UK: A Clash of Educations, Part II

by Denis MacEoin • June 27, 2019 at 5:00 am

"It seems it was far less politically complicated to keep quiet." — Baroness Cox, address on grooming gangs to the House of Lords, May 14, 2019.
"In the context of schooling, it manifests itself as the imposition of an aggressively separatist and intolerant agenda, incompatible with full participation in a plural, secular democracy.... It appears to be a deliberate attempt to convert secular state schools into exclusive faith schools in all but name. (5:2)" — Peter Clarke, the Deputy Assistant Commissioner and head of the Metropolitan Police's counter-terrorism branch, in a report for the House of Commons, July 22, 2014.
Is Ofsted, the schools inspectorate, still hampered by an unwillingness to ask hard questions and a desire to "avoid giving offence"?

In the light of recent protests outside schools in Birmingham, it is likely that many fundamentalists are still working to restrict attempts to bring Muslim children inside the way of life British society offers them. Pictured: Birmingham, England. (Image source: Brian Clift/Wikimedia Commons)

Recent protests about supposed LGBT lessons in a school in Birmingham, England, have drawn attention from the media, politicians, the High Court, and the National Secular Society. While the protests may well spread to other cities, for the moment they are contained. When these lessons, which are based on the "No Outsiders" curriculum within the international system of "Diversity Education," become legally compulsory for almost all schools in 2020, either the protests will die out or become more clamorous in a struggle to rescind the law -- an act to which the government might well not agree.

The question of demands placed on Western governments to alter national laws in order to accommodate religious rulings remains an issue that is divisive, notably between secular states and citizens who might not want a secular state but a religious one instead.

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Turkey Loses an Ally

by Uzay Bulut • June 27, 2019 at 4:00 am

Erdogan's close ties to Bashir appear to have had the goal of expanding Turkey's economic and military influence in Africa as well as in the Gulf. After the ouster of Bashir, however, all of Turkey's endeavors in Sudan, including a key Turkish strategic project on the Red Sea, could now be in jeopardy -- bad news for a Turkish government that already facing serious economic problems.
Bashir granted Erdoğan the use, near Egypt and Saudi Arabia, of Suakin Island, a Sudanese port city in the Red Sea.... The Turkish press reported that Ankara was preparing to build a "military base" on the island, which would turn it into the "second Turkish eye in the Mediterranean after Cyprus."
According to the Turkish financial newspaper, Dünya, billion-dollar business deals -- including Turkey's investment in a new airport in Khartoum, as well as in the fields of agriculture, textiles, and oil -- could also be in jeopardy.

The April 11 military coup that ousted Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir after 30 years of Islamist rule seems to have the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan extremely worried. Pictured: Omar al-Bashir. (Photo by Omar Rashidi/PPO via Getty Images)

The April 11 military coup that ousted Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir after 30 years of Islamist rule seems to have the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan extremely worried.

The Turkish government, in its attempts to prop up Bashir's ailing government, had invested heavily in Sudan. The ouster of Bashir, after months-long protests, has thrown the cooperation between the Turkish and Sudanese regimes in intelligence, economics and military, among other matters, into uncertainty.

Although Turkey is a member of NATO with long-standing aspirations to become part of the European Union -- while Bashir came to power in 1989 by overthrowing Sudan's democratically elected government and was later indicted by the International Criminal Court as a war criminal -- Erdoğan and his loyalists are blaming the United States, Israel and other "global powers" for toppling their ally.

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