Britain : Private Muslim schools have been given the power to police themselves

Melanie Phillips:

Even I, who have written constantly about the British government’s lethally flawed strategy of appeasing Islamism, am left breathless by today’s story in the Telegraph:

Private Muslim schools have been given the power to police themselves, despite widespread fears over religious segregation, The Daily Telegraph can disclose. In a controversial move, they have won the right to appoint their own Ofsted-style inspectors. A new independent watchdog has been set up to be more ‘sensitive’ toward Islamic education. The decision comes despite concerns some private Muslim schools are already failing to prepare pupils for life in modern Britain.

Barry Sheerman, the chairman of the Commons schools select committee, told MPs last month local councils were finding it ‘difficult to know what is going on in some faith schools - particularly Muslim schools’. But religious leaders defended the move, saying the curriculum and religious traditions in faith schools demand specialist knowledge. Under present legislation, most state and private schools are inspected by Ofsted, the Government's standards watchdog. The Association of Muslim Schools and the Christian Schools' Trust applied to the Government to set up a separate inspectorate for a small number of private faith schools. The Daily Telegraph has learned the Department for Children, Schools and Families [DCSF] approved plans for the Bridge Schools' Inspectorate last week, giving it the power to inspect about 60 private Muslim schools and 50 Christian schools.

It really is hard to believe this. There is a crying need for much more rigorous state inspection of Muslim schools. Ofsted, which is supposedly going to police this new Muslim/Christian inspectorate, is hopeless; having progressively emasculated its inspection processes generally, it has already failed to identify Islamic extremism in the Muslim schools it inspects (see the evidence revealed in the recent Policy Exchange report of the bigoted teaching materials used at the King Fahad academy in west London, to which Ofsted gave a clean bill of health). The only way to address Islamic extremism is to take the toughest line possible against the dissemination of hatred and incitement. That means that the state must make it its business to find out where children are being thus indoctrinated and stop it. And that means the state must inspect all Muslim teaching institutions and take action against them where it finds that this is happening. To withdraw instead, as the government is now doing, and allow these schools to police themselves is to give a green light to the extremist production line.

Furthermore, it also bows to the Islamist insistence that British Muslims must develop parallel institutions to the British state, a fundamental element of their strategy to Islamise this country. For although this is presented as a Muslim/Christian initiative, no-one can be in any doubt that the main thrust comes from British Muslims. The website of the Christian body involved, the Christian Schools’ Trust, is being rejigged so information on it is sparse; but it appears to be a marginal fundamentalist body. Certainly there is no indication that Christian schools in general, or Jewish schools for that matter, are pressing for their own inspectorate.

Many people still think that the idea that Britain could ever be ‘Islamised’ is just too preposterous and silly to be taken seriously. It is not. It is well advanced. What it relies upon is three things: the refusal of the British public to take it seriously; the Islamists' ability to manipulate moral and intellectual liberal confusion and the resulting paralysis over ‘Islamophobia’, ‘discrimination’ and ‘minority rights’; and the craven desire by the British government to buy off the implicit and explicit threats of Muslim social unrest and yet more terrorist attacks by giving in to the Islamists’ demands. Truly moderate British Muslims who want to live under the umbrella of British laws and institutions are thus grievously undermined, and the entire country is put at ever greater peril from the pincer movement of cultural and terrorist attack.

Members of Parliament with an elementary sense of national self-preservation simply must not let this pass.