Christian schools that still dare to actually teach anything slightly resembling Christianity are being attacked under the government’s new plan to promote ‘British values.’

These values do not include things like an Englishman’s castle is his home or marriage being for life, instead the Orwellian term is just shorthand for brutally enforced politically correct brainwashing.

Christian schools are being particularly singled out for their promotion of marriage and refusal to teach children that Islam is just as British as Christianity.

Bizarrely, the reason given for enforcing ‘British values’ is that it will prevent Muslims from taking schools over and radicalizing the pupils.  This comes after they were caught doing just that recently in the North of England.

So, instead of the Muslims secretly pushing all the White teachers out and replacing them with Muslims, now they can just walk straight in and indoctrinate them under the guise of ‘British values.’

One particularly successful Christian school has even been targeted by the PC inspectors for closure, after they refused to invite Muslims in to run their assemblies and teach Islam instead of Christianity.

Telegraph:

The small independent school in the Home Counties was told it is in breach of new rules intended to promote “British values” such as individual liberty and tolerance in the wake of the Trojan Horse scandal, involving infiltration by hard-line Muslim groups in Birmingham.

…

It follows 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.

In the latest case inspectors are understood to have warned the head that the school, which was previously rated as “good” that it would be downgraded to “adequate” for failing to meet standards requiring it to “actively promote” harmony between different faiths because it had failed to bring in representatives from other religions.

They warned that unless the school could demonstrate how it was going to meet the new requirements there would be a further full inspection which could ultimately lead to it being closed.

A Government consultation paper published in June, explaining the new rules, makes clear that even taking children on trips to different places of worship would not be enough to be judged compliant.

The Institute, which is already planning a legal challenge to the consultation, arguing that it was rushed through during the school holidays, fears that the new guidelines could be used to clamp down on the teaching of anything deemed politically incorrect on issues such as marriage.

“Worryingly, evidence is already emerging of how the new regulations are requiring Ofsted inspection teams to behave in ways which do not respect the religious ethos of faith schools,” Simon Calvert, deputy director of the Christian Institute, told Mrs Morgan.

“The new requirements are infringing the rights of children, parents, teachers and schools to hold and practise their religious beliefs.”

Listing recent cases involving criticism of Anglican, Roman Catholic and Jewish schools by Ofsted, he added: “The Christian Institute is currently working with an independent Christian School which has been marked down by Ofsted for not promoting other faiths.

“Astonishingly it was told it should invite representatives of other faith groups to lead assemblies and lessons, such as an Imam.

“The wording of the regulations inevitably results in these kind of outcomes.

“While we obviously support attempts to address the problem of radicalisation, the current regulations fail to do this.”

Because ‘British Values’ has now become nothing but a euphemism for Cultural Marxism.

Daily Mail:

Independent schools and academies may be forced to drop Christmas celebrations under rules designed to tackle extremists, critics warned yesterday.

They say 6,000 private schools will be compelled to adopt political correctness.

Following the Trojan Horse scandal, in which Birmingham schools came under the sway of Islamic extremists, the Education Department proposed that independent schools must ‘actively promote’ British values – said to include respect for legally ‘protected characteristics’.

Critics warn the rules will bring a series of unintended consequences, including preventing teachers from using words like husband or wife when discussing marriage; making teachers inflate the reputation of politicians in their lessons, and dictating the curriculum and exams schools must use.

They also accuse the Department for Education of setting too tight a timetable when it set up a consultation among schools over the rules. Responses to the key proposals had to be returned last week – a month before the end of the school holidays and at a time when heads are likely to be on the beach rather than answering Whitehall questionnaires.

The Independent School Standards consultation was begun in late June at the height of the Trojan Horse affair, in which a group of schools in Birmingham were found to have fallen under the sway of Islamic extremists. An inquiry found the schools segregated boys and girls, disparaged British soldiers, promoted hatred of homosexuals, and taught scepticism about responsibility for the murder of soldier Lee Rigby and the Boston bombings.

The resulting Education Department proposals say that independent schools must ‘actively promote’ British values, which are said to include respect for legally ‘protected characteristics’ such as homosexuality, religion, gender change, disability, race and marital status. They also require improved teaching standards from schools with the lowest levels of attainment.

The rules will apply to academies and free schools as well as the long-established independent sector.

A consultation paper reveals this would allow Education Secretary Nicky Morgan to take ‘regulatory action’ in cases such as where girls are ‘disadvantaged’ on grounds of gender, ‘failure to address homophobia’, or where prejudice against other faiths is ‘encouraged or not adequately challenged’.

The Christian Institute (CI) warned this may rule out Christmas events if other religions’ festivals are not celebrated to the same degree. It also fears teachers may have to avoid the words ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ when discussing marriage, so as not to discriminate against same-sex couples.

The CI’s Colin Hart said: ‘They mistakenly advance the principle that political correctness equal British values. Accordingly they could be used to punish any school in the independent sector which has a religious ethos, a set of traditional beliefs, or which does not promote every minority group’s world view.’

A HEAD teacher forced out of his school by Trojan horse extremists last night said he felt betrayed by the council which he claims did nothing to stop the plot.

The teacher broke his silence to tell of his ordeal at the hands of his own school governors.

He said the governors sought to control his inner-city school, including bringing in Islamic worship each morning.

When he objected he claims they conspired to force him out and replace him with a Muslim head.

He told the council what was happening and was offered no support. Later he was told to resign by council bosses.

Now he has decided to speak out despite being banned from discussing his ordeal after signing a compromise agreement.

Last night the teacher, who did not wish to be named, spoke of the betrayal he felt by Birmingham City Council which failed to stand up to the bullying governors at his school.

He said: “It was bullying and I told the local authority I was being bullied and they did nothing to stop it and eventually asked me to leave rather than taking action against the governors. It felt like a bit of a betrayal.”

The head first ran into difficulties with his governing body after the appointment of a new Muslim chairman.

He said: “From there on relations were never the same again and gradually went down hill.

“They would collude over meetings and would make sure to orchestrate situations where the only people present were the troublesome Muslim governors and myself so they would try to browbeat me into doing what they wanted.

“What they wanted was Islamic worship every day for all students.

“Ultimately the governors wanted the Islamifaction of the school. I am sure they wanted to get rid of me and get a new ­Muslim head teacher in.”

The head took the difficult decision to talk to the local authority and demand action be taken against the governing body.

“I spoke to the local authority numerous times and I was told that if things ever got too bad they would step in but then they didn’t and it was at that point it became clear that I was going to have to leave.”

On the day the head was asked to tender his resignation, he was under the impression the local authority was finally going to intervene.

He said: “I thought I was going to talk to the local authority about the steps they were going to take to tackle the governing body but as it turned out, they said, ‘No, you will have to resign’.”

The teacher also believes had he been free to speak up, other teachers may not have had to suffer the same ordeal.

In all, 25 schools in Birmingham have been linked with the alleged Trojan horse takeover plot. Now the former head has backed up claims made by Birmingham MP Khalid Mahmood last week that those teachers forced out of Birmingham schools could sue the council for failure in its duty of care towards them.

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In an earlier article, I mentioned Operation Trojan Horse, the plot by Muslim groups in Britain to take over Birmingham schools (see also Francis Carr Begbie’s “Britain baffled by Muslims being Muslims“) and possibly schools elsewhere. The matter has been in the news since March, when a document and an accompanying letter, written anonymously by a concerned citizen, emerged via the Birmingham City Council, which had been in possession of it for some time. The letter alerted the authorities about the existence of the plot and urged the authorities to take action. The document, discovered by the concerned citizen, provided a five point plan on how to take over schools, which the author referred to as Operation Trojan Horse.

Now that two separate government investigations have been carried out and the respective reports published, it is worth examining how the BBC has chosen to cover the issue. I focus on the BBC because its being a public service as well as a prestigious organization means it ought to provide excellent coverage.

Firstly, we must outline the plot.

 Operation Trojan Horse

 According to the BBC, the document

suggests targeting schools with a predominantly Muslim population, especially in poorer areas, before selecting a group of parents, which it describes as “hard liners”, to agitate at the school gate and in the playground and to raise questions about staff, the syllabus and teaching methods.

It goes on to say that after infiltrating the governing body, a policy of disruption should be carried out from within, until the leadership has been changed to one more sympathetic to the group’s religious views.

Trojan Horse, it says, is “totally invisible to the naked eye and allows us to operate under the radar. I have detailed the plan we have in Birmingham and how well it has worked and you will see how easy the whole process is to get the head teacher out and your own person in”.

It identifies four schools at which it claims Operation Trojan Horse had been successfully put into action. Saltley School, Adderley School, Regents Park Community School and Park View Academy.

A Park View governor, Tahir Alam, is named in the document as someone who was involved in the plot . . . Another school, Highfield, is mentioned as a potential target.

By the time the above lines were written in April, 200 separate complaints had already been made about 25 schools, all in parts of Birmingham with a 90% Muslim population.

The plotters, who espoused or sympathized with extreme Islamist views, sought to introduce an aggressive, anti-British, Islamist ethos into Birmingham schools.

The Reporting

The paragraphs excerpted above are taken from a report titled, “Operation Trojan Horse: Will We Ever Learn the Truth?”, published concurrently with the government and the Birmingham City Council launching their respective investigations.

The report is divided into five sections, titled “The ‘plot’”, “Real or fake?”, “Reaction”, “What are the inquiries looking into?” and “When will we find out the truth?”. Right off the bat, we find that the focus is kept on the different responses by the authorities, and on the various claims and counter-claims. In other words, the explosive revelations are neutralized under a blizzard of verbiage pulling in different directions, sowing doubt, and making it all seem like a wrangle between minor bureaucrats over a turbid matter. The reader is prevented from having a focused emotional response.

More importantly, the policies and conditions that made this possible—the most vital matter at hand—are not discussed.

Following the publishing of the reports, the focus has been on insubstantial differences of opinion between the different authors, and the irrelevant statements of opinion between a sampling of local authorities reacting to the findings, not on the facts that no one has disputed, even though the latter are of far greater import. What’s more, news about the investigations’ findings were not prominent in the BBC News website—to find them, one had to search.

A side by side comparison of the reports by Peter Clarke (appointed by the government) and Sir Ian Kershaw (appointed by Birmingham City Council) is presented in an effort to highlight differences. Yet, a critical reading shows that on the things that matter, the reports are in agreement.

For example, one of the differences highlighted is whether or not there was a plot. Both reports, however, agree that individuals acted with the common goal of promoting Islamic principles. It therefore seems preposterous to focus attention on whether or not the authors have chosen to call this a plot or individuals acting in concert. Isn’t one the definition of the other?

Another example involves a simple matter of interpretation. Clarke determined that

[w]hether the motivation reflects a political agenda, a deeply held religious conviction, personal gain or achieving influence within the communities, the effect has been to limit the life chances of the young people in their care and to render them vulnerable to more pernicious influences in the future.

On the other hand, Sir Ian determined that

[i]t appears that there is a genuine and understandable desire among these groups to improve the education and opportunities for Muslim pupils. The desire is often coupled with a belief that these children can only be served by Muslim leaders and teachers.

Again, is the emphasis here on what is really important? The Islamist conspirators would of course see their actions as being in the interest of the children’s education, their community, and their religion. The above paragraphs show concurrence, not divergence.

The concurrence is buried in the reports, despite efforts to hide it away. We may have to go to a separate report about a minor issue, tucked at the bottom of a longer and more substantial piece, to find that Sir Ian

did find evidence that “five steps” outlined in the original letter as a means of destabilizing school leadership were “present in a large number of the schools considered part of the investigation”.

Concurrence with the essential facts does not end with the reports. It is also reflected in the statements of those reacting to them, however immaterial.

They express themselves euphemistically — that there are “problems” in some schools. But for their own varied reasons, they have uniformly sought to deflect attention from the plot and shift the focus onto Birmingham City Council. The declarations of Labour MP Khalid Mahmood are emblematic. He

said he agreed with Mr Kershaw’s finding that identified the issue as a “minority problem” caused by a handful of disruptive governors, but said there was “still more to look at” and called for Birmingham City Council to be held to account.

The efforts to deflect go as far as reporting the admission by Council leader Sir Albert Bore that

the council failed to act for fear of being seen as racist or Islamophobic.

This fear, of course, is a legitimate matter for concern, and well worth reporting. Yet, in the context in which it is mentioned, which is a context of disagreement, differences of opinion, claim and counter-claim, the central issue is effectively neutralized, because it passes from being one about British schools being colonized by anti-British Islamists to one about a local authority’s ineffectiveness.

An interesting aspect of the reporting is that the BBC has been careful to record the opinion of Muslims who are on-message when it comes to promoting ideas of integration and the general moderateness of the majority of Muslims in Britain. This is another tactic for neutralizing the issue, for, as long as the British public sees Muslims exhibiting concern, calling for action, and talking about “integrated education” and community cohesion, the impression left is that, though there is certainly work to be done, now that the reports have come out the matter is at hand and the government and the authorities will eventually sort it out.

Nadeem Malik, UK Director of the Hazrat Sultan Bahu Trust, a registered charity that provides essential religious and pastoral services to Muslims in the United Kingdom, is filmed offering a reassuring statement:

We are sick of the negativity surrounding the city at the moment, the negative portrayal of Birmingham. There are issues, there are issues in every city. We want to be part of the solution now.

In the same video report, Khalid Mahmood appears talking about “taking the bad apples out of the community” and “making us all more cohesive”. He is presented as a critic of Birmingham City Council’s efforts at appeasing Muslims.

This scrupulousness by the BBC at having many different opinions represented in their reporting creates the impression of fairness and a lack of bias, when, in reality, they conceal a bias that is quite pronounced.

Consider that the policies and conditions that caused Birmingham City Council to think appeasing Muslims was preferable to taking action is not once challenged or discussed, even though in the face proven example of ethnic competition for power and cultural influence.

Doing so could lead to a wider and very awkward debate about multiculturalism, diversity, and immigration—all policies supported by the BBC. It could lead to tensions between communities, which nobody wants. And it could fuel support for an awkward brand of anti-establishment politics.

Taken as a whole, this is a very skillful exercise in managing the emotions of the public, when faced with an awkward incident. Hardly anyone—not even the “nationalist” political parties—have shown much excitement over the issue. We could even argue that, in this case, being boring, pedantic, overly verbal, and scrupulously fair, has been used as a weapon. The hoped-for reaction, one is tempted to speculate, is for the reader to think “yea yea blah blah blah” part-way down the main news report and navigate away to some more exciting item, such as the Malaysian Airlines jet crash, the Israeli strike on Gaza, Tulisa’s drug trial, the case of the cannibal nurse, or, even better, the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

While we can understand that there is a desire to maintain conviviality, we cannot—and should not—understand the desire to pretend that there is nothing of substance to discuss.

The head of one the Birmingham schools at the centre of the ‘Trojan Horse’ controversy has revealed that parents of Pakistani origin wanted her to “get rid of the white kids” at her school.

Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson, head teacher at Anderton Park Primary School, told the Sunday Times that when a small number of white children arrived at her school, which was predominantly Muslim, parents started making a series of racist demands:

“We had kids saying ‘What are you playing with the white kid for? What are you playing with the Christians for?’ The dad of one of the Pakistani heritage pupils at the school even told me I should ‘get rid of the white kids’.

“He said, ‘If I was head I would get the white kids and shove them in the corner with white desks and a white teacher and keep them away from the rest of the kids. I told him that what he had said was racist and I was going to write it down. Then he said, ‘You should get rid of the white kids, that is what the community would want you to do.'”

She later reported the parent to the police.

The ‘Trojan Horse’ scandal erupted earlier this year following a series of revelations over hard line Islamist governors trying to force secular schools to adopt strict Islamic practices.

The revelation comes as Prime Minister David Cameron called for every school child to be taught the “British values” enshrined in Magna Carta. Mr Cameron said children from all backgrounds should learn about the document, which is widely credited with paving the way for parliamentary democracy and rule of law.

The Prime Minister wants to mark next year’s 800th anniversary of the signing of the document with celebrations across the country. I want to use this anniversary as an opportunity for every child to learn about the Magna Carta, for towns to commemorate it, for events to celebrate it,” he said.

Magna Carta was forced on King John on 1215 following a revolt by his nobility. John had tried to rule as a despotic, absolute ruler, but his barons humiliated him and forced him to sign the document which limited his power.

David Cameron said: “It’s a great document in our history — what my favourite book, Our Island Story, describes as the ‘foundation of all our laws and liberties’. In sealing it, King John had to accept his subjects were citizens — for the first time giving them rights, protections and security”

An East London MP claimed the Labour Party has been the target of a Trojan Horse plot to infiltrate it with Islamic extremists, according to the Evening Standard. He says his party has rejected “several hundred” membership applications from people the party believed were extremists, and expelled others.

Jim Fitzpatrick said that the re-election of Lutfur Rahman as Mayor of Tower Hamlets was evidence the borough was being taken over by “race politics”. Rahman is often accused of favouring Muslims over anyone else, and has been the subject of significant criticism.

Poplar and Limehouse MP Mr Fitzpatrick claimed that Mr Rahman’s newly established Tower Hamlet’s First Party is “mono-cultural” as it has 18 councillors, all of whom are Bengali and 17 of whom are men.

“We think our act is pretty clean now, but that doesn’t stop people trying because that’s what was influencing our politics in the past and that’s certainly a way of working,” he told the Standard.

“Much as the entryism, the Trojan Horse allegations [were] in education in Birmingham, the Trojan Horse in east London was a political one rather than an educational one.

“We’ve been trying to build an inclusive, tolerant, cohesive community in east London and there are some people who want to take us backwards into race politics, and certainly monochrome politics, and that’s just not the future.

“There’s a small minority who are determined to try and manipulate opinion to get their way and we’ve got to guard against that.”

The borough itself is remarkably divided already, and used to be one of the poorest parts of Britain. However, in the 1980s the Conservative government embarked on a vast regeneration project centred on the abandoned Canary Wharf dock on the Isle of Dogs.

Today the area is home to some of the world’s most significant corporations like HSBC but in surrounding areas the poorer immigrant communities remain. The borough itself is 32 percent Bengali Muslim.

Allegations of wrongdoing are not new in Tower Hamlets, with Breitbart London exposing a large number electoral practices at last month’s elections that could be illegal.

If Mr Fitzpatrick is right in saying that the Labour Party is a target for infiltration, national security questions would be raised, especially as it comes amidst concerns that the party is likely to run Sadiq Khan MP as their London Mayoral candidate. Mr Khan admitted to being a friend and supporter of Babar Ahmad, a self-confessed terrorist.

Whilst Mr Ahmed was fighting extradition to the US to face allegations of being an Al-Qaeda fundraiser Mr Khan supported the campaign to release him and visited him in prison. Once Ahmad was extradited to America he pleaded guilty to terrorist offences.

If I have learnt one thing working with children as a teacher, a volunteer and, more recently, a parent, it’s that what children want above all else is to fit in. The desire not to be different must be hard-wired, so urgent is the need of your average nine-year-old to have the same pencil case as every other nine-year-old. Individuality, much prized in adult life, is abhorred by our conservative juniors, who crave acceptance as the thirsty crave water. “Fitting in” is braided into the DNA of every child, regardless of creed or colour. When the deep, resonant bell of human evolution tolls, it says: “Belong, belong, belong.”

Integrating children into a new society, then, should not present too much of a problem. A football, some Panini World Cup stickers to trade, One Direction, Harry Potter, 97 episodes of Friends, especially the one where Rachel has a baby: common interests for youngsters are not hard to find. So how have we ended up with a situation where so many Muslims are adrift from the mainstream? Why this scandal in Birmingham where five overwhelmingly Muslim schools, some until recently judged to be outstanding, are to be put into special measures because they have sought to inculcate ideas that are repellent to this country?

Let me quote Myriam Francois-Cerrah, a writer and Muslim convert, who told Channel 4 News on Tuesday that she rejected calls by the Prime Minister and Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, for schools to promote British values. “In many ways, the problem is creating a hierarchy of cultures when you say you need to promote British values,” she objected. “What does that say to children in a classroom whose heritage harks from outside the British Isles? It says this country has superior moral values and you are coming from some backward culture whose values you … must not consider equal to our own.”

Funnily enough, that’s exactly what we are saying, Myriam. Spot on! A Muslim girl who winds up in Bolton or Luton should thank her lucky stars she doesn’t live in Sudan – or Pakistan, where, only last month, a woman was stoned to death by her family for the crime of marrying a man of whom they disapproved. Farzana Parveen’s father explained: “I killed my daughter as she had insulted all of our family by marrying a man without our consent, and I have no regret over it.”

Are British values superior to Mr Parveen’s? I do hope so.

Unfortunately, the great lie underpinning the creed of multiculturalism, as spouted by Francois‑Cerrah and her ilk, is that all cultures are “equally valid”. Well, patently, they’re not. The reason irate Pakistani patriarchs are not chucking bricks at their errant daughters in the Birmingham Bull Ring is because Britain has a basically uncorrupt police force, a robust judiciary and an enlightened, hard-won system of liberal values that regards women and girls as equals, not third-class citizens.

But instead of standing up to barbarism and ignorance, too often we have looked away in embarrassment or fear. How many teachers have averted their gaze when 13-year-old Muslim girls suddenly disappear from the classroom to be taken “home” for a forced marriage, because this would present unwelcome evidence that some cultures are less valid than others?

How many health professionals in Bradford are concerned, but never say so, that intermarriage in the Muslim community – 75 per cent of Pakistanis in the city are married to their first cousin – is causing babies to be born blind, deaf and with other disabilities? Back in 2008, when Labour environment minister Phil Woolas said that British Pakistanis were fuelling the rate of birth defects, he was slapped down by Downing Street, with a spokesman for prime minister Gordon Brown saying the issue was not one for ministers to comment on. Government after government has filed this thorny issue in “The Too Difficult Box”, the title of a timely new book edited by former Cabinet minister Charles Clarke.

This was all so predictable.

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How long do you think a white teacher would last in a British primary school if he were to tell his class of seven-year olds that all non-Christians were “filthy heathens”? Or if he referred to black people using the “n-word”? Or he accused all Muslims of being frustrated terrorists?

Not very long, I expect. The story would be a national scandal, with politicians promising to root out this disgraceful attitude wherever they found it, with earnest, handwringing Guardian editorials about the prevalence of racism in modern Britain, and a soundbite from the Prime Minister himself on Channel 4 News reassuring viewers how personally repellant he found the whole appalling business.

So how come for one particular minority the rules are different? How come, when a Birmingham teacher told his Local Education Authority that he had seen signs of an attempted Islamist takeover in local schools as early as 1993, his warnings were ignored and he ended up being dismissed for “gross misconduct”? How come when a headteacher advised the Department of Education of the Birmingham “Trojan Horse” plot in 2010, he too was ignored? How come, the very second it emerged that in certain Birmingham schools Western women were being described by teachers as “white prostitutes” and Westerners generally as “kuffar” the offending teachers weren’t sacked and the schools investigated with a view to closure?

The injustice and cowardice and dishonesty of the cultural surrender here seems to me so obvious that I’m astonished it needs spelling out. But apparently it does. Here we are, after perhaps two decades’ worth of warnings and rumours that, courtesy of the UK taxpayer, British schoolchildren in parts of the country are being indoctrinated in the virtues of racial and religious hatred and of cultural apartheid. Yet only today have we reached the point where our authorities have come round to acknowledging the problem with the publication of Ofsted’s damning report on the way a number of Birmingham schools have been hijacked by Islamist extremists.

Worse still, even now, there remains bitter division within the government over whether confronting the problem remains the right thing to do. Or whether it might be more culturally sensitive to look the other way, because after all, devout Muslims really are concerned about the decadence of the West, and it’s only proper that they should be permitted by the British state school system to treat their girls as second-class citizens, and teach them anti-Christmas chants, and stop boys from urinating standing up, because then they’ll learn from example what it is to live in tolerant country and we’ll all get along just fine, probably.

Representing the first point of view in the Coalition cabinet is Education Secretary Michael Gove. Representing the latter point of view is Home Secretary Theresa May. This is the division responsible for their public spat over the last few days and I can certainly see why Gove refused to back down until absolutely forced to do so by David Cameron. Some points of principle are so important they deserve to take precedence over Coalition government unity or career safety – and this was most definitely one of them.

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On his Facebook page, Inam Ul Haq Anwar doesn’t call himself a senior teacher at Park View School, which is a large secondary in the multi-cultural Small Heath area that’s just east of Birmingham city centre.

Instead, the heavily-bearded head of department describes his profession much more grandly — as an ‘architect  of minds’.

If you were to spend a few minutes, as I have, browsing his Facebook profile, you would get a very clear idea of what motivates him to fulfil this remit.

Like most of the 600-plus pupils he teaches, Anwar is Muslim.

Deeply religious, he posts regular comments about Islamic practices and protocols, points readers to website articles supportive of Islam, and often quotes from the Koran.

He also appears to be highly political. In recent weeks, Anwar has condemned incursions by Israel into Arab-controlled Gaza (which he describes as ‘our Holocaust’), criticised U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan and made pointed attacks on Ukip’s ‘retard’ leader Nigel Farage.

On another occasion, he strayed into yet more contentious territory: posting two outspoken messages voicing support for an individual who was appearing in court charged with  terror offences.

‘We need everyone to make dua [pray] that [the alleged terrorist] is released and that Allah Almighty alleviates him from this suffering,’ read one, posted on the eve of the hearing.

The following day, after a court ruling, Anwar commented: ‘Know this was not the Judge’s decision, nor the corrupt Establishment’s. Or anyone else’s for that matter. This was Allah jalla wa’ala’s decision.’

He then posted a lengthy quote from the Koran, advising: ‘No matter how great the setback, the struggle between truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, must continue.’

This wasn’t the first time that this teacher, or ‘architect of minds’, had voiced support for an alleged  Islamic extremist. Just before Christmas, he took to Facebook to celebrate the ‘great news’ that a bookshop owner from Birmingham nicknamed ‘Abu Bakr’ was to be released early from prison.

‘May Allah make it easy for  all those that have been wrongly imprisoned. Ameen!’ he declared.

Abu Bakr, whose real name is Ahmed Faraz, has been frequently described as ‘the terrorists’ favourite bookseller,’ because of the extremist literature his store sells, and the fact its customers have included the leaders of the 7/7 London bomb plot.

He was jailed in 2011 after being convicted of 11 counts of possessing and disseminating terrorist publications. However, he was released last year after winning an appeal on a legal technicality — the development Anwar was applauding.

All of which begs a simple question: should a teacher charged with shaping the minds of 600 impressionable Muslim schoolchildren be publicly supporting alleged extremists?

‘Certainly not,’ says Saif Rahman, of the centrist Humanist and Cultural Muslim Association.

‘These are the words of a firebrand. Looking at this guy’s Facebook feed, it rings alarm bells. If he’s saying stuff like this in public, one can only imagine what he’s saying to the kids he teaches in private.’

Indeed one can. But Anwar’s comments are all the more disturbing because his place of work, Park View School, is currently at the centre of the hugely contentious ‘Trojan Horse’ affair.

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Britain is turning into a third world country. If you want to know how and why, consider three of the ongoing scandals that continued to fester over the weekend.

The first concerns allegations of vote-rigging in London borough of Tower Hamlets, where scandal-wracked, Islamist-linked mayor Lutfur Rahman has just won a second term as mayor.

The mayor himself, according to a senior Labour figure present, was “visibly throwing his weight around” and being “overly familiar with count staff, some of whom were telling him they had voted for him even as they counted the votes”. Mr Golds, another subjected to a recount, found his vote had changed by more than a fifth overnight, from 1,098 to 1,345.

And Sanu Miah?In the recount, his vote dropped by a quarter from 2,270 to 1,722 and he fell from first place to sixth. Two of the three seats in his ward went to Mr Rahman’s Tower Hamlets First party. “I think this election was stolen from me,” said Mr Miah.

Not everyone agrees with that. One of Mr Miah’s opponents had the same surname: the counters could have got them mixed up. But he might be right. The normal rules do not apply in Tower Hamlets. It was Britain’s most troubling election in Britain’s most troubling borough.

Then there’s the similarly troubling case of Operation Trojan Horse – the campaign to infiltrate a number of state schools in Birmingham, oust non-Muslim teachers, hijack the curriculum, segregate boys from girls and create a corner of the English Midlands that is forever Islamabad.

At Park View, for example, there have been complaints of segregation in classrooms and of GCSE syllabuses being restricted to comply with conservative Islamic teaching. Sex education lessons have allegedly seen impressionable teenage boys told that rape is legal in marriage, while religious education classes have apparently seen pupils given a list of Christian teachers and told to try to convert them. At one assembly, a senior teacher is said to have endorsed terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki. At another, detailed by a Sunday newspaper, he allegedly described non-Muslims to pupils as ‘kuffar’ —or infidels.

Sex education lessons have, according to reports in a Sunday newspaper, seen impressionable teenage boys told rape is legal in marriage, while religious education classes have seen pupils given a list of Christian teachers and told to try to convert them Last November, Sheikh Shady al-Suleiman, a preacher many regard as extremist, was invited to speak at the school.

Nigel Sloan, a former teacher at the school, has said Mozz Hussain, the deputy headmaster, preached ‘mind-blowing’ anti-American and anti-Western ‘propaganda’ to pupils, describing the U.S. as ‘the evil in the world’ and ‘the cause of all famine’.

And finally, from Charles Moore,an excellent insight as to why this has been allowed to happen. In a piece entitled “Our voting system is flawed but politicians don’t seem to care”, he writes:

Tower Hamlets has been a problem for many years, but its controversies are not unique. There have been cases of electoral malpractice in Birmingham, Bradford, Slough, Woking, Peterborough. There are also serious problems, particularly in big cities, with the Electoral Register.

Fraud, he says, is widespread – and known by the authorities to be widespread:

There are two reasons for this –forgery and coercion. The first has now been mitigated by insisting on postal voters giving a signature and a date of birth (in Tower Hamlets this time, no fewer than 10 per cent of the postal votes returned were rejected because of discrepancies in this area). The second flourishes, particularly in minority ethnic communities, where leaders can exploit clan or family ties to “harvest” votes from their juniors and from women.

So why is so little being done about it? One answer is that the very institutions charged with preventing this kind of behaviour have been turning a deliberate blind eye to it.

Enter the Electoral Commission – yes, the same Electoral Commission recently embroiled in another scandal concerning a UKIP lookalike on the European election ballot papers. It turns out that this quango, stuffed with usual bien-pensant apparatchiks, is so busy trying to encourage “engagement” – getting people to take part in the voting process – that it prefers not to deal with the less fluffy and more challenging issue of voter fraud.

The Electoral Commission is the body supposed to ensure that all is well with British voting. But if you look at its remit and pronouncements, you will see that it focuses more on engagement than on making votes trustworthy. In a speech in March, its chairman, Jenny Watson, seemed preoccupied with the need to “modernise”. “As a society, we are at risk,” she said clumsily, “of how we ask people to engage with our electoral system… becoming increasingly disconnected from how they interact with both each other and with other institutions, from their banking arrangements to their weekly shop.” The system needed to be “more reflective of the wider society”. She said how nice it would be if people could register to vote on the actual day of the election. She played down issues of fraud. She praised the work of pressure groups, such as Operation Black Vote (OBV), which try to get new voters. She did not praise anyone who checks that registered voters are true ones.

But it’s not just the Electoral Commission which is to blame. So too are those police – presumably obeying orders from on high – stood by and watched as the thoroughly illegal voter intimidation took place in Tower Hamlets. So too are the local councillors in Labour-controlled Birmingham. So too is the coalition government, which is said to have been warned four years ago that Operation Trojan Horse was taking place. So too are the three main political parties, all of whom have agreed that dealing with postal-vote is not priority.

Final thought.

Everyone in authority is so afraid of being accused of being “racist” or “Islamophobic” that they have found it easier to sweep the issue under the carpet than confront it. But the problem isn’t going to go away. In fact – until someone, somewhere finds the courage to deal with it – it’s bound to get an awful lot worse.