Seeker Blog

I wonder if Britain may be more at risk than France. Val MacQueen reports on recent incidents:

In the last few days in Britain, three events have caused what was already a small crack in the paper-thin edifice of “multiculturalism” in Britain to widen to a noticeable fissure.

First, 14-year old British schoolgirl Codie Stott was arrested for trying to get a good grade in her group science project. She had been placed with a group of students only one of whom spoke any English. When they began talking what she deduced was Urdu among themselves, she realized she had no hope of completing the project. She went to her teacher, and prefacing her request with a diplomatic, “I’m not trying to be funny, but …” she asked to be moved to an English-speaking team. The teacher reacted violently, raising her voice in the classroom to shout, “It’s racist! You’re going to get done by the police!”

The 14-year old was reported to a police officer on the school premises and the next day she was arrested, taken to the police station and told to take the laces out of her shoes and take off her jewelry. She then had her fingerprints taken and she was formally questioned. “It was awful,” she said later, when she’d been released, the police having shown more sense than her teacher.

This news item created a storm of anger in Britain. But, the incident was quickly followed by another. Aishah Azmi, a teacher’s assistant in an Episcopalian school who was tasked with helping recently arrived Urdu-speaking children to learn English, was asked to remove her niqab (full facial veil) in the classroom. She refused. She was told that the children needed to see her lips and mouth as she pronounced the English words they were supposed to be learning. She refused on religious grounds. The school, conciliatory for fear of being accused of racism, told her she was free to wear the veil in corridors and the staff room, but she should remove it when teaching foreign children English. She refused again, saying that as there was a male colleague in the classroom, she could not remove her veil in his presence.

Ms Azmi was sent home and her salary suspended. There is a broad school of thought in Islam that wearing the veil is not a religious requirement. Indeed the full facial veil is banned in public by the governments of both Turkey and Tunisia. In Tunisia, a woman may not enter a public [government] building wearing even a headscarf.

Read on…