Events in Birmingham suggest an Islamist plot to take over state schools. I'm not a natural supporter of anything concerning Islam, a religion which I think on the whole treats women pretty poorly, but I would like to spare a thought today for the beleaguered men of Allah.
In the first place, pressure groups of all kinds are at liberty to try and get themselves elected onto school governing boards. It's a thankless job done generally by the middle-class great and good (my wife does it). Why shouldn't Islamists have a go? There's nothing, as far as I'm concerned, preventing any organisation - boy scouts, naturists, the Woodcraft Folk, Morris dancers et al - from trying to do the same thing.
No, my objection lies with the people who are surprised that this is happening. In the first place, how dare they object when people try and get involved with local democracy. That's their right! Second, the objectors - Labour councillors who run Birmingham Council - are precisely the kind of people whose open door immigration policy invited the Islamic hardliners in to start with.
If you allow in an awful lot of people from a relatively small rural part of Pakistan (surprisingly, most of them from the area surrounding the town of Mirpur), you are going to find that population will pretty quickly start demanding that political and social rules come to reflect the mores and norms of the society they've left behind. Who can blame them?
And what norms those are. Muslims, extremist or otherwise, have radically different views about the role of religion in society, about the extent to which religion should dominate the individual's life, about the extent to which an individual should be free to marry whom they choose, about whether people can have sex before marriage, about whether women can go out to work or interact freely with other British people, about the way women should dress, about relations between husbands and their wives, about which legal system should govern their affairs, about women's right to enjoy sex without being hacked about, and even about the right of women to inherit money.
The idea that Muslims, extremist or otherwise, might want these cultural practices to be reflected in some way in the kind of things children should be taught at school seems to have come as a shock to some people. Not to me. It's inevitable, and all the more so when you dish out quite large sums of money to "community" groups, encouraging migrants to regard themselves as a self-contained pocket of the Asian sub-continent rather than New Britons.
I don't blame the Islamic fundamentalists for having a go. It's the people who brought them to Britain who need to have a look in the mirror.
