The Centre For Social Cohesion

Some 200 mosques and Islamic schools mainly in West Yorkshire are teaching Muslim children to take on extremism with radical preachers' own choice weapon: Islamic scripture.

A new program of lessons devised by Sajid Hussain, an Imam with the Bradford Council for Mosques, aims to teach Muslim children civic values using examples from the Quran.

“It’s okay saying Islam teaches against suicide bombings, but we need to know why,” Hussain told The Sunday Times. “It’s very important that young Muslims understand that their faith is not divisive.”

There is a bizarre story in today’s Times. Apparently, Education Secretary Ed Balls will announce today that all secondary schools must include compulsory lessons in ‘happiness, well-being and good manners’.

They are being introduced reportedly on the basis of the apparent improvement in behaviour and academic performance of primary pupils who had received such lessons as part of an extensive pilot programme named ‘Seal’ which stands for ‘Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning’.

The Centre for Social Cohesion's latest report 'Hate on the State' was featured extensively on BBC's Newsnight last night.

The report - which is available online - examines how many of the UK's public libraries have promoted Islamic extremism by stocking books by convicted preachers such as Abu Hamza al-Masri and Sheikh al-Faisal.

Douglas Murray, the director of the Centre for Social Cohesion, told the BBC that the Tower Hamlet's books collection "is a collection that is warped towards one particular extreme interpretation of Islam."

The programme showed the report's findings being endorsed by Tariq Ramadan, a leading Muslim thinker, Haras Rafiq, the leader of the Sufi Muslim Council and Ed Husain, the author of 'The Islamist'.

According to the Times, Riyadh ul-Haq, is set to become the UK leader of the Deobandi movement, a neo-fundamentalist, revivalist Islamic movement.

Despite being educated and trained at an Islamic school in Britain, the 36 year-old still has a radical agenda that encourages and approves segregation and hatred.

A number of Councils have responded to the Centre for Social Cohesion’s report Hate on the State.

The Islamist movement Hizb ut-Tahrir, feared and in some cases banned by governments from Britain to Central Asia, recently took a body blow: the defection of senior member Maajid Nawaz, whose story will be featured Tuesday night on BBC2's "Newsnight" programme.

Nawaz went public late last month with his departure two months ago from Hizb ut-Tahrir, saying that a 2002 - 2006 stretch in an Egyptian prison on the group's behalf had given him time to reconsider their ideology.

On his blog, Nawaz described Hizb ut-Tahrir as distracted from Islam's true essence by grandiose political projects.

No society can flourish in the absence of its enjoying a considerable degree of cohesion among its members.

In determining how much cohesion a society enjoys, few factors play a more decisive role than do the policies it adopts towards two decisive matters. These are immigration and education.

The sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 was a perfect date for a good-news story to emerge from the BBC.

The Newsnight programme last night focussed on the criticisms of Hizb ut-Tahrir by Maajid Nawaz, formerly one of the organisation’s leading operatives. His testimony of how the movement he has known so well operates and thinks was a vital and landmark event in the debate which has been raging so publicly for six years now.

The London borough of Harrow has granted planning permission for the UK's first state-funded Hindu school.

The decision - made on Wednesday - lifts the final barrier to the construction of the school which is expected to open in September of next year.

Word reaches us of a grass-roots response to the Centre’s recent publication Hate on the State: How British libraries encourage Islamic extremism (download by clicking on link here).

Local Councillors and residents of Tower Hamlets are to gather tomorrow morning to launch a petition demanding the removal of hate-books from the shelves of their public libraries. The East London Advertiser this week has a double-page spread highlighting local feeling in Tower Hamlets on the matter.

Although we rightly worry about the potentially divisive effects of faith schools, on-campus extremism, and the hateful intolerance that some Muslims show former co-religionists who leave Islam, in actuality the battle for social cohesion will be lost or won not so much by what takes place in Britain than by what happens in the Middle East.

For it has been there where the Islamist virus currently plaguing the world was first spawned, and it has been this aggressive, intolerant and supremacist ideology that ultimately fuels all demands and forms of activity by Muslims that so currently imperil social cohesion at home.

Conservative Home today carries front-page photos and an article about the petition-launch outside the Whitechapel Ideas Store yesterday to get ‘hate-books’ out of the area’s libraries.

Councillor Phil Briscoe – who was among the Councillors who joined the Centre outside the library – writes on Conservative Home:

So much for employer references: a London-area hospital has hurriedly suspended its chaplain upon being informed by the police that he is an Islamic extremist kicked out of his own mosque. Yet hospital officials may have ignored earlier warnings.

One could imagine the look of fear and horror on the face of the Indian police officer as the Quran, in slow motion, slipped through his sweaty fingers.

A riot soon ensued around the Deabandi Jamia Milia Islamia University in the district of Sahinbagh.

‘Every citizen who answer[s] the call of the country - policemen and women, our security and emergency services, our health services - all le[ave] their mark on this island's story by keeping us safe. They are the pride of Britain.

‘Just as our armed services with bravery and heroism every single day also make us proud. We mourn those who have been lost and we honour all those who in distant places of danger give so much to our country.’

So spoke Gordon Brown yesterday at the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth.

In response to the patriotic sentiments here expressed, one feels tempted to respond:

Thousands of British Hindus have travelled to Liverpool to take part in a religious ceremony on the River Mersey.

Over 5,000 pilgrims crowded onto boats and ferries to take part in religious rituals which included immersing a statue of the Elephant God, Lord Ganesh, in the river.

Dr Shiv Pande, secretary of the Indo British Association in the North which helped organise the ceremony said the River Mersey is worshipped by British Hindus as an English version of the River Ganges.

The case of the Muslim dentist who would not treat a Muslim woman unless she covered her face has received wide-spread press attention.

Shocking as it is, that the dentist Omer Butt displayed such flagrant discrimination and sectarianism, it is heartening to reflect that - with the General Dental Council disciplinary hearing finding him guilty of discrimination - he has at least not got away with it.

The spectre of billionaire Saudi Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, an old hand at silencing journalists with legal sabre-rattling, has recently led prominent British news publications to pull the plug on articles criticising him, this week's Private Eye reveals.

Unfortunately, Private Eye isn't good enough to offer the scoop online, but here's the meat of it: