The government officials allegedly asked 10-year-old students what lesbians “did.”
Another bureaucrat queried a young boy on what a Muslim was.
And, apparently, they didn’t get the answers they wanted.
Because one Christian school is now being actively monitored by the state — and another is going to be shut down.
The latter is the Durham Free School in Gilesgate, County Durham, United Kingdom, where government inspectors labeled the pupils “bigots,” branded the institution “an educational failure, and said some children displayed ‘discriminatory views’ toward people of other faiths,” reports the Daily Mail. The school’s known “trespass”?
The answer offered by the earlier referenced boy — one lad, a 12-year-old — who was asked about Muslims “apparently included a reference to terrorism,” the Mail also writes.
The school at which the lesbian question was asked, Grindon Hall Christian School in Sunderland, U.K., was put into “special measures” (government monitoring and control of curriculum) after, among other things, inspectors labeled the students “intolerant.”
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The teachers at these institutions say their students were performing well academically; the government says otherwise. But cultural trends and the imperatives of political expediency say there’s far, far more to the story.
Teachers at Durham Free said that the verdict against them, writes the Mail, “was grossly unfair and based on a throwaway and ignorant comment made by a single pupil. They said the school’s Christian ethos made it an easy target for officials who wanted to show they were promoting the Government’s diversity agenda.” Chris Gray, principal of Grindon Hall, echoed this sentiment, the paper also reported, saying “It is now well known that the manner in which inspectors questioned our pupils in November was hostile, inappropriate and raises serious safeguarding issues. Ofsted’s [Office for Standards in Education’s] approach to us was negative at every stage, as if the data collected had to fit a predetermined outcome.”
Why might that outcome have been predetermined? There is, of course, the anti-Christian bias prevailing in today’s often militantly secular Western governments. But what explains the focus on these Christian schools at this particular time? To understand a likely reason, we have to explore two seemingly unrelated events: the U.K.’s recent “Trojan horse” (TH) scandal and what I’ll call “Trojan horse II” (THII), and the 2009 banning of talk-show host Michael Savage from Britain.
A conspiracy was uncovered last year whose goal was the Islamization of a number of U.K. schools in Birmingham (TH); sometime later, a similar effort in London (THII) was exposed. As the Daily Mail reported in November on THII, the problems were severe enough so that “youngsters were being taught a narrow curriculum which often focused only on the Islamic faith and culture”; some students were using a “Facebook page to post references to [radical] Sheikh Omar Suleiman”; one five-year-old “told inspectors he would ‘go to hell’ if he did music or dance”; and other pupils, “when talking about Sharia law and English law, were unable to tell inspectors which laws they should follow and which were more important.”
As a result, at least a couple of these Islam-oriented schools were temporarily closed, and some offending headmasters and teachers were suspended, fired, or banned from education altogether. Also know that the TH problem was long ignored because, as a Birmingham public official admitted, education staff had “fear of being accused of racism.” This fact’s relevance will soon become apparent.
Now we come to the woes of radio giant and raconteur Michael Savage. When reporting on his banning from Britain, in which he was placed on a no-entry list with Muslim extremists, the Mail wrote in 2009, “Mr Savage … claimed his name had been ‘plucked out of a hat’ because he was ‘controversial and white.’”
Conspiracy fiction?
Paranoia?
Well, consider that the paper then told us, reporting on “correspondence released under Freedom of Information legislation”:
One message, sent by an unidentified Home Office official on November 27 last year [2008], said that “with Weiner [Savage’s birth name], I can understand that disclosure of the decision would help provide a balance of types of exclusion cases”.
The documents include a draft recommendation, marked “Restricted”, saying: “We will want to ensure that the names disclosed reflect the broad range of cases and are not all Islamic extremists.”
…[These] [e]mails written by Home Office officials privately acknowledged the ban on Mr Savage would provide “balance” to a list dominated by Muslims.
Put simply, politically correct U.K. officials had a “fear” that banning only Muslim-jihadist types — which would be thoroughly justified — could bring charges of “racism.” So they needed a white, non-Muslim sacrificial lamb whose presence could slaughter that accusation.
This brings us back to the schools. If U.K. officials’ “fear of being accused of racism” was intense enough to cause them to ignore TH in the first place, wouldn’t it also be intense enough to make a focus on only Muslim-oriented institutions unlikely — even if that surgical scrutiny is wholly warranted? Is it unreasonable to think that, reflecting the savaging of Savage (who is Jewish), they’d want to take some Christian educational scalps to prove how “fair” they are?
Of course, British officials would surely say they’re simply being fair. In the case of THII, they accused schools of breeding students who lacked “understanding of the fundamental British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance,” as the Mail reported this past November. And in the cases of the Christian schools, they’re being held to a “requirement to promote British values such as tolerance, fairness, respect for other faiths and the rule of law and democracy,” as the Mail reported this past Tuesday. Similar words, similar punishments.
But are the trespasses really similar? Note that the above values requirement was instituted precisely because of the Trojan horse scandal — not because of anything a Christian school did. And is a Christian institution that doesn’t teach about Muslims (which should be contrary to its mission, anyway) really the equivalent of a Muslim one that casts Sharia as pre-eminent? The U.K. government’s “un-Fox” approach — balanced but unfair — certainly lends credence to the aforementioned Christian educator’s claim that officials simply “wanted to show they were promoting the Government’s diversity agenda.”
Of course, one thing the British government certainly is consistent about is the application of its sexual-heresy agenda. As the Telegraph wrote in October, there also were “complaints from orthodox Jewish schools about recent inspections in which girls from strict traditional backgrounds were allegedly asked whether they were being taught enough about lesbianism, whether they had boyfriends and if they knew where babies came from.” And this raises the question: What are these vaunted “British values,” anyway?
If a country that rose to hegemony and saw its heyday as a Christian civilization finds Christian teaching so contrary to “British values,” then of what value are those values?
