A second school accused of Islamophobia may be forced to close its doors over its headteacher’s decision to ban children from wearing pro-Palestinian badges, The Telegraph can reveal.
Barclay Primary School in Leyton, east London, sent a letter to parents warning that it may have to “revert to online learning” if the safety of children and staff cannot be guaranteed after it had received bomb threats over the policy.
Clearly, there’s some activist group behind this. Bomb threats are not to be allowed and so on.
But who is supposed to define such things? Assume a majority of parents desire it to be allowed for a moment. No, just assume. Should parents be able to decide how their children are educated? Or should it be the State?
Which is a lovely problem for what I assume are left wing activists. By demanding that Palestinian badges should be allowed they are, of course, arguing in favour of school choice.
Ah, their playing the made up Islamaphobia card. The school should play the Israelaphobia card and say that’s why they banned the flags.
If parents want their kids to wear badges in support of a made-up problem and a gang of scum who rape and murder and torture people and dance around in the street laughing and shouting about it then they should definitely be encouraged to do so.
That way the parents and the kids can be more easily identified, rounded up, and shipped to Gaza to be with their own kind.
Relatedly, in this morning’s Times:
Sir Martyn Oliver sets out reforms in his first interview as the watchdog’s chief inspector
The new head of Ofsted has said that behaviour at some schools is so bad that there are “no-go” areas for staff, and teachers lock themselves in classrooms for safety at lunchtime.
Well, if it isn’t it the consequences of thirty or forty years of the feminisation of teaching, teachers and their unions demanding not to be able to discipline kids, and supporting immigration from countries where women are treated like shit.
Excuse me if I let out a bitter chuckle.
Also related (apologies, I’m on a roll), this story also from the Times, which I will reproduce in full because it contains so many of the ingredients of our national downfall:
– muslims being exalted over everyone else
– ostentatious praying by the same
– the modern tendency of kids to ‘express themselves’ in groups
-the tragedy that Michaela is ‘Britain’s strictest school’ and one of its best, when it is no different than hundreds and possibly thousands of British schools were thirty years ago
– actual fucking public money being used to undermine such a school (anyone on social media will see the hatred it gets from the left, this is just the logical extension of that)
– British courts taking such nonsense seriously – we’ll see how they rule, but ‘fuck off’ would be the ideal response to the initial writ
– Matrix Chambers (going from call to QC, as was, in 17 years is…. suspiciously quick – perhaps she’s a genius)
Anyway:
A student who is suing Britain’s “strictest” school over a “prayer ban” is being funded by tens of thousands of pounds of public money, The Times has learnt.
Michaela Community School in Wembley, northwest London, is facing a High Court challenge from a pupil who says the school’s policy of banning prayer rituals was in effect a prayer ban for Muslim children.
The school was founded by Katharine Birbalsingh, a teacher and educational reformer. She recently said on social media that every religious group must “make sacrifices for the sake of the whole” if multiculturalism was to succeed.
The student told a court hearing that the school’s policy was discriminatory and had “fundamentally changed” how she feels “about being a Muslim in this country”.
The Times can now reveal that the legal team representing the student is being paid from the civil legal aid fund, with estimates at the bill so far running to between £100,000 and £150,000. In civil legal aid cases, lawyers are usually paid at the end of the case. If a claimant is successful, costs are sometimes ordered to be paid by the respondent.
Sarah Hannett KC, a barrister at Matrix Chambers in London, is leading the legal team in the High Court. The chambers were launched in 2000 by Cherie Blair KC, the wife of Sir Tony Blair, then the prime minister.
Hannett was called to the Bar in 2003 and was made what was then Queen’s Counsel three years ago.
A human rights and public law expert who specialises in education law, she is being supported by a junior barrister and was instructed by Dan Rosenberg, a partner at the law firm Simpson Millar, who specialises in education.
Ministry of Justice figures revealed that Simpson Millar is one of the biggest recipients of civil legal aid funding in England and Wales. In 2016 it emerged that the firm had been paid nearly £5 million from public funds.
Simpson Millar was approached for comment.
The case involving Birbalsingh’s school was brought by a pupil, who can be identified only as TTT, after the school brought in its “prayer ritual policy” restricting how children can pray during school hours.
Although the ban is for all faiths, Hannett told the court this week that the policy had the “practical effect of only preventing Muslims from praying because their prayer by nature has a ritualised nature rather than being internal”. She said it “wouldn’t prevent a Christian child sitting quietly in the corner of the playground from praying”.
The pupil was seeking a “compromise” to the school’s position, Hannett said, arguing that they should be allowed to pray for around five minutes at lunchtime on dates when faith rules required it, but not during lessons.
Jason Coppel KC, defending the school’s policy for the London borough of Brent, said that in March last year a Year 9 pupil had used her blazer as a prayer mat to pray in the schoolyard during her lunch break.
He said: “The number of children praying grew very quickly from three to 30 children within a few days.”
Those children are understood to have included the claimant. In written arguments, Coppel said the child had brought in a prayer mat despite them not being permitted, resulting in a verbal altercation with a teacher.
In a witness statement, the teacher said: “I told her it was fine to pray as she had been the past few days, but that prayer mats were not allowed. She continued to interrupt me and tell me that I was wrong and that it wasn’t OK without a prayer mat.”
As a result, TTT was suspended from school for five days. Birbalsingh went on to bring in the prayer policy from March 27 as a temporary measure.
On March 30, lawyers for the schoolgirl sent a pre-action letter to the school.
Coppel said: “Those were very difficult days for the school, with tensions running high, and it is hard to see how matters would have been improved by taking more and more disciplinary action as opposed to removing the girl, whom the school saw as the source of the problem.”
During this period, Coppel said that the school and its teachers were subject to online abuse. One teacher had a brick thrown through their window and a bomb threat was sent to the school. The governors voted at a meeting on May 23 to maintain the ban on prayer rituals, which remains still in place.
The student told a court hearing that the school’s policy was discriminatory and had “fundamentally changed” how she feels “about being a Muslim in this country”.
Islamofobiainnit
Islamofobiainnit
Islamofobiainnit
Islamofobiainnit
Islamofobiainnit
etc.
Magic Horse Pedo Cult: Not Even One.
Michaela school told all the parents on day one it was a secular school. If they don’t like it, they can send their kids elsewhere.
What this is actually about is privileging Muslims over everyone else. Which the Left are fine with…for the time being
’Clearly, there’s some activist group behind this…’
Wouldn’t be so sure. No need to invent an activist group to explain this. It’s mob mentality. Of a kind Islam seems to specialise in.
I find it amusing that the modern Left have brainwashed themselves to believe that, after they destroy the existing society, they will naturally emerge from the wreckage as the elite.
If only they got out more…
By demanding that Palestinian badges should be allowed they are, of course, arguing in favour of school choice.
You’re rather wide of the mark, I fear. There is no reason to believe that schools that do not permit the wearing of Palestinian badges will be tolerated.
Given that 50% of the Michaela intake is muslim and that Michaela has an enviable record for improving the educational standards of pupils and obtaining high grades, why aren’t all the parents irrespective of their faith running to support the school? Is it more desirable for muslim parents that their children join the ranks of uneducated stabbers than surrender some of the outward trappings of their vile religion?
School choice about being able to choose which school you send your children to, not which rules you choose to adhere to once you’ve made that choice.
Given that 50% of the Michaela intake is muslim
What the fuck is wrong with people? I’d never send one of my children to a school like that.
Holy Catherine, pray for us.
Interesting that Sadiq Khan doesn’t feel strong enough yet to make a pronouncement on this. He’s got the mobs on the streets, he’s demoralised and pansified the police, and promoted his co-religionists into positions of power. What’s he waiting for?
Usual power play by Muslims. When i’ve been to muslim countries they are not praying all the time, but in the UK they use prayer to “rub our noses in diversity”
I doubt this child even thinks of herself as British – probably muslim first, then pakistani or whatever shithole she identifies with. I doubt Britishness comes anywhere near it, unless it’s her family claiming benefits off the great british tax paying public.
At my old school in the 1980s Muslim lads were given enough leniency to be a bit late in Friday afternoons, to go and pray at the local mosque. Ostentatious praying in the school was banned.
Anyway, Interested, being a KC is not a meritorious award. Barristers write up and apply to be one these days. They have to be able to show their commitment to Diversity and Equality and stuff ( really ). It sems to be the modern leftist equivalent of ‘losing at golf to the right people’.
The ESTABLISHED religion in England is the Church of England.
Those are the rules that are relevant. All others, GFY.
PS, my personal view is that all Sky Fairyism is a waste of time.
Otto
“Anyway, Interested, being a KC is not a meritorious award. Barristers write up and apply to be one these days. ”
I know a few (and a few judges, inc family members) and they’re pretty switched on. But it’s true that you have to ‘evidence’ your commitment to ‘diversity’ by playing the bongos or some such in your spare time.
Have had a few candidates applying to become train drivers who were rather miffed when told they would not be allowed to stop the train to do their rites in the driving cab or have breaks in their classroom training sessions to do the same. For a while there was a dedicated prayer room in the training centre. They would wash their feet in the washbasins too………
asiaseen – Don’t want to be rude, but atheists are Muggles.
That’s why their societies don’t work.
WE BELIEVE IN NUSSING, LEBOWSKI, NUSSING
Interested: Could a KC show their commitment to diversity by braiding their hair….?
Related news: WAR!
A top defence chief has revealed that NATO forces are bracing for an all-out war with Russia in the next two decades.
Admiral Rob Bauer, the chairman of NATO’s Military Committee urged both civilians and governments to prepare for cataclysmic conflicts and the chilling prospect of being conscripted.
Who does NATO think is going to defend them, lol.
We have to realise it’s not a given that we are in peace. And that’s why we [NATO forces] have the plans, that’s why we are preparing for a conflict with Russia,’ Bauer told reporters after a meeting of NATO defence chiefs in Brussels.
‘But the discussion is much wider. It is also the industrial base and also the people that have to understand they play a role.’
In a stark warning, he said civilians must be ready for a conflict in the next 20 years that would require wholesale change in their lives.
Bauer said large numbers of civilians will need to be mobilised in case a global war breaks out and governments must make sure their nations are ‘war ready’.
NATO is getting ready to lose to Russia again in the next 20 years.
Seriously, who do they imagine is going to risk being killed to defend Equality, Diversity and Net Zero?* It’s not gonna be Ahmed, innit? And white men have already rejected the armed forces. Good luck trying to force people to die in trenches on the say-so of Grant Shapps or some other gimp. The alternative (prison) is much cushier than learning to live with your new stumps.
Blokes, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?
Whaddayamean, “no”?!?!
*Steiner?
That NATO article made me smile. In twenty years’ time the UK will have a small body of wfh trans armed forces following a moratorium on recruiting white males and willyless white females.
Usual power play by Muslims. When i’ve been to muslim countries they are not praying all the time, but in the UK they use prayer to “rub our noses in diversity”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/19/muslim-pupil-taking-school-to-court-prayer-ban-on-legal-aid/
In other words they use prayer and our own money.
TMB – No need to wait 20 years, the British Army would get lost in Wembley Stadium now.
There’s always been more than a touch of the Live Action Roleplay about post-Cold War NATO’s tiny, scale model militaries, but Admiral Rob Bauer (he’s an “admiral” of four frigates and four diesel submarines) is taking the piss.
Conscription is fantasy bullshit, the riots would do more damage than the Russians could. Conta The Joker, we don’t really live in a society anymore, so we can’t make the sort of demands of people that Admiral Bob suggests and expect them not to laugh.
Also if Army Groups North, South and Centre couldn’t defeat Russia – and those boys were the most powerful attack package Europe has ever produced – who can?
Batu Khan!
The Gurkhas have for centuries attained British citizenship through dedicated military service, and they are some of the Britishish Britishers you could meet. I advocate extending that to all people attempting to gain residency here.
Michaela school told all the parents on day one it was a secular school. If they don’t like it, they can send their kids elsewhere.
And that is why they are determined to undermine it. Islam is a parasite that feeds on the host until it is an empty shell. They will keep pushing until they get what they want. So, no, they won’t send their children to an Islamic school, they will try their damndest to convert this one. It’s what they do.
So, I recently had some first-hand experience of this praying thing. I was running a CBT (compulsory basic training) motorcycle course a few weeks back with another trainer. At the end of the half-hour lunch break we were preparing to go out on the road for the road ride element of the course. At this point, one student springs the ‘I need to go to the mosque to pray’ schtick.
Set aside, for a moment, that he could, if he had so desired, found somewhere quiet during the lunch break, he now wanted time out to go to the local mosque. This would have been the best part of half an hour to get there and again getting back and the time spent praying. In the meantime, his allotted trainer and the other student were supposed to do what? Twiddle their thumbs? Or, they could have taken a diversion out to the mosque and again, the trainer and other student would be expected to wait outside while he indulged. Either way, it would have disrupted the course.
What he got was a firm refusal. We both advised him that he was more than welcome to go to the mosque, but his training for the day would be terminated and if he wished to continue he could rebook at a later date.
Oddly enough, going to the mosque lost its importance. Any attempt to push the envelope needs to be firmly resisted.
You’d think that they would have developed all sorts of practical rules for accommodating training or temporary disruptions by now, it’s not a new religion. Interesting that no one in authority seems to want to ask them that question.
@BniC – it’s not compulsory to pray. I’ve visited 3 muslim shitholes and the locals don’t go to pray 5 times a day. In the west they insist that they must pray as a means of exerting control over the local population. as longrider says islam is a parasite which hollows out the host either by demanding concessions or the more usual of plundering the benefit system and crime, Islam will never change it is very successful (albeit muslim countries are invariably 3rd world shitholes) in propagating more muslims and has a long term plan.
jgh
Actually the Gurkhas haven’t always been given residency, it’s a realtively recent thing. The deal was that Nepal would send its lads over, they’d be trained and incorporated into the GB Army.
At the end of their stint they’d go home and enjoy their pension ( not brilliant in British terms but excellent at home ) and become leaders, businessmen whatever.
Not all returned home, some could stay, but the norm was to go back.
Court cases in the 1990s and Joanna Lumley changed that. Not that I am complaining, there are a lot where I live and they are a super bunch – polite and funny. I am quite proud that the second language in these parts is Nepalese. However I can imagine that the govt back home was rather miffed at the enforced one sided change in the agreement.
Otto – Yarp, I thought at the time that the Lumleyisation of the Gurkhas evidenced the feminisation of British society. Like when Tony Blair went on TV to fake-cry over Princess Di (herself a tawdry tabloid celeb) and nobody laughed.
The Gurkhas aren’t cuddly diverse mascots, they’re mercenaries we hire to kill enemies of the British state. We used to understand what mercenaries – however brave or gallant they may be – are for. There was nothing wrong with our old arrangements, until the British public turned into a menopausal old woman about everything.
The Gurkhas are awesome.
Army brass says “Bring us proof of death” when sending them after Taliban targets in Afghanistan. So, they get heads in bags and ear necklaces.
No one gives a fuck about this until we get the usual whine about not desecrating muslim bodies. Then there is a big panic about it.
Thing was, the Taliban understood the message and wasn’t that the important thing? Didn’t we want to put the shits up them? Or was the plan to hope they just gave up without a fight?