July 6, 2010 Jihadist group a threat to us all The Australian, 6 July 2010 Hizb ut-Tahrir , which held its controversial rally in Sydney on Sunday, is not just yet another radical Islamist group. It is one of the most manipulative and effective recruitment fronts for the Islamic jihad, particularly among the educated Muslim young. It is precisely because its spokesmen do not appear to be wild-eyed fanatics but are usually highly intelligent and even intellectual that it is so appealing and therefore so dangerous. But because it takes such care to conceal its links to terror, governments in Australia and Britain, where it has managed to establish a significant and highly troubling presence, find it difficult to deal with it. Liberal societies are reluctant to ban any organisation unless it can be proved to be connected to terrorism or violence. Since neither Australia nor Britain says it has found any such links, they allow HT to continue to operate while monitoring its activities. Hence Sunday’s meeting in Sydney. But HT members in other countries have been involved in terrorism, and whatever its protestations to the contrary, the organisation actively promotes and encourages violence. And since it regards itself as a global movement that does not recognise national boundaries, the comforting fiction that it presents no threat to Australia is particularly otiose. In Russia, HT has been banned since 2003, when the leaders of its Moscow cell were arrested in possession of plastic explosives, grenades, TNT and detonators. In August 2005, nine members of HT in Russia were convicted of illegal possession of weapons and incitement to racial and religious hatred. In August 2002, HT in Denmark reportedly offered the equivalent of £25,000 to anyone who killed a prominent Danish Jew, producing a hit list of between 15 and 25 leading members of Denmark’s Jewish community. The leader of HT in Denmark, Fadi Ahmad Abdel Latif, was convicted of incitement to racial hatred for distributing a leaflet urging people to ‘kill them, kill the Jews wherever you find them’. And last year HT was banned in Bangladesh after the government said it feared the organisation posed ‘a threat to peaceful life’. Not only does HT explicitly promote violence in Israel, Afghanistan and Iraq, but it calls on Muslims everywhere to engage in violent jihad. HT is dedicated to the creation of a single Islamic state, or caliphate, that ‘will reach the whole world and the rule of the Muslims will reach as far as the day and night’. It believes there is a timeless conflict that governs relations between Muslims and ‘unbelievers’, a conflict it encourages. On the Harry’s Place website recently, ‘Raziq’, a former HT member, wrote that HT’s efforts in Britain are primarily aimed at disrupting the civic and political integration of British Muslims: ‘They want Muslims to disown citizenship in their hearts, to reject government and all democratic institutions in their minds . . . and to encourage them to work semi-secretly for the return of a lost empire across a massive land base.’ HT makes clear in its literature that peaceful means are not enough to win this conflict and that Muslims are allowed to launch aggressive wars against non-Muslims. Its publications say Islamic religious texts all command Muslims to initiate fighting against disbelievers, ‘even if they do not initiate [it] against us’. It even justifies the killing of Muslims who do not want to live by these rules. ‘He who does not rule by Islam and rules by a kufr [non-Muslim] system should either retract or be killed.’ It also calls on Muslims to fight Jews everywhere, and engages in vicious anti-Jew invective. Last month, HT in Bangladesh issued a press release to advertise a demonstration about the Gaza flotilla which said: ‘O Muslim armies! Teach the Jews a lesson after which they will need no further lessons. March forth to fight them, eradicate their entity and purify the earth of their filth.’ Its invective radicalises Muslims everywhere to the cause of extremism and jihadi violence. In Britain, it has had a particularly seismic effect on campus, where its combination of intellectualism, save-the-world idealism and secret-society comradeship has proved devastatingly effective in recruiting even highly westernised students to the jihad. Britain’s National Union of Students has twice banned HT — in 1994-95 and again in 2004 — holding it ‘responsible for supporting terrorism and publishing material that incites racial hatred’. The result has been merely that HT has repeatedly changed its name to continue to spread its message on campus. But the students union’s attempt to stop HT has not been echoed by the British government, although the new Prime Minister, David Cameron, promised in opposition to ban it. Not only has the government refused until now to proscribe it, but it sometimes inadvertently even channelled public funds to it through front organisations. And it has taken no legal action against it, despite calls by British Jewish leaders for HT to be prosecuted after it repeatedly called on its website for the killing of Jews and the annihilation of Israel. Several former HT members in Britain have testified to the extraordinary effectiveness of HT’s manipulative mind games on impressionable Muslim youths, and have been in the forefront of arguing that the British government’s refusal to ban it has been a disaster. Shiraz Maher, who left HT after the London tube and bus bombings in 2005, says there is a real danger in allowing the group to operate freely, as its words may have inspired terrorist activity. One of Britain’s first suicide bombers, Omar Sharif, was partially radicalised by HT activists at King’s College, London. Maher also notes that HT targets Britain’s many foreign Muslim students in order to project the party’s message back into the Muslim world, where it is severely curbed by local governments. That’s why public meetings such as the one in Sydney are so important to HT, not just to radicalise Australian Muslims but to boost the organisation’s ability to recruit to the cause in countries that have banned it because they are only too well aware of the lethal threat it poses. Democratic countries such as Britain and Australia are rightly very reluctant to clamp down on political expression. But the decision that nothing can be done to ban HT’s ‘conveyor belt to terror’ is disastrously naive. |
Daily Mail, 5 July 2010
When someone is found to be thoroughly incompetent at their job, there is only one remedy. That individual has to be fired.
Unfortunately, there are many instances where that doesn’ t happen. Dud employees may be given a glowing reference just to get rid of them.
In the public sector in particular, they may even end up being promoted to get them out of the way.
The result is that they can then inflict their incompetence on a fresh set of unsuspecting victims. When this involves children whose life chances are blighted as a result, this is absolutely unforgivable.
Yet that is what is revealed by tonight’s edition of BBC TV’s Panorama, which claims that over the past four decades a mere 18 teachers have been drummed out of the profession for incompetence.
That figure is hard to credit — not least because it was only a decade ago that a register of teachers was set up, along the lines of the medical profession, from which a teacher could be ‘struck off ’ and thus prevented from ever teaching again.
But even if the precise figure is arguable, the fact that teachers have effectively been unsackable has indeed been a key factor in the desperate decline of British education.
Back in the early days of the Blair government, the then Chief Inspector of Schools Chris Woodhead caused a sensation when he stated that some 15,000 teachers were incompetent and should be sacked.
Two years ago, the General Teaching Council’s chief executive Keith Bartley said there could be as many as 17,000 ‘substandard’ teachers among the 500,000 registered teachers in the UK.
It wasn’t surprising that, far from being reduced during the intervening period, the figure had actually risen. For in the teaching profession it seems that virtually no one is ever sacked for incompetence.
For years, head teachers have complained that one of their main problems was that the terms of teachers’ contracts with local education authorities meant they were unable to sack those who were not up to scratch.
Now Panorama is apparently reporting the shocking fact that, instead of being removed from the profession, dud teachers are merely being recycled by being given good references in exchange for agreeing to look for work in alternative schools.
According to Mick Brookes, leader of the National Association of Head Teachers, this is a common practice which he says causes heads serious problems. The classroom teacher unions, however, think it is perfectly justified.
Well, there’s a surprise. In fact, it is an absolute betrayal of the children for whom school represents their one chance in life.
Bristol University professor Simon Burgess, who has researched the impact of bad teachers on pupil performance, says that if all the poor teachers were replaced by even just average ones achievement per pupil would rise by as much as half a grade.
With all due respect to Professor Burgess, we didn’t need an academic study to tell us that the quality of a teacher makes all the difference.
It is patently obvious that it is the most important factor in a child’s education. An inspirational teacher can transform a pupil’s prospects even in the most unpromising school.
Conversely, a rotten teacher can blight a pupil for life even in an apparently well-favoured school.
The fact that bad teachers are being recycled from one school to another means that other unfortunate children will get a lousy education.
Just imagine the outcry if incompetent doctors weren’t struck off but were moved to another hospital, thus exposing yet more patients to dangerous treatment.
Pupils may not be exposed to physical threat from useless teachers, but their entire life chances are certainly imperilled by them.
It was to lever up teachers’ standards — and also to boost their professional status — that the General Teaching Council was introduced ten years ago with the power to strike incompetent teachers off the register.
In fact, all it did was shore up the incompetence in a classic example of professionals sticking together — a sorry record which has led the new Education Secretary, Michael Gove, rightly to disband the Council altogether.
But the problem of incompetent teachers goes far deeper than a flawed regulatory structure or self-interested unions.
For the teaching profession’s implacable refusal to dump its bad apples is rooted in a desire to protect not just poorly performing employees but an entire way of thinking about education itself.
Take the explosion of anger and incredulity detonated by Chris Woodhead’s claim of 15,000 sub-standard teachers.
This was hardly an implausible figure, since every profession carries a proportion of dead wood which needs to be pruned and 15,000 amounted to fewer than 5 per cent of the total number of teachers in schools.
Yet for speaking this most elementary if inconvenient truth, Woodhead was instantly and viciously vilified by virtually the entire educational establishment.
This simply refused to accept there was anything wrong with teachers or teaching. All educational failure was blamed instead on child poverty, low school funding or parental inadequacy.
This was patently absurd, since there were always schools in the most deprived areas and with high proportions of pupils from highly disadvantaged backgrounds where pupils nevertheless achieved far more than in other schools.
The reason was always the superior quality of the teaching. But the real sting in this — and the reason Woodhead was crucified — was that such competence almost always went hand in hand with a traditional approach to education.
For the fact is that so much teachers’ incompetence has been inextricably tied up with the destructive dogma of ‘childcentred’ education, which has driven our entire school system off the rails.
The most successful teachers have always understood that children need to be inducted into a body of knowledge, to be taught in a structured and disciplined manner, to be corrected when they make mistakes.
But for decades, the predominant educational ideology has ordained that children effectively teach themselves, with teachers taking a back seat as mere ‘facilitators’.
What children feel about themselves has been deemed to be more important than what they know.
Achievement was bad — because it made others who didn’t achieve feel bad about themselves.
This led to the collapse of the teaching of reading and the dumbing down of virtually every subject on the curriculum. Indeed, it eroded the very basis of teaching as the transmission of knowledge.
Instead, it led to the lunacy of ‘learnacy’ — that prize bit of educational gibberish that says there is no such thing as reality, and so instead of acquiring knowledge children must just learn how to learn.
Throughout the Labour government years, the evidence of the enormous damage done by this ideological idiocy was systematically denied by the educational establishment. Unless Michael Gove gets to grip with this, his reforms will hit the buffers.
That means in the first place training teachers on the job in the schools. For little of this disaster can be laid at the door of the teachers themselves.
The real problem is located in our teacher training institutions, which have dressed up all this nonsense in pretentious, pseudo-intellectual psychobabble which masked the fact it was utter garbage.
Head teachers need to be given the power to hire and fire if they are ever to be able to run competent schools.
But it is those who teach the teachers, and have indoctrinated them into the pedagogy of institutionalised incompetence, who really need to be fired if our systemic problem of failure in the classroom is ever to be fixed.
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