Exclusive: over 60 per cent of Britain's Muslim schools have extremist

Exclusive: over 60 per cent of Britain's Muslim schools have extremist
links, says draft report
Damian Thompson
Dec 17, 2008
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/damian_thompson/blog/2008/12/17/exclusive_over_60_per_cent_of_britains_muslim_schools_have_extremist_links_says_draft_report

Britain's Muslim schools have been sharply criticised in a controversial
draft report commissioned by a leading think tank which suggests that
over 60 per cent of them are linked to potentially dangerous Islamic
fundamentalists.

An early version of the report, entitled When Worlds Collide, alleges
that of the 133 Muslim primary and secondary schools it surveyed, 82
(61.6 per cent) have connections or direct affiliations to
fundamentalists. The 133 schools are in the private sector but
supposedly subject to Ofsted inspection.

The report also claims that some of these schools teach "repugnant"
beliefs about the wickedness of Western society and Jews.

The claims in the report, written by Denis MacEoin in response to a
commission from Civitas, will provoke ritual cries of "Islamophobia"
from the Muslim Council of Britain and fellow travellers such as Koran
Armstrong. MacEoin has been careful to back up his claims with
evidence - in particular, screen captures of links to Islamic
hate-mongers, including supporters of Al-Qaeda.

Civitas, however, is not prepared to endorse MacEoin's 61.6 per cent
figure, which will not appear in the published version of When Worlds
Collide. A spokesman for Civitas explains: "We want to concentrate on
claims that are absolutely robust, rather than complicated material,
some of it in Arabic, that might unjustly damage someone's reputation."

Perhaps the most alarming finding of the draft I've seen is that so many
of these schools (including ones with no connections to political
extremism) are bricking up their pupils behind a wall of Koranic
injunctions and Sharia law.

The schools known as Darul Ulooms, which base their curriculum on a
seventeenth-century Indian teaching system, include very few secular
subjects, claims the report. It says: "Their aim is not to prepare
pupils for life in the wider world, but to give them the tools for a
more limited existence inside the Muslim enclaves."

The consequences for bright Muslim British girls are absolutely dire.
Lively intellects are being destroyed and brilliant careers cut off
before they can begin. To quote the report again: "Every year, an
incalculable number of Muslim teenagers and young women are lost to the
wider world that informs their citizenship."

The numbers are increasing fast, and there is confusion over how many
schools exist. The growth of non-Muslim schools, says MacEoin, is
"hugely overshadowed by a rapidly growing sector of Muslim institutions.
These now number 127 [sic] full-time schools and an estimated 700
part-time madrassas for intense religious instruction [and that doesn't
include the Darul Uloom seminaries] . Many recreate in the UK the style
and content of schooling that can be found in Pakistan, Bangladesh and
India." Great.

And all this is happening with the implicit consent of the Government,
Ofsted - and Christian leaders, who bang on about the threat to "faith
schools" (and, in the case of R. Williams, the virtues of Sharia) while
shielding their eyes from the evidence that many Muslim faith schools
are poisonously anti-Christian.

I've seen many of the extremely damaging screen grabs on which MacEoin
bases his claims. Memo to the Muslim Council of Britain: start lining up
irate spokesmen now.