Friday, May 16, 2014

Al Jazeera Scribbler Uses Loaded Language In a Bid to Gin Up Fears About an Anti-Muslim "Witch Hunt" In the U.K

It's a right-wing croooosaaaaade!, he wails:
Many Muslims in Britain are convinced that there is a witch-hunt against them headed by government officials and the right-wing media; a non-Muslim friend of mine called it a "crusade". Equally, right-wing "think-tanks" have weighed in with their comments to stir up an evil brew that threatens community relations. 
Attacks include scurrilous media articles and the so-called Trojan Horse plot in Birmingham, which sees Muslim educationalists and school governors accused of plotting to "Islamise" state schools in the city. The real Trojan Horse plot is the planting of neo-conservative apparatchiks in key positions within government departments and quasi-governmental bodies. The Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, is himself an avowed neoconservative. 
Although nominally expressing concern about the education of Muslim children, the real motive of such attacks has nothing to do with improving the education of Muslim children, but with controlling it. In doing so, Britain's new crusaders seek to discredit decades of hard work and sincere community efforts to improve our children's life chances as they face the future in an increasingly hostile atmosphere. 
A few years ago, one religious affairs correspondent for a well-known newspaper told me that a senior Church of England figure was very calm about the upsurge of mosque planning applications in the 1960s: "Let them have their mosques. We have their children in our schools." What we are seeing today is nothing less than an ideological struggle for control of the education of Muslim children. 
The crusaders are not satisfied that all schools, including independent Muslim schools, are inspected regularly; we must have "investigations" and "commissions" as well...
Oooo, scary. But not nearly as scary as, say, the prospect of "independent" Muslim schools (funded by the Saudis?) teaching the jihad imperative to impressionable young'uns.

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