The case of the ‘Trojan horse’ school shows that Britain was wrong not to expect minorities to embrace liberal values.
For years in Britain there has been a pernicious trend to shy away from making a case for our liberal values among minority communities. As these values continued their march unabated among the mainstream, certain multiculturalists assumed that to assert them among minorities would be deemed offensive, perhaps racist, and in the Muslim context even Islamophobic.
The successful turnaround of the “Trojan horse” school Park View — now Rockwood Academy — couldn’t have proved this view more wrong. Two years after the scandal, the school has surpassed expectations, with cadet recruitment, after-school drama classes, counterextremism workshops and trips to Wimbledon. Those who worried about a more active integration policy alienating the Birmingham school’s predominantly Muslim students really needn’t have. So why did they? [116 comments]
[TOP RATED COMMENT 119 votes] Great article. I want everyone in Britain who's Muslim - or any other faith - to have a great, free life here. The elephant in the room is Saudi Arabia. SA's blatant funding of Wahaabism in mosques in the UK and throughout Europe is there for all to see in the tens of thousands of Muslim teens that wear the hijab in Gulf State style, and whose parents didn't wear the veil. Look at pictures of Baghdad or Beirut or Dhaka or Kabul in the Fifties and Sixties and they look like pictures taken in contemporary European cities, with women in fashionable European dress.
Wahaabism is a Subjugation Algorithm, a really nasty misogynist xenophobic sect that is causing enormous harm throughout the world. Where's the politician who will call it out and ultimately take it out?
I would've thought Sadiq Khan had a duty to do just this as our most prominent Muslim who surely knows what's going on.
[2ND 105] There only seems to be one 'minority community' that cannot adapt to British/Western values. And, as usual, we are blamed rather than the particular community which refuses to modernise and which despises us and all we stand for - freedom, democracy, equality of the sexes, tolerance.
[3RD 98] I applaud what your trying to say and do, but no amount of integration, educational excellence and social mobility will counteract some of the messianic and hateful content of Islamism.
It should be remembered that many of worlds terrorist atrocities have been undertaken by highly educated people. Moreover many of the worlds terrorists and despots have been educated at some of Britains' finest institutions where liberalism and raised expectations were indeed already the norm.
There will always be a clash between the presumptions of many religions and modern secular, science-based education because they simply cannot co-exist logically. It is naive to think that one will obliquely displace the other. But I wish you good fortune in your endeavour.
[4TH 62] Mainstream society DID wake up to it earlier ... much earlier.
But the Establishment Parties and the liberal media not only didn't wake up to it, they deliberately suppressed any attempt to discuss it by screaming "racist and bigot" at any one who tried. [The Times (£)] Read more
