Monthly Archives: May 2017

It has often been pointed out that the real threat to the West is not Islamic violence, the Hoy War ‘Jihad’,  but the cultural Jihad in which Islam slowly builds a dominant position through a process of demographic change, population increase, the cultural cringe of those afraid to ‘offend’ and not stand up for their own values and culture, a fear of the ‘native’ Establishment of being called racist/Islamophobic and thus refusing to challenge Muslim behaviour as well as granting special, favoured status upon Muslims….ala Rochdale or Rotherham or where they are promoted to positions, such as the Chair of the Tory Party, that are only given because of the supposed need to appease and placate the Muslim ‘community’.  Then there is the practice of Muslim lawfare and media Jihad where Muslim activists launch endless legal challenges to any laws or regulations or inhibitions placed upon them that restrict their desire to practice their religion completely as they like as well as an orchestrated campaign of intimidation against media organisations in order to scare them into not publishing or broadcasting anything that reflects badly on Islam and Muslims.

Today we have a classic example as the Muslim Council of Britain launch a complaint at the BBC for daring to allow Douglas Murray onto the airwaves (H/T Pounce)…

Yet again it is the Daily Politics, Jo Coburn this time, the female Andrew Neil, that asks the hard and ‘controversial’ [for the BBC] questions.

The MCB naturally doesn’t complain about the airwaves being filled with a relentless stream of pro-Islam programmes from the BBC or the more usual constant reassurances the BBC serves up about the ‘religion of peace’ as well as the excuses and downplaying of Islamically inspired terrorism and the support for the Islamist narrative that Muslims are victims of the West and that all the problems in the Middle East  and further field [Manchester] can be traced back to ‘duplicitous British’ activities over the last century…as Jeremy Bowen tells us.

As Boris said medieval ‘Islam’, not violent Jihad, may well be the actual problem…incompatible as it is with Western, progressive, liberal values.

Sara Khan demonstrates the problem…she’s not violent, she’s not ‘radical’, she in fact campaigns against such things…an yet…and yet…she still adheres strongly to the ‘Faith’….a faith that has some extraordinarily unpleasant and violent commands which just aren’t part of other religions.  Does she consider herself Muslim first or British?  An important consideration and test of identity when it comes to foreign policy….do you oppose ‘British’ foreign policy because it, in your opinion, impacts badly upon Muslim countries…and oppose it solely on the basis of those countries being Muslim?  You have chosen your dominant identity then…Muslim first…your loyalty is to the ‘Ummah’ not Britain.  Which could be a problem.

The BBC’s programme ‘Muslims Like Us’ was very instructive and showed the reality….even the ‘westernised’ Muslims were Muslim first and held strong views antagonistic to British foreign policy and culture…. ‘British values for me are colonialism, institutional racism and theft, and genocide.’  What it also showed was how a minority of extremists could dominate the community as the less ‘radical’ and less determined backed away from confrontation and let the radicals dominate and control the house.

The programme of course wasn’t meant to develop like that…as I’ve said before...’Far from turning people’s perceptions about Islam and Muslims on their heads this programme just reinforces them’…..It shone a light, unexpectedly I’m sure, onto some dark secrets that need to be discussed….and that’s where the likes of Douglas Murray come in saying the ‘unsayable’ unless the MCB gets their way.

From the Spectator…Douglas Murray and Haras Rafiq [not Mehdi Hasan as in the photo]….note Rafiq saying the problem stems from within those Muslim ‘community leaders’ and groups who have access to the ‘Establishment’ and thus have the influence to ensure the narrative is theirs, and who are homophobic, anti-semitic, who create the victim mentality, the otherisation…it is not Al Qaeda or ISIS that radicalises Muslims, they merely tip over the edge Muslims who are under the sway of those ‘community leaders’ who thrive on identity politics, those who create the ‘prism’ that so many Muslims see the world through such as the West is bad and the cause of all the Muslim world’s problems..and ISIS says ‘thankyou very much’….which is pretty much what  we’ve said and urged the BBC to consider…the root cause is ‘Islam’ and the values it instils and the identity and loyalty it creates…not all Muslims are terrorists but most terrorists right now are Muslim…because of that command in the Koran to ‘defend’ Islam and the false belief that Islam is under attack.

‘You are the few, we are the many’

Corbyn is extremely sinister…anyone who adopts that quiet, steady, repressed tone of voice, that way of speaking. is hiding a lot…..it’s a mask…..curious how many people fall for it and believe Corbyn is a ‘nice’ person…..(H/T Sue at Is the BBC biased? for the video)…..

My recommendation?……

 

Boris told us that terrorism in the UK was due to Islam…he said this in the same article that Corbyn’s fans use to defend Corbyn’s policy of outsourcing Britain’s foreign policy to Al Qaeda or its branch office IS…naturally that part of the article does not get quoted.

Corbyn and his supporters, the BBC as well, claim the Iraq War was the catalyst for British Muslims to become radicalised and that we should therefore alter our foreign policy to suit these terrorists…they use the words of ex-MI5 chief, Eliza Manningham-Buller, to back them up as she made the assessment that the Iraq War did give British Muslims a pretext to attack Britain.  What the likes of Corbyn don’t say is that that pretex was based upon an entirely false narrative…that the West was  attacking Islam completey ignoring the reality that Saddam was a secular dictator that nearly all Iraqis wanted removed. [and most Iraqis hate the foreign Jihadis who have invaded their country…they like Sykes-Picot thanks very much] They also conveniently forget to mention that Manningham-Buller made no judgement on the rights and wrongs of going to war, merely warning government of a potential threat….a threat which she said did not mean we should change our behaviour….something Corbyn ignores as he seeks to do just that…..

You could say that even if terrorism increases, that shouldn’t stop you doing what you believe, as the government believed, to be right.

She also stated that even if we had not gone to war it is likely we would have been targeted anyway as looking on ‘favourably’ at a US invasion of Iraq…

I think even if we had supported the United States in sentiment but not militarily, we would still have been seen as supporters so it probably wouldn’t have altered it.

She states the obvious about the root cause…Islam…and the narrative of Muslims under attack…and of course that it pre-dated not just 2003 but 9/11 as well….back to the 1990’s….

A few among a generation who saw our involvement in Iraq, on top of our involvement in Afghanistan, as being an attack on Islam.   An increasing number of  British-born individuals living and brought up in this  country, some of them third generation, who were attracted to the ideology of Osama bin Laden and saw the west’s activities in Iraq and Afghanistan as threatening their fellow religionists and the Muslim world.

It is part of what we call the single narrative, which is the view of some that everything the west was doing was part of a fundamental hostility to the Muslim world and to Islam, of which manifestations were Iraq and Afghanistan, but which pre-dated those because it pre-dated 9/11, but it was enhanced by those events.

It is important to say that threat from Al-Qaeda did not begin at 9/11.  My Service was already engaged in concern about the threat posed by Al-Qaeda from the late — mid- to late 1990s; after all the fatwa by Fawwaz from Osama bin Laden was issued in London in 1996.  We had various operations at that time, some of which had connections to Afghanistan, and well before 9/11 we were anxious and worried and doing investigations.   We were far from relaxed about the threat from Al Qaeda, which again, if I can refer to that open document, said back in 2001 the UK was a target.  There was increasing information around the world of that.

Now of course the narrative is that the Iraq War caused terrorism in the UK…but again that’s not true….in 2000 British Muslims were arrested and jailed for a plot…and plenty of Muslims were being ‘radicalised’ in the UK pre-2003….Siddiq Khan of 7/7 infamy was radicalised before the war.

 We had had a operation to which David Omand referred in his evidence, which was a case in Birmingham in 2000,   where we retrieved and prevented the detonation of a large bomb.  David Omand said he thought that was  related to Al-Qaeda.  That was the case at the time I thought I retired.  We now think, I gather from my colleagues, it probably wasn’t.  But those were British citizens of Bangladeshi origin planning an attack.

Certainly the Iraq War was used by Al Qaeda as propaganda, helping them create a narrative of Islam under attack, but that is a narrative that should be easy to dispel.  However it was one adopted enthusiastically by many, including the BBC, who added fuel to the fire by claiming we went to war on a lie.

The BBC has run an anti-Iraq War campaign from the start, it was John Humphrys and Andrew Gilligan on the Today show that really gave an impetus to the terrorist narrative though as they falsely declared that Tony Blair had lied in the Iraq Dossier and thus Humphrys and Co gave the terrorists a pretext to attack us.

The BBC has maintained that attack after being brought to heel, Greg Dykes removed from office and the Gilligan/Humphrys story shown to be false, fake news, very dangerous fake news.  The BBC has never forgiven this chastisement and has spent the last decade rewriting history so that now you will hear BBC presenters telling us that ‘Blair lied’ without any thought that they are themselves lying.

We had Marr yesterday adding Libya into the mix blaming Cameron for the terrorist attack in Manchester and going  on to attack May for having the nerve to criticise Corbyn’s speech on foreign policy…a narrative Marr himself supports as his words on Libya show.

‘And of course it has to be said Libya collapsed into a failed state on David Cameron’s watch.  It was our intervention there that knocked out the Gaddafi regime and unfortunately left a failed state.’

[on May’s criticism of Corbyn]

‘It’s very difficult to accuse someone in the middle of an election after Manchester of supporting terrorism…it’s a matter of good taste, what’s appropriate and reasonable to say is hard for people to get right.’

Eliza Manningham-Buller gives us a more rounded picture...the threat eminates from around the world due to a huge number of ’causes’….no matter what you do or don’t do they will find an excuse, a ‘pretext’, to blame and attack you…

There has been much speculation about what motivates young men and women to carry out acts of terrorism in the UK. My Service needs to understand the motivations behind terrorism to succeed in countering it, as far as that is possible. Al-Qaida has developed an ideology which claims that Islam is under attack, and needs to be defended.

This is a powerful narrative that weaves together conflicts from across the globe, presenting the West’s response to varied and complex issues, from long-standing disputes such as Israel/Palestine and Kashmir to more recent events as evidence of an across-the-board determination to undermine and humiliate Islam worldwide. Afghanistan, the Balkans, Chechnya, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Kashmir and Lebanon are regularly cited by those who advocate terrorist violence as illustrating what they allege is Western hostility to Islam.

The video wills of British suicide bombers make it clear that they are motivated by perceived worldwide and long-standing injustices against Muslims; an extreme and minority interpretation of Islam promoted by some preachers and people of influence; and their interpretation as anti-Muslim of UK foreign policy, in particular the UK’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

Then we have the other defence of Corbyn…the fine words of Boris Johnson in the Spectator in 2005….what those who quote him do not do, for obvious reasons when you see his article complete, is to provide a link to that article so that you can judge his words in the round, something that would give a completely different picture of what he intended to say….from the Guardian’s report….

Yes he said:

“Isn’t it possible that things like the Iraq war did not create the problem of murderous Islamic fundamentalists, though the war has unquestionably sharpened the resentments felt by such people in this country and given them a new pretext?”

And:

‘the Iraq war did not introduce the poison into our bloodstream but, yes, the war did help to potentiate that poison. It is difficult to deny that they have a point, the ‘told-you-so’ brigade.”

But note how, in this case C4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy, dodges the two big stand-out points in the first quote….that the Iraq War did not create the problem of murderous Islamic fundamentalists and that the Iraq war merely gave those who wanted to attack Britain a ‘pretext’..that’s a pretext, not a credible, authentic, rational, informed reason.  Yes the war may have stirred up the anger, but was it reasonable or rational anger?  No says Boris, not ‘noticed’ conveniently by those who partially quote him….

To the paranoid Muslim mind, the evident bogusness of the ‘war on terror’ — in so far as it applied to Iraq — suggested that the war was really about something else: about oil, about humiliating and dominating the Islamic world; and because they make no separation between religion and politics, the bogus ‘war on terror’ seemed to imply an undeclared war on Islam.

The ‘paranoid Muslim mind’?  Hardly gives the impression that Boris thinks they are making rational, informed decisions…more that they are the subject of hardcore anti-western propaganda…a lot coming from the left-wing media itself…such as the BBC.

That second quote misses out the first part of the paragraph which indicates Boris has his doubts about the theory..

In groping to understand, the pundits and the politicians have clutched first at Iraq, and the idea that this is ‘blowback’, the inevitable punishment for Britain’s part in the Pentagon’s fiasco. George Galloway began it in Parliament; he was followed by Sir Max Hastings, with the Lib Dems limping in the rear. It is difficult to deny that they have a point, the Told-You-So brigade.

‘Difficult to deny’ but possible in truth.

And why miss this out?:

Supporters of the war have retorted that Iraq cannot be said to be a whole and sufficient explanation for the existence of suicidal Islamic cells in the West, and they, too, have a point. The threat from Islamicist nutters preceded 9/11; they bombed the Paris Métro in the 1990s; and it is evident that the threat to British lives pre-dates the Iraq war, when you think that roughly the same number of Britons died in the World Trade Center as died in last week’s bombings.

What do these folks want? Do they really want British troops out of Iraq, when most people I met in Baghdad secretly or openly want them to stay and help fight the insurgency?  There are plenty of people in Iraq who think Britain did a wonderful thing in helping to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and it is still too early to reach a final verdict on the success of the Iraq war. 

There’s absolutely no doubt why they miss the last bit out…it says the real problem is Islam and the Muslim community’s ghettoisation….

We have a serious and long-term security problem, not in Iraq but in this country, among young men who speak with Yorkshire accents. This is a cultural calamity that will take decades to correct.

We — non-Muslims — cannot solve the problem; we cannot brainwash them out of their fundamentalist beliefs. The Islamicists last week horribly and irrefutably asserted the supreme importance of that faith, overriding all worldly considerations, and it will take a huge effort of courage and skill to win round the many thousands of British Muslims who are in a similar state of alienation, and to make them see that their faith must be compatible with British values and with loyalty to Britain. That means disposing of the first taboo, and accepting that the problem is Islam. Islam is the problem.

To any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia — fear of Islam — seems a natural reaction, and, indeed, exactly what that text is intended to provoke. Judged purely on its scripture — to say nothing of what is preached in the mosques — it is the most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers. As the killer of Theo Van Gogh told his victim’s mother this week in a Dutch courtroom, he could not care for her, could not sympathise, because she was not a Muslim.

The trouble with this disgusting arrogance and condescension is that it is widely supported in Koranic texts, and we look in vain for the enlightened Islamic teachers and preachers who will begin the process of reform. What is going on in these mosques and madrasas? When is someone going to get 18th century on Islam’s mediaeval ass?

Here you go, a brand new Open Thread to start the week. Detail the bias here!

What magic is this?  So glamorous…the new Jacqui Smith……

Apart from the BBC not seeming to get enough of Jacqui Smith at the moment what else was on Marr?

Marr’s paper review had the above mentioned Smith, and the Trump hating BBC journo Jon Sopel, and ex-BBC PR guru for the liberal ‘Tory’ pro-EU Cameron, Craig Oliver….so none likely to be onside for May…and indeed not…and of course Sopel just put the boot into Trump not forgetting a gratuitous dig about his ‘machoness’.  Smith spent her time attacking May on social care so not really a paper review but a political broadcast on behalf of Labour from her.

Marr was on hand to help her with that as he promoted Corbyn’s message about Western intervention causing the deaths in Manchester saying…

‘And of course it has to be said Libya collapsed into a failed state on David Cameron’s watch.  It was our intervention there that knocked out the Gaddafi regime and unfortunately left a failed state.’

…which led to an angry Libyan heritage man to bomb a pop concert targeting mostly young girls….all the Tories’ fault.

Except no…it bloody well wasn’t.  Marr is so caught up in the BBC’s narrative of Western intervention that he can’t even read the news and put the facts together into a coherent whole.

Abedi’s family fled Libya to get away from Gaddafi…they returned to Libya along with Abedi to fight against Gaddafi with the help of that ‘Western intervention’….an intervention directed by the United Nations….action to prevent a massacre that if it had been allowed to happen the BBC would have been making outraged films about, using a Muslim extremist as the presenter just as they did with Srebrenica [and getting that completely wrong…failing to  mention the Muslim fighters were killed because they had been massacring Christians in the surrounding villages] telling us how we had stood by as ‘Muslims’ were massacred once again.

So we helped to fulfil the wishes of Abedi and his family…Gaddafi gone.  How then does this feed into the BBC’s narrative that Western intervention in Libya caused the bomb attack in Manchester?

Marr is talking complete rubbish, dangerous rubbish as he peddles what is not just Corbyn’s line but the terrorist line as well.

He goes on talking rubbish, highly partisan rubbish.  Naturally he doesn’t criticise Corbyn for linking ‘Western intervention’ to terrorism, he himself did just that, he instead targets May and says it is inappropriate and tasteless for her to criticise Corbyn and his own very close ties to and support for terrorists…

‘It’s very difficult to accuse someone in the middle of an election after Manchester of supporting terrorism…it’s a matter of good taste, what’s appropriate and reasonable to say is hard for people to get right.’

Really?  Really?  Are you f**king kidding me?  It’s bad taste to draw attention to the close links a man who wants to be Prime Minister has to terrorists?  It is inappropriate to draw attention to the fact that he thinks the IRA were honourable freedom fighters, that he praises Islamic terrorists, that he wants to hold negotiations with ISIS?  Is there no more appropriate time than after a terrorist attack to state the bleeding obvious about him and what he will do to the country and national security and to point out the absolute lies he tells as he grandstands with feigned outrage…outrage he never expressed towards the IRA or Hamas or Hezbollah as they tried to murder their way to victory?

Red Andy lives.  Twenty two young people don’t any more.  Part of the reason they don’t is the false narrative spread by the likes of Red Andy that excuses and cheerleads for the Islamic terrorists.

So desperate are the BBC to mock and malign Trump they get it wrong yet again…

A short clip that sums up this G7 summit: look who has chosen not to hear a translation of his Italian host's speech #G6 pic.twitter.com/6pXbBlfvof

— James Landale (@BBCJLandale) May 27, 2017

You can see the small earpiece behind the glass…

Emma Barnett is name-checked in this video but her attitude is endemic and institutional throughout the BBC in regard towards ‘Fake news’.  The BBC has a huge vested interest in generating the impression that ‘fake news’ is a massive problem…..the BBC is trying to consolidate and reinforce its position as the dominant news provider suggesting only it can be trusted as the disseminator of accurate, trusted and impartial news. [Amused to hear George Osborne have a sly dig at the BBC yesterday on Nick Robinson’s show as he suggested the BBC was of course impartial….‘in its charter’...not in real life then?]  To do this it has to convince politicians and the public that fake news is out there, a massive conspiracy  by people out to make money, by sinister right-wing groups and by State enemies of ‘democracy’…such as Russia who seek to undermine our national interests.

The BBC of course has already had one crack at smashing its political and commercial rivals with its unchecked support for Leveson…it now seeks to promote further clamp downs on websites and the likes of Facebook and Google who are becoming evermore the preferred means of absorbing news and culture.

As said in the video it is often those who complain about fake news the most who are the biggest disseminators of it….that’ll be the BBC and the Guardian then.

The BBC’s biggest fake news story of late is what it doesn’t tell you about Corbyn.

Imagine if he’d said ‘I am happy to commemorate the young Muslim who died fighting for an ethical British foreign policy.’

Not hard to imagine….because that is what he did say in effect as he stood before us just days after 22 young people were slaughtered at a pop concert because they were not Muslim, saying how he would change British foreign policy to reflect the vews of Muslims like our bomber ‘friend’.

Perhaps because Emma Barnett is Jewish she feels she cannot criticise any element of Islam especially when events as happened in Manchester this week unfold.  Or, perhaps it is because she has imbibed the BBC ethos not to criticise Islam unduly.

Laughably she held court over a discussion this week on her programme that suggested what we need is action….and indeed she has doubled up on that by writing something similar in the Times today entitled…‘My grieving city is built on grit – but sees little of it in the powerful’.  Reading the article you will find no real analsyis, no thoughts on the real cause of the problem other than that Manchester is tough and craves ‘action’.

This is the Emma Barnett who sided with Corbyn when he decided that the best approach is to appease Muslim sentiment and bow down to the bombers….he will change foreign policy, and no doubt domestic policy towards Islam, in order to suit Muslims who oppose that foreign policy…and who threaten us with ‘angry and alienated’ Muslim youth should we not comply.

And so Barnett complains that the ‘powerful’ have no grit to deal with the problem and yet she backs the one who abjectly surrenders to the threat.  She opened her programme with talk of Emmeline Pankhurst and how Manchester had ‘marked a sea change’…..ridiculous to proudly parade the feminist Emmeline Pankhurst and not say why she is important in the context of an Islamic attack on what were mainly young women enjoying themselves, and as for a ‘sea change’…a sea change in what?  In attitudes towards Islam, or how to deal with potential terrorists?  She doesn’t say.

What will she make of a Muslim calling for internment camps?

7/7 Met police chief calls for extremists to be locked up in INTERNMENT camps as he says MI5 and police cannot keep track of 3,000 terror suspects

Are we at war?

Macron in the French election debate used this line against Le Pen..‘the greatest wish of the terrorists is that Madame Le Pen takes power in France…because they are looking for the radicalisation, the division, the civil war that you bring to this country.’

Trouble is it is the Establishment politicians like him who cower and surrender in the face of bombs and blackmail who have created the civil war, their policies of mass immigration of people who hold radically different beliefs and values to Europeans have created the divisions that tear Europe apart now.  Le Pen might have had the answers and the guts, Macron has grand words and nothing else….just as our own politicians and media have as well.

You can see the problem vividly exposed in the video below…again it’s left to Andrew Neil to ask the difficult question such as ‘what lessons have we failed to learn?‘…with Hazel Blears refusing to put the blame where it belongs….and Douglas Murray suggesting we control immigration to stamp down on this problem.

Blears talks of a threadbare, worthless ideolgy, saying ‘we’ve tackled Nazism and Fascism, we need the same determination to defeat this ideology’...Neil suggests it was ‘total war’ that defeated those ideologies…Blears said she wouldn’t contemplate that of course……hmmmm…. it would help to  identify that ‘threadbare, worthless ideology’….is it the violence or the religion she is concerned with?…Murray says it comes from the religion…….he also says that there is a complete disconnect from what politicians think is the problem and what the Public across Europe recognise as the real problem…immigration.

Blears says it is essential to have critical thinking to tackle the ideology, lol…and then attacks Murray saying that his rhetoric, ie his critical thinking,  upsets Muslims and inflames the situation….note the counter-terror officer rebuts Blears line that the Muslim community’s attitude is not part of the problem…..

Who was right…The EDL’s Tommy Robinson who argued we had to combat Islamic extremism or Lord Hall whose organisation worked relentlessly to cover up and excuse that extremism and present it as a ‘normal’ British way of life whilst vilifying and demonising Robinson?

Nothing ‘normal’ about this attack on the British way of life…..

These are some of the Muslim practices that the ‘moderate’ and most representative Muslim organisation in Britain, the MCB, demanded in 2007 that schools adopt in what turned out to be its ‘blueprint’ for the Trojan Horse plot…it’s based around blackmail…adopt Muslim practice or Muslims will become alienated and, left unspoken, the threat is…they will become radicalised….music is the devil’s work….Manchester was chosen because of its cultural implications…young people out freely enjoying themselves, boys and girls together enjoying a music concert…it’s not just violent extremists who object…..Muslims should not give up or compromise any of their beilefs or values…it is for the British to do that….

Failure to recognise and affirm, or even worse the creation of situations involving conflicts of belief or conscience is likely to have an alienating effect where pupils may feel that they are not valued and may give rise to inappropriate assumptions that in order to progress in society they will have to compromise or give up aspects of who they are, and their religious beliefs and values.

Schools are asked to respect these views and principles, which are held sincerely on the grounds of conscience, and to honour parents’ wishes by not placing pupils in situations of religious and moral compromise.
Whilst Muslims have no wish to constrain the freedom of others, they would urge schools to organise and manage physical education so that pupils can choose other acceptable forms of activity, for example, athletics, games, gymnastics, outdoor and adventurous activities and swimming within the curriculum.

“All forms of music that may include the use of obscene and blasphemous language, encourage or promote immoral behaviour, arouse lustful feelings, encourage the consumption of intoxicants and drugs or contain unethical and un-Islamic lyrics would be considered objectionable. For this reason some Muslim parents may express concerns in the way music is taught in school and the extent to which their children may participate in it. Some Muslims may hold a very conservative attitude towards music and may seek to avoid it altogether, not wishing their children to participate in school music lessons. In such cases the school can show great understanding by providing alternative musical learning opportunities.”

It is also important, in schools where there are no Muslims, for all pupils to learn about Islam.

It is not permissible for Muslims to actively participate in non-Islamic acts of worship.

Girls should be covered except for their hands and faces, a concept known as ‘hijab’.

The most suitable sportswear for boys and girls that respects the requirements of Islamic
modesty is a tracksuit and in addition for girls a headscarf tied in a safe and secure manner.

Any decision by Muslim pupils to manifest their religion by growing a beard should be respected by their school.

School makes arrangements for their Muslim pupils who wish to perform daily prayers in school.

School allocates a regular place for the daily prayers that fall within school time.

School ensures washing facilities are available, preferably in close proximity to the prayer area.

School builds or adapts a washing facility in the toilet areas where pupils can conveniently make ablution which includes washing of the feet.

Schools can recognise and celebrate the Eid festivals by highlighting the importance of the
message of Eid through collective worship and assemblies. Schools may want to share sweets amongst all children to mark this event. In addition, schools may make the normal school meals a special Eid meal for all the children

Some sports involve physical contact with other team players, for example basketball and football.   Most Muslim parents would find it objectionable for boys and girls to play such sports in mixedgender groups.  Schools can respond positively to this concern by making sure that contact sports are always in single-gender groups.

Given the choice between mixed or single-sex swimming, Muslim parents would always opt for a wholly single-sex environment for swimming.

Dance is one of the activity areas of the national curriculum for physical education. Muslims
consider that most dance activities, as practised in the curriculum, are not consistent with
the Islamic requirements for modesty as they may involve sexual connotations and messages
when performed within mixed-gender groups or if performed in front of mixed audiences.

Sex and relationship education (SRE) is taught in single-sex groups, by a teacher of the same gender.

The use of sexually explicit videos, pictures and objects are avoided as aids for the teaching of SRE.

School takes account of Muslim sensitivities and sensibilities with respect to sexual morality and includes Islamic moral perspectives when teaching SRE to Muslim pupils.

Schools should consider giving Muslim pupils the opportunity to study Arabic and/or
other languages relevant to their family background.

Wonder if she has any views on Brexit.

Oh…here’s the youthful Diane Abbott…