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Notes -
https://news.sky.com/story/muslim-student-loses-legal-challenge-against-michaela-community-schools-prayer-ban-13116385
In what is perhaps the first win Secularism has experienced in a long time, a high court judge has ruled against a challenge brought forward by a muslim pupil claiming that lack of prayer rooms at hier school were a substantial opposition to her faith. The judge's reasoning is that the school explicitly advertised itself as secular and would not permit certain activities in an attempt to minise friction between pupils. This outcome was accomplished in spite of threats and bomb scares made to the school and criminal damage to both the school and a few of the homes of the staff who worked there.
Michaela Community School is not a typical institution, hence why it was not only able to fight back against Islamists, but also win. Situated in a particularly deprived part of London, it boasts extremely successful grades compared to not only the borough but the wider country as a whole. It accomplishes this through rules many consider extreme, including no talking in corridors, demerits for failing to remove your book from your bag and flip to the correct page in under 10 seconds and mirrors removed from bathrooms in order to avoid distractions.
Its head, Katharine Birbalsingh, is not a typical educator. An Indo-Guyanese woman and once a Conservative advisor for social mobility, her comments on education, society and the role of its members routinely antagonise left of centre commentators. Michaela is a free school, indepedent of the local authority and thus she is immunised against potential attempts by that local authority and other insitutions to instill accepted views into her school. This is I think a large part of why she won - she ultimately only answers to herself and those parents in her community who are in favour of her school and the way she runs it, and can thus ignore detractors in a way that an LEA controlled, union dependent teacher can't.
The school really is pretty grim, though. Its big selling point is that it takes children from all sorts of different minority backgrounds, forces them to get along, and manages to educate them to a high level. But the price for that is severe: anything which might cause cultural conflict between children is removed. So all meals are vegetarian, to prevent conflict between vegetarians and meat-eaters. Muslims don't get to pray, and neither do Christians. I have sympathy in this specific case because the prayer conflict resulted from aggressive children forcing others to pray or be labelled bad muslims, but my feelings about the school are ambivalent.
If the only way to make a multicultural community work is an aggressive secularism that excises huge bits of everyday life, I'm not sure that's worth it.
Rum Millet and pillarization seems to work as well as laicite.
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Interesting. My original assumption was the the headteacher was preventing someone from praying out of her own volition (bad), but in this case I can see why the headteacher wanted such a policy (and would support her in it).
This makes perfect sense. I don't think the fault line in particular the school wished to avoid was meat/no-meat (in that case why not take it further and make everything vegan?) but rather the desire to avoid catering to special religious dietary requirements like halal/kosher which would again give the studnets somethign to tribalize over. Removing meat entirely from the menu is a particularly elegant solution here.
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For me, this highlights what a terrible idea it was to accept Muslim immigrants to Western nations in large numbers. Resolving the irreconcilable differences between Muslims and Christians is much, much harder than agreeing that they're actually quite different and would be happier living separately. I don't care if Muslims want to pray five times a day and refuse to eat pork, more power to them, but I want English kids to just be able to eat normal English meals without someone from an alien culture taking offense. If you want to move to England, learn to be English rather than demanding accomodations.
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I am pretty sure that the school is for the underclass/lower class. In those cases, yes, in order for people to get along even to the point that they stop disrupting the learning process you practically have to beat the tribalism out of them.
Multiculturalism is not necessary for a disruptive learning environment (CVUHSD in LA is ~75% Hispanic and tests even worse than the average LA high school) nor is it sufficient (plenty of wealthy zip codes with a lot of immigrants where the kids is definitely learning, even if they have their own dysfunctions).
Yep. It's non selective and draws its pupils from a known poor area full of poor people. It's not somewhere I'd want to send my future children too (it would stifle them) but its policies and ethos are excellent for turning little shits (who have nothing in them to be stifled in the first place) into decent if unremarkable members of society, I want to see 100x of these schools all over the country.
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Yeah, I went to a "multicultural" school mainly made up of the children of middle-to-upper-middle class people from across the globe. Russians, Chinese, Nigerians.
None of this shit was needed, because people mostly self-segregated and figured out a way to live within that* and teachers simply didn't tolerate shit, it's not like they couldn't find someone else to pay those extortionate tuition fees. My first assumption hearing this was this was a no-excuse school for the problem kids (I wonder if this is a "win" or not for Wax's model: the 'no-excuse' school still faced attempts to destroy it on grounds of difference, just as she claims income-integration schools do, yet it survived)
* Though maybe the next generation will lose the segregation aspect and have more conflict as a result...
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Nothing stops the multiculturalism from existing outside the school walls though. Let the parents complain as they wish, which they have. See if the tradeoff is deemed worth it in the moment and in the result. The lack of protests from other parents about this forced secularisation and success in tamping down this islamic contingent would, ironically, likely lead to greater minority enrolment.
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Really? I get that it’s the U.K., but I’m skeptical that the state is getting too cozy with any particular religion.
This looks like the right decision.
I'm not sure we're going to see Sharia law anytime soon, but the state seems pretty fearful of pushing back on the excesses of one particular religion. The Palestine protests in London show that the city police have pretty much abandoned the monopoly on violence when large groups of Muslims get together.
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The curling into a fetal surrender position is quite comfortable. The teacher in Batley is still in hiding, the groveling of the West Yorkshire mum is still on full display to see, and lets not get started on the lack of consequences for the grooming gangs. I would say the UK establishment and population are indeed quite comfortable with one particular religion, and will continue to be salami sliced as the London elite gaslight Norf FC gammons that this isn't happening and Noticing is proof of their systemic racism.
These could use links or at least slightly more explanation.
Batley and Spen: teacher is in hiding after local muslims threaten to kill him for teaching about the Charlie Hedbo massacre, which involved showing the offending picture.
https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/year-prophet-muhammad-batley-school-23493076
West Yorkshire Quran incident: Autistic Boy, maybe on the egging of his muslim friends, is filmed stomping in his own copy of a Quran. Death threats against the boy cause his mother to be filmed issuing a grovelling apology while wearing a hijab, while the police sagely advise that there isn't really a problem because death threats aren't to be taken seriously. https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/local-news/police-statement-wakefield-schoolboy-who-26379609
There are plenty more incidents that straddle the line of Noticing. The manchester arena bomber was not stopped because of concerns about being racist, the home invader Mizzy said people only injected to his 'pranks' because he is black (not quite the Islam surrender, but maps closely) the liverpool bombing was memory holed after the bomber was revealed to be a refugee, then unearthed when he turned out to have converted to Christianity and reholed when investigators found he had reverted to Islam, the Leicester riots saw police blame the Hindus for oppressing the local muslim minority...
The list of examples is quite extensive and even a non Britisher would be able to casually recount simple news articles that reached local escape velocity. Local lads in all these towns know far more about whats going on, and the passivity of the UK establishment in the face of unrepentant and actively exploitative muslim contingent who sees the weakness not as charity to be reciprocated but stupidity to be taken advantage of.
Thanks.
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We must also not forget the parliamentary crisis of procedure caused by activism over recent tensions occuring in a region miles away from the country that very few people have a genuine stake in. Granted, a large part of the problem are enablers, not actual theists, but this problem still remains.
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I mean hundreds, if not thousands, of people in those gangs have been arrested over the last 5 years. They just get sentenced to relatively short sentences because that’s what the sentencing guidelines say is owed for their offenses.
And then not deported because activist judges say things like "he might be unfairly stigmatised in his home culture for being a child rapist" or "this child rapist needs anti-schizophrenia medication that he can't get in his home country so he must stay here".
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The grooming gang predators need to be whipped on a weekly basis followed by a promise upon release that if they ever get caught again it'll be immediate castration plus twice the sentence they just served. It's the only language they understand.
Unfortunately Westerners are too far gone at this point and will not listen to groups that have actual historical experience of properly subjugating the excesses of these people. At this point what can you even do...
Or simply declared outlaw and exposed to the tender mercies of their victim’s families.
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Presumably they meant the time period during which there weren't any consequences.
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As much as I agree that the failure to put and keep offenders behind bars is a result of generous laws requiring exhaustive investigations and light sentencing guidelines for humanistic as logistical purposes, it is impossible to wipe the stain of Labours political correctness from the grooming gang issue. Literally every statement from Labour about grooming gangs complains about how the Far Right is fixated on this issue and that actually most sex crime is done by white people (82% of UK population) so these stupid racists better shut up for the sake of diversity. Starmer seems to have clamped down on Momentums Corbyn-era excesses but Labour still wants to push the spotlight away from the Kashmir voters forming the Red Wall.
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