C4 Dispatches Tonight on 'Lessons in Hate & Violence' in Muslim Schools
Categories: Latest News
Monday February 14 2011
 |
At 8pm tonight, Channel 4 will air a Dispatches programme, titled, “Lessons in Hate and Violence.” |
The Dispatches website promotes the programme as follows:
“Dispatches goes undercover to investigate allegations that teachers regularly assault young children in some of the 2,000 Muslim schools in Britain run by Islamic organisations.
“The programme also follows up allegations that, behind closed doors, some Muslim secondary schools teach a message of hatred and intolerance.”
On Saturday, an article in the Times newspaper picked up on the upcoming documentary and reported:
“Young pupils at an Islamic secondary school are being taught hatred for British values and contempt for other religions, an undercover investigation has found.”
“During assemblies children were told that Hindus ‘drink the piss of a cow’, disbelievers were ‘the worst of all people’, British society was ‘the influence of Satan’ and anyone with ‘less than a fistful of beard’ must be avoided ‘the same way you stay away from a serpent or a snake.’”
In a repeat of statements published in a 2007 article by The Times, which stated that over half of Britain’s mosques had come under “the control of a hardline Islamic sect”, The Times further added:
“Darul Uloom Islamic High School in Birmingham belongs to Islam’s conservative Deobandi tradition, which gave birth to the Taleban in Afghanistan, runs an estimated 700 of Britain’s 1,500 mosques and produces 80 per cent of British-trained Muslim clerics.”
The Times’ report was followed by similar articles in both national (see the Telegraph, the Daily Express and Daily Star) and regional newspapers (see Evening Standard, the Portsmouth News, the Lancaster and Morecambe Citizen) – all with headlines that were variations of “Mosques teaching extreme views.”
Tazeen Ahmad , the presenter of tonight’s show, also wrote an article in the Daily Mail, arguing that Muslim children were “being taught religious apartheid and social segregation.”
She called for “Muslim schools [needing] closer scrutiny” and for Muslims to “face up to what is happening behind closed doors.”
The Times article further published a statement from the Birmingham school, which said that it “did not tolerate hatred towards any faith group. It said that a student who gave a speech about Hindus had been expelled. The school would study the footage and take disciplinary action if necessary.”
Solicitors for the committee of another school in Keighley, West Yorkshire, in which a teacher and older boys were reportedly filmed beating and kicking young children, were also reported as having said that they would “take whatever action was necessary to protect children and give its full cooperation to any inquiries.”
As mentioned, you can watch Dispatches tonight at 8pm on Channel 4. You can watch the programme again on ‘4oD’.
If you wish to send your thoughts on the programme to the Dispatches team, you can do so via this link.
We would also welcome your thoughts on the programme on our site, which you can leave by using the comments box below this article.