RUTHFULLY YOURS

Britain’s educational authorities also failed to note the underlying message of the Teacher Handbook: that jihadist violence is justified when committed by those who believe themselves to be victims. This is a crucial point: it accepts at face value what might only be many Muslims’ perception of “victimhood.”

Despite the Teacher Handbook’s questionable attempts to align Islam with secular, Western principles such as human rights, fundamental British values are undermined by the very content of theTeacher Handbook.

No amount of Western appeasement can counter jihad, which is, as openly admitted, a global expansionist project.

Many religious texts have violent verses, but in Islam people still live by them.

Sweeping reforms in Britain’s education system are having an unintended dangerous consequence: the infiltration of extremist Muslim influence on the teaching of Religious Studies.

This influence is visible in The Oxford Teacher Handbook for GCSE Islam, authored by a small team of educational specialists and Muslim community leaders. The purpose of the manual is to guide British teachers lacking in-depth knowledge of Islam to help their students pass the Religious Studies General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), the UK’s public examination for pupils at the end of Grade 11. This academic study of religions is an optional but relatively popular subject in British high schools — 322,910 students took the examination in 2017, out of a total GCSE cohort in all subjects of 3,694,771.

The understanding of Islam — absorbed by a significant proportion of each year’s 300,000+ Religious Studies students (whose school chooses to take the Islam module) — is sufficient to create a national climate of opinion, given that the GCSE is a near-essential first stepping-stone to higher education and influential professions in British public life. It is therefore alarming that a portion of such influence has been granted to the Islamic scholar and activist, Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra, a co-author of the Teacher Handbook, who oversaw his fellow authors’ contributions.

“Why hasn’t any ‘kind-hearted’ anti-Assad Arab state (e.g. Saudi) taken any Syrian refugees? Shouldn’t countries that spent billions on arming militants (including terrorists) in the name of ‘liberating’ Syrians take refugees in? The only Syrian refugees that got attention in the Gulf states are the vulnerable underage girls they bought in the name of marriage.” — Dr. Abbas Kadhim.

“Why not bring Christians and Yazidis from the Muslim world here first?… Finally, why not bring Muslim girls and women who are already in flight from honor-based violence, including from honor killing, here next — before we extend visas, green cards and asylum to Muslim boys and men?” — Professor Phyllis Chesler.

“It is ironic that millions of Muslims are trying… to reach the borders of a civilization they have historically blamed for all the world’s evils… is it ‘Islamophobic’ to point out that there is no war in Greece, Serbia, Hungary, or Austria?” — Burak Bekdil, BESA Center for Strategic Studies.

Last month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan slammed French President Emmanuel Macron for his recent offer to mediate between Turkey and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), saying he hopes Paris will not ask Ankara to help when terrorists fleeing Iraq and Syria arrive in France:

“With this attitude, France has no right to complain about any terrorist organization, any terrorist, any terrorist attack. Those who sleep with terrorists, welcome them in their palaces, will understand sooner or later the mistake that they made.”

On April 7, hours after a man ploughed his van into pedestrians in Münster, Germany, Erdogan threatened France again, referring to the incident: :

“France, [you are] being a stooge… providing support to the terrorism, you are hosting terrorists at the Elysée Palace… You are seeing what is happening in Germany, right? The same will happen in France. The West will not able to free itself from terror. The West will sink as it feeds these terrorists.”

Writing in Politico, Paulina Neuding returns to the topic of Sweden’s crime problem and the unwillingness of the Swedish elite to admit what has been going on:

In a period of two weeks earlier this year, five explosions took place in the country. It’s not unusual these days — Swedes have grown accustomed to headlines of violent crime, witness intimidation and gangland executions. In a country long renowned for its safety, voters cite “law and order” as the most important issue ahead of the general election in September.

The topic of crime is sensitive, however, and debate about the issue in the consensus-oriented Scandinavian society is restricted by taboos.

Indeed it is, although, to be fair, those taboos are fraying fairly rapidly. Nevertheless, Sweden remains a country where, whether by law or, even more so, social convention, free speech is not quite as free as it should be. There is, to borrow a useful Swedish term, an ‘opinion corridor’ (åsiktskorridor) beyond which people are not meant to stray. Again, that corridor has widened—the fact that someone has even defined it is a measure of that—but not yet by enough.

There is also something else. To admit that there was a connection between current crime rates and what was (until recently) an extraordinarily generous immigration policy would be to admit that much of the political and media class has messed up. That is not something that such prominenti are keen to do. Thus, for example, they emphasize the fall in the murder rates. Fair enough, you might think, but…

Neuding:

To understand crime in Sweden, it’s important to note that Sweden has benefited from the West’s broad decline in deadly violence, particularly when it comes to spontaneous violence and alcohol-related killings. The overall drop in homicides has been, however, far smaller in Sweden than in neighboring countries.