Birmingham Schools’ Trojan Wars: Intolerant Liberals Fight Bigoted Muslims And Christians For Children’s Minds
ANDREW Moffat has resigned his job as assistant head teacher at Chilwell Croft Academy, in Newtown, Birmingham. You may know him as the author of the guide Challenging Homophobia in Primary Schools. That’s CHIPS. (Does the acronym come before the policy?)
The Times says CHIPS begins with the advice that five-year-olds need to be taught that gay men and lesbians exist. (But do they care?) But Mr Moffat’s books and his sensible appeal for tolerance and understanding are mostly aimed at older children.
Mr Moffat says he resigned from his post after parents complained that he was telling children it was acceptable to be gay. He told the children he was gay during an assembly. He explains why he did it:
“I did come out at school in an assembly after a group of 11-year-olds held up a poster they made, with the heading ‘Gay is good’. It seemed like the right time to let the children know that they knew a gay person. Following my coming out, some parents from different communities complained to the school, but I maintain that my decision was the right one at that time. Some Christian and some Muslim parents have told me they don’t want their children learning that it’s OK to be gay.”
Mr Moffat is now teaching at a different school.
Chilwell Croft has issued a statement (Mr Moffat used the story of a gay family on a picnic to teach literacy):
“A minority group of parents objected to some of the resource books being used in literacy lessons with some of the oldest children in the school, which explored relationships in different families. The objections were primarily voiced by those whose own religion took an opposing stance to homosexuality.”
Liam Nolan, head teacher at Perry Beeches Academy, is upset. She tells the Sunday Times: “The Muslim community is being allowed to influence government legislation around equality.”
Mr Moffat
The Times says Mr Moffat’s treatment is part of a wider campaign. Birmingham is…
“…the city at the centre of allegations that fundamentalist Muslims are attempting to take over schools.
Park View School, the secondary academy at the centre of the allegations, faced new claims yesterday after a former senior teacher said that some assemblies were ‘anti-American, anti-Western propaganda’. The new allegations follow the revelation that urgent inspections are to take place in about a dozen Birmingham schools amid mounting concern at claims of attempts to infiltrate them by hardline Muslims.
Adding:
Mr Moffat and the school said they did not believe the parents’ objections were linked to claims that Islamic hardliners are attempting to take control of schools in Birmingham. The school is two miles from Park View. Nigel Sloan, the former head of drama at Park View, said yesterday that he was the victim of a “trumped-up allegation” of racism after telling a female pupil that it would be a “shame” if she wore a veil, after she asked for his view…
Two teachers at Park View, which is also an academy, claimed last week that the school promoted political viewpoints sympathetic to al-Qaeda. Park View has denied the allegations of extremism and said that Mr Sloan was suspended after an allegation of racism.
Andrew Gilligan has covered the story in the Telegraph:
Children at one of the state schools taken over by hardline Muslims are being “programmed” and have been “drilled” by their teachers to lie to Ofsted inspectors investigating the plot, according to a parent.
Mohammed Zabar, the father of a 10-year-old girl attending Oldknow Academy in Birmingham, today becomes the first person to speak openly about events at his daughter’s school. Mr Zabar, 44, decided to break his silence after The Sunday Telegraph described how teachers at the supposedly secular school led children in anti-Christian chanting, stopped them from celebrating Christmas, organised subsidised trips to Mecca and required all pupils to learn Arabic.
The parent is quoted:
“Everything I read in your articles is true. The last three or four months have been really difficult. My daughter’s education has been at the back of my mind the whole time. It is important for Muslim parents to say that what is happening is wrong, and to stand up against it. The culture I’ve been brought up with is that you mix with all races and communities and this will drive wedges between different communities.”
Previously, we’ve heard that the Government is investigating “serious allegations” against Park View School, including a claim that £70,000 was spent on speakers used to call Muslim pupils to prayer. But is that true?
The Times:
“The Education Funding Agency (EFA) has been provided with evidence to show that although £70,000 was claimed for the speakers, they actually cost much less than half that price,” a source familiar with the inquiry said. So now the EFA will be going through the academy’s financial records from top to bottom. And what’s especially strange is why the speakers, which were going to be used to call kids to prayer, were needed at a non-faith school.” While declining to comment directly on the allegation that Park View had overclaimed for the loudspeakers, Tahir Alam, chairman of the governors at the academy, said yesterday that they had cost “around £10,000”. Their “primary use”, he added, is for “functions and performances within the hall, not for call to prayer”.
Gilligan has reported:
Staff at one of the Birmingham schools targeted by Muslim hardliners in the so-called “Trojan Horse” plot were assaulted as part of a campaign against the school management, official documents show. The disclosure comes as one local Muslim MP said he was certain there was an “extensive operation” to import fundamentalist views into supposedly secular state schools and “split young people away from their parents”.
Khalid Mahmood, Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, accused Birmingham city council of being “complicit” in the alleged plot and attacked the purported ringleader, Tahir Alam, saying: “It is very appropriately named Trojan Horse – that’s exactly what he has been doing.”
Mr Alam, the chairman of governors at one of the schools allegedly taken over, Park View, says the plot is a fabrication and denies any involvement.
The Trojan Horse is an anonymous paper purporting to be strategy documents outlining ways of ousting head teachers in Muslim areas of the city in order to establish schools run on Islamic principles.
The documents suggest that the strategy, called Operation Trojan Horse, should be used in Bradford and Manchester as well as Birmingham. “We have an obligation to our children to fulfil our roles and ensure these schools are run on Islamic principles,” they argue.
The papers say the first step is to identify poor-performing state schools in Muslim areas; then Salafist parents in each school are encouraged to complain that teachers are “corrupting children with sex education, teaching about homosexuals, making their children say Christian prayers and mixed swimming and sports”.
The next steps are to “parachute in” Muslim governors “to drip-feed our ideal for a Muslim school” and stir up staff to urge the council to investigate. The strategy stresses the importance of having an “English face among the staff group to make it more believable”.
Finally, anonymous letters are to be circulated to MPs, press and ministers. “All these things will work towards wearing the head down, removing their resolve and weakening their mindset so they eventually give up.”
The Sunday Times wonders if the Trojan Horse document might be a fake:
The alleged campaign was outlined in a document entitled Operation Trojan Horse which was leaked to The Sunday Times after being sent to Birmingham city council.
It was purportedly written by fundamentalists who wanted head teachers forced out of their jobs by Muslim parents and governors if they opposed changes to “sex education, teaching about homosexuals, making their children say Christian prayers and mixed swimming and sports”.
While a number of factual inaccuracies in the Trojan Horse document have raised suspicions that it could be a hoax, the new letter says: “Not sure where the Trojan Horse document has originated from, but all contents are true and accurate and have been going on for the last two-three years gradually.”
Several sources last week offered a theory that the Trojan Horse document had in fact been drawn up by people opposed to more Islamic traditions being introduced in the city’s schools. The intention of the fictitious document, they believe, was to force the council to take more seriously what they consider to be legitimate concerns.
A closer look at the Trojan Horse shows that the conspirators were working to remove a primary school headmistress who was actually dismissed 20 years ago.
The blunder undermines the authenticity of the anonymous letter. The error emerges in a passage detailing how plotters can take over schools. “The parents MUST be given direction and told not to discuss this with anyone, you only need a maximum of 4 parents to disrupt the whole school, to send in complaints, to question their child’s education and to contact their MP and local Authority,” it states. “We did this perfectly to Noshaba Hussain from Springfield School. However, the Governors reappointed her so now we have another plan in place to get her out.”
In fact, Ms Hussain was dismissed in 1994. Raghib Ahsan, a former Labour councillor for the area who went on to become chairman of governors at the school, was astonished to be told about the claim in the letter. “That’s a total lie,” he said: “We got rid of Noshaba Hussain. There was no religious issue. There was no such thing, if they are trying to take credit for it I was Sparkhill councillor at that time.”
Press reports from the 1990s described how a petition by 50 parents was sent to the council, organised by Mr Ahsan, who has since become a lawyer.He was concerned as to whether she was qualified for the post. Parents were unhappy because she had no previous paid experience teaching primary pupils. She was removed when education chiefs found inaccuracies on her application form, the Local Government Chronicle reported.
What the hell is going on in Birmingham? The Trojan Horse document is clearly a fake.
This incident also suggests all is not as it should be in the city:
In extensive interviews with The Sunday Telegraph, more than a dozen sources disclosed how children at one supposedly non-religious primary school, Oldknow, were led in anti-Christian chanting by one of their teachers at assembly.
The school also conducts weekly Friday prayers, has organised at least three school trips to Mecca subsidised from public funds, and requires all pupils to learn Arabic — almost unheard of at a primary school. It also runs its own madrassah, or religious school. Oldknow’s highly successful non-Muslim head teacher has been driven from her post for resisting this “Islamising agenda”, this newspaper has learnt.
And:
Matters came to a head, three separate sources said, last December when all the normal Christmas activity, including a tree, cards and the pantomime, was cancelled because it was considered un-Islamic, and the school’s Arabic teacher, Asif Khan, delivered an assembly “ridiculing” Christian beliefs. “It was like a rally,” said one person present. “He was leading them in chants of, ‘Do we believe in Christmas? No! Do we give out Christmas cards? No! The seven days of Christmas, they [Christians] can’t even count!’
Adults are utter berks, aren’t they. Why should adults who hold traditional, anti-gay views not pass on their moronic bigotry to the next generation through schools? Why should they be prevented from doing so? What about parental rights and autonomy? What about equality?
These parents who want to control what their children think so that they agree on all things could send their offspring to faith schools. Freedom of religion is sacrosanct. The religious people must be free to hold and promote certain beliefs. At faith schools they can follow the old books to the letter.
But why can’t they do so at state schools, too? Why must religion be left at the door when the state gets involved? Which intolerant orthodoxy are the children being taught? Why must the classroom be censored and not open to debate and discussion?
Mr Moffat wasn’t sacked. He resigned as part of what seems to be a toxic row between the intolerant religionists and the intolerant liberals who want to change them.
The only victims here are the children being taught that some kind of CHIPS in their lunch boxes are fine, and many adults are fools.
Posted: 7th, April 2014 | In: Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
