Tuesday, October 17, 2006

VEILED TEACHER CONTROVERSY IN BRITAIN

A British government minister joined an increasingly bitter debate about the rights of Muslim women to veil their faces, saying a teaching assistant should be fired for insisting on wearing one in school. Phil Woolas, the government's Race and Faith minister, was quoted by the Sunday Mirror newspaper as demanding that Aishah Azmi, a Muslim teaching assistant, be fired for refusing to remove her veil at work. She should be sacked. She has put herself in a position where she can't do her job," Woolas said.

Azmi has refused to remove her black veil, which leaves only her eyes visible, in front of male colleagues. She was suspended from her job, but has taken her case to an industrial tribunal, a court that handles cases on employment law, which will make a decision in the next few weeks.

Azmi, who is 24 and has two children, has insisted that she had been willing to remove her veil in class, as long as there were no adult males present. "She is denying the right of children to a full education by insisting that she wears the veil. If she is saying that she won't work with men, she is taking away the right of men to work in school," Woolas said.

The debate on the veils began earlier this month, when Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary who now serves as leader of the House of Commons, said Muslim women visiting his office should remove their veils. The opposition Conservatives also weighed in on the contentious issue, with one of the party's top officials accusing Muslim leaders of encouraging a "voluntary apartheid" that could help spawn homegrown terrorism.

David Davis, a top Conservative Party official, supported Straw for starting the debate. "What Jack touched on was the fundamental issue of whether in Britain we are developing a divided society," Davis told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper. "Whether we are inadvertently encouraging a kind of voluntary apartheid."

Prime Minister Tony Blair has praised Straw for raising the issue "in a measured and considered way," and urged Britons to engage in such discussions without "becoming hysterical."

Salman Rushdie, whose book "The Satanic Verses" once led to death threats against him by Islamic clerics, said last week that Straw "was expressing an important opinion, which is that veils suck, which they do. I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women."

Nazir Ahmed, the House of Lords' first Muslim legislator, today joined the fray by criticizing British politicians and the media for "demonizing" the country's Muslim community. In an interview with British Broadcasting Corp. radio, Ahmed, a moderate lawmaker of the governing Labour Party, said: "Let's be honest, there are people in our community who call themselves Muslims who have been threatening our national security. It is very unfortunate. "But the problem is that the politicians and some people in the media have used this for demonization of entire communities, which has become a very fashionable thing today."

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An insightful comment from a Columbia student about the antidemocratic attitudes there:

Columbia University is a place for rich kids - rich kids who agree with each other. Sure, some come from well-to-do Hispanic families - we're not all poor Mexicans, you know - and a few are from the black upper middle-class. But at Columbia, being "from Brooklyn" means you grew up in Park Slope. This is why Columbia has problems with free speech.

But first, a clarifier: The students and non-students who caused a ruckus at the Minutemen event last week were an assortment of radicals and fringe thinkers. They weren't "typical Columbia students" in any way, shape or form. Many weren't students at all. But the radicals on campus exist and act - much as radicals anywhere - with the tacit support of the broader community. Why is Columbia a sanctuary for these people? Why was Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minutemen, forcibly silenced and not just ignored?

Call it white guilt, though in a mutated form. There are Latinos at Columbia, but most of them are like me - our Hispanic heritage is invisible to the naked eye. Very few are brown, and even fewer come from poor or even working-class households. And the fact is that most Columbia students are afraid of poor people, or at least people who look poor. They see going above 125th Street as "being adventurous."

The insularity and homogeneity of Columbia's campus makes students feel guilty when they come across New Yorkers who are visibly less privileged. In the eyes of my fellow students, poor and working-class minorities are an exotic, vulnerable species that needs the protection and support of upstanding Ivy Leaguers like ourselves . . . Except when we actually have to be around them, in which case we complain about their bad manners and uncouth behavior. ("Can you believe that greasy-looking Dominican guy just whistled at me like that? How disgusting!")

Jim Gilchrist and the Minutemen hit a nerve at Columbia, because they say the things that so many students here at Coumbia feel so guilty about thinking.

Immigration in America isn't really about race. It's about class. There were no jingoist protests during the 1980s and '90s when equally dark-skinned doctors and software engineers from India flooded the American labor market. No, we loved them. Poor people, well, that's another story. I was talking with a classmate, one of Columbia's white Latinas, last week, and she explained to me her problem with "people who have no class." She started off complaining about the anti-immigrant tone that Midwestern Democrats have displayed as of late. "I don't know if I can still be a Democrat," she said. Then she started talking about the Mexicans that had invaded her placid Queens neighborhood when she was still in high school. "They left trash all over the soccer field!" she gasped. Well, what did our burgeoning little Latina activist do? She supported the building of dozens of mounds on the field so that it would no longer be suitable for soccer. Those dirty Mexicans stopped coming around after that, she explained. Never would they mess up her neighborhood again. So much for "Si se puede," I guess.

It's easy to support poor immigrants when they're a theoretical entity and you never actually have to deal with them on a day-to-day basis. The Minuteman melee is a case in point. The insularity of the campus, much as with the upper-crust suburbs from which Columbia students largely hail, leaves a lot of young people feeling empty about their lives. It all feels so structured and sanitized and safe. Where's the gritty reality we read about in all these books? Where's the anti-war protests and civil-rights struggle of our parents' generation? Where's the grand struggle for a just cause?

Of course, having never seen much grit for most of their lives, Columbia students tend to balk at the first sight of too much reality - like going above 125th Street. On the other hand, joining a protest group is easy and safe but still "edgy" and cool. It lets students feel good about themselves and their convictions and their fight against "the man" without ever having to leave the shelter and structure of campus. "No person is illegal," read the trilingual (English, Spanish, and Arabic) banner unfurled in protest as students stormed the Minutemen's stage last week. I wonder how many of those kids know a single illegal immigrant? (Well, maybe they know the pizza-delivery guy . . .)

I, for one, believe that the people who climb mountains and trek through the badlands of south Texas and Arizona to work in this country pay homage to the dogged, never-say-die spirit of the American dream. Illegal or not, they underpin the American economy and they do jobs that other Americans are unwilling to do. They should be embraced and legalized somehow, someway.

But the principle of free speech and the free exchange of ideas is at the heart of that American dream. Under no circumstance is it OK to forcibly silence or prevent from speaking someone we don't like, even a xenophobe or demagogue. It is a sad comment on the state of the American mind, but Jim Gilchrist is an important and influential voice in contemporary American politics and he deserves to be heard by the rich, guilty white kids of Columbia University.

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Islamic militants face purge in British schools and universities

Minister will order police and councils to identify hotspots of extremism

Hotspots of Islamic extremism will be identified in schools, colleges and universities under government plans to be announced today. Ruth Kelly, the Communities Secretary, will defy growing anger from Islamic leaders by ordering police and local authorities to root out Muslim extremists.

The announcement comes after the revelation yesterday that new faith schools could be forced to offer at least a quarter of their places to pupils of other religions and non-believers.

Ms Kelly will urge representatives from 20 “key” local councils to consider if they are doing enough to tackle extremism in schools, colleges and universities, and if they have identified “hot-spot” neighbourhoods and sections of the community that could be breeding grounds for such activity.

“In major parts of Britain the new extremism we’re facing is the single biggest security issue for local communities,” she will stay. “This is not just a problem for Muslim communities. The far Right is still with us, still poisonous, still trying to create and exploit divisions.”

The Department for Education has also prepared plans to ask university staff and lecturers to inform police of Muslim and “Asian-looking” students they suspect of involvement in supporting terrorists. An 18-page document due to be sent to universities and colleges by the end of the year expresses concern over Islamic societies and students from “segregated backgrounds”.

Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, is expected to suggest that opening up admissions to faith schools would help to ease racial tensions and give parents more choice. The move comes after a proposal this month by the Church of England to open up voluntarily 25 per cent of places in all its new schools to children irrespective of their religious beliefs.

The changes are likely to prove more controversial with Roman Catholics and Muslims. Critics of faith schools have long complained that they are exclusive and divide society, rather than promote cohesion. About a third, or 7,000, of all state schools in England have a religious ethos, mostly Christian. Four fifths of the top 200 secondaries are faith schools.

Mr Johnson will table an amendment to the Education and Inspections Bill when it returns to the Lords this week requiring new faith schools to reserve a quarter of their places for non-believers or children of other faiths. The change would place the initial decision about a school’s intake in the hands of the local education authority (LEA), enabling it to demand that up to a quarter of its places are open to families of different or no faiths.

“It is not a quota, per se, only obviously if there is a demand for places,” a source close to Mr Johnson said. “But if there is demand they [LEAs] will have the power to insist on up to 25 per cent of places being given up to non-faith pupils.”

Where there is opposition to the policy within the school, the Church or community, an appeal could be made to the Secretary of State who could allow the LEA to approve a faith school with fewer than 25 per cent non-faith pupils.

Shahid Malik, the Muslim Labour MP for Dewsbury, said of the move: “This is part of a strategy which says we can’t ignore segregation any longer. We have to start working to make people have a greater understanding of one another.”

Last week Lord Bruce- Lockhart, the head of the Local Government Association, suggested in The Times that state schools should introduce ethnic quotas into admissions criteria to break down the extreme segregation of pupils along cultural and religious lines.

A Tory spokesman gave Mr Johnson’s plan a guarded welcome, saying that David Cameron had made clear that he supported such initiatives, but that it should not be a matter of uniform national rules. Idris Mears, of the Association of Muslim Schools, said that imposing the proposals on minority faiths seemed to be socially unjust. “Most Muslim schools already have this provision in their regulations, but to impose it on us without increasing our numbers substantially doesn’t seem fair,” he said.

There are seven Muslim state schools in England, and five more are recommended for public funding. Tony Blair hopes to bring more of the 150 private Muslim schools into the state sector. There are two Sikh schools, 37 Jewish schools, 2,041 Catholic schools and 4,646 Church of England schools.

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