Muslims in dispatches

I watched the excellent channel 4 Dispatches documentary last night entitled "lessons in hate and violence" it was an undercover expose of lies, hypocrisy, bullying, intolerance and outright sedition apparently going on every day in some of the 2,000 Muslim faith schools up and down the country. The program was a follow on from a previous undercover sting by the same production team at certain British mosques which showed anti-Semitism and hate speech being openly preached. The program was particularly topical because of the recent controversial comments made by David Cameron regarding the failure of the multicultural state and a suggested re-evaluation of relativism.

The program was shocking, in that it showed teachers (so called) instructing pupils to dehumanise and hate non-Muslims and also to detest the very society they derive their freedom and living from; it also showed teachers and child carers beating, kicking and abusing young children in their care. No doubt there will be a flood of drivel from the accommodationists in the press now; no doubt we will hear all about how this is the fault of extremists and not Islam, that these views don't represent the views of the majority of Muslims bla, bla, bla. Except that these are straw-man fallacies, the problem for the Government and indeed all of us is that there are clear warrants for all the things seen on the program last night in the various holy books that with alarming cognitive dissonance we are supposed to "respect", to the extent you could be arrested for burning one. This obvious contradiction and the Tory policy of encouraging more and more faith schools will surely result an increase in ghettoisation of peoples via faith schools, along religious, racial and cultural lines, this in turn will spur on an inevitable back-lash from people who look for any excuse to persecute out-groups.

If the Koran, Bible, Torah etc. didn't exist and the EDL (or some such organisation) created and published the same elitist, intolerant, racist and misogynistic philosophies in a book now it would be banned by moderate governments everywhere. It seems obvious, the problem is these religions and what they say is true without evidence, what they define as moral and how they indoctrinate the children to believe it. We are fortunate as a species that most sensible people choose to ignore the vast majority of the teachings of their religion because a) its clearly bronze age quackery, b) because the secular societies they live in don't tolerate it and c) they don't derive their morality from a literal reading of the words in those books, morality clearly comes from somewhere else; these people we call moderates and the ones who actually follow the instructions (we're supposed to respect) are the extremists - it's a funny old game.