Islamist extremists want to brainwash children: UK MP

LONDON: An influential British Pakistani parliamentarian has said that hard-line extremists are involved in targeting Birmingham’s city schools to indoctrinate school children with a harsh version of Islam.
He agreed that the government was now investigating these serious allegations.Khalid Mahmood, Labour’s Birmingham Perry Barr MP, spoke to The News after Britain’s Department for Education announced investigation into concerns of an alleged hard-line Islamist plot - dubbed operation Trojan Horse - to take over 25 schools in Birmingham – UK’s second largest city and home to around 300,000 British Pakistanis.
Twenty-five schools in the city are now in the spotlight after the city council said it received more than 200 reports in relation to its enquiry. There are allegations that a well-coordinated dirty campaign was used by Islamist teachers to bully staff so that to sideline non-Muslim head teachers and staff, replacing them with staff sympathetic to the hard-line view.
Khalid Mahmood, who chairs the Tackling Terrorism All-Party Parliamentary Group, said that it was time to face up to the facts and admit that there were extreme hardliners within Muslim communities who wanted to impose their kind of Shariah on everyone else “at all costs and have no tolerance for diversity within Islam”. “Majority of the kids in these schools, Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin, are the Sunni mainstream Muslims. Their parents are Barelvis, Shias, Sufis, Deobandis and come from all kinds of Islamic schools of thoughts. They don’t believe in a uniform version of Islam. What has happened in Birmingham is a blatant attempt at indoctrination. It’s so serious that the teachers involved in the plot introduced their own book on Shariah in these schools when there is no agreement on a single book on Shariah.”
Khalid Mahmood said that a thorough investigation should determine how come some individuals were allowed to take hold of these schools while they injected into system “school governors of their choice”.
“It’s clear that a group of people planned to come into education structure of Birmingham with their ethos and their school of thought and unacceptable to mainstream Muslims. The objective of this group has been to penetrate these schools and change the school of thought of the pupils away from their parents to a harsh version.”
Khalid Mahmood, however, disagreed with the government decision of appointing Peter Clarke, the former national head of counter terrorism, to lead the enquiry into 25 Birmingham schools.
“This is an issue about the governors and the local authorities. This is not a terrorism issue. It should be ensured that only individuals are probed and not the whole community is victimised. It should be the secretary of state for education or a former secretary of state for education or someone from the home office looking into these allegations with consultations from different Islamic schools of thoughts. The appointment of Peter Clarke is unfortunate.”