest to me that Thatcher and her cabinet also actively discouraged any attempt to act against their anti-Communist allies, in the same way she embraced the Chilean Fascist butcher General Pinochet.

Conservative Welfare Reforms Cutting Secular Ties between Muslim and Non-Muslim

The French scholar, Alfred Kepel, also notes the role Thatcher’s cuts to the welfare state played in the development of Islamic radicalism in Britain in his book on the rise of religious militancy, The Revenge of God. Thatcher cut state aid to the poor and unemployed partly as a way of reinvigorating religious charities. She aimed to remove secular welfare provision, so that the poor and unemployed would have to return to private charity, including religious organisations, for support. Kepel points out that the faith best organised to do this was Islam. One of the Five Pillars of Islam, the fundamental practices at the heart of the faith, is the zakat or alms tax. Muslims are required to pay a tenth of their income to the mosque, to be distributed as alms to the community’s poor. Clearly there is absolutely nothing wrong in religious organisations – or anyone else – providing aid to the poor and needy. However, the removal of state support meant that many Muslims, who were already alienated from non-Muslim British society, became even more inward-looking. It helped to break down contact between communities, not promote it, and promoted a situation where suspicion and hostility towards non-Muslims could thrive in some.

Thus, whatever the Tories say to the contrary, and however Cameron acts now to present himself as protecting Britain against the threat of Islamist terrorism, his party and Margaret Thatcher herself are partly responsible for its growth and development here in the UK. Since 9/11 and 7/7 there have been numerous programmes trying to steer vulnerable and alienated Muslims away from the preachers of hate and terrorism. It’s a pity that this could not have been started earlier, and that others now are having mend the immense damage Thatcher did. Unfortunately, this does not seem to involve the restoration of the welfare state, which is forcing so many in Britain, regardless of their colour or religious convictions, in dire poverty. This needs to be stopped if we are ever to have again a united, prosperous British people.

*****

Need for More Coverage of Muslim Demos against Radicals

There are a couple of other points that need to be made on the subject of Islamist radicalism and terrorism here in the UK. Firstly, moderate Muslims have complained that their demonstrations against the preachers of hate are ignored by the news media. There have been a number of marches and demonstrations by ordinary Muslims against the preachers of hate. I was told about one by my lecturer in Islam at college, who had seen a notice for it in the window of a local newsagents. Clearly, by ignoring the demos by ordinary Muslims against the radicals, creates a one-sided, distorted view of Islam in Britain. This needs to change.

Extreme Right Falsely Claiming Alliance between Left and Radical Islam – Disproved by Hope Not Hate

Secondly, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim organisations like the BNP and the English Defence league repeatedly claim in their propaganda that the Left, and anti-Fascists, are allies of the Islamist radicals. There’s a nasty little propaganda film on Youtube, for example, which claims that in ten years’ time Europe will be racked by civil war, as Nationalists battle the combined forces of the Left and Islam for dominance of the continent. Although extreme, these fears have also been promoted in a series of books, some of them by respected international literary figures. Way back in 1984, Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, wrote his response to Orwell’s 1984. Burgess was harshly critical of the great British Socialist and the book’s status as a classic. In Burgess’ own book, 1985, Muslims and trade unionists join forces to try to take over Britain, plunging it into violence and terror. More recently, the Spectator reviewed one novel by a contemporary American author. This was set in alternative universe, where French Socialists have allied with radical Islam to set up a new holocaust against Europe’s Jews. These fantasies say much more about the Right-wing authors fears of the organised working class and the supposed Islamic threat than they do about reality. The anti-Fascist organisation, Hope Not Hate, for example, not only campaigns against White Fascism and racism, but also against Islamist radicalism and terrorism. This also needs to be more widely known in order to combat the propaganda of the extreme Right that anti-Fascist organisations are complicit in promoting Islamist terrorism as part of their own campaign to increase racial tension.