Skip to main content

Trojan horse: the real story behind the fake 'Islamic plot' to take over schools

In 2014, documents alleging a conspiracy to Islamise Birmingham schools were leaked to the media, sparking a national scandal. The papers were debunked – but the story remains as divisive as ever. What really happened? By Samira Shackle

In November 2013, Birmingham city council received a strange document in the post. It was a photocopy of a letter, which seemed to be part of a correspondence between Muslims conspiring to take over local schools and run them according to strict Islamic principles. The photocopy was accompanied by a note from an anonymous person claiming that they had found these pages in their boss’s office.

The letter – supposedly written by an Islamist offering advice to a co-conspirator – outlined a five-stage strategy called “Operation Trojan Horse”. Step one: identify vulnerable schools where most of the pupils are Muslim. Next, identify a group of sympathetic parents to agitate for an Islamic agenda. Then put in place governors who adhere to the same conservative Islamic beliefs. Next, identify staff to disrupt the school from within by changing rules and undermining unsympathetic colleagues. Finally, run anonymous letter and PR campaigns with the aim of forcing the headteacher to resign. The letter stated that this strategy “is tried and tested within Birmingham”, and named specific schools where it had supposedly been carried out.

Continue reading...The Guardian http://ift.tt/2wnfhlK September 01, 2017 at 09:00AM
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using RStudio and LaTeX

(This article was first published on r – Experimental Behaviour , and kindly contributed to R-bloggers) This post will explain how to integrate RStudio and LaTeX, especially the inclusion of well-formatted tables and nice-looking graphs and figures produced in RStudio and imported to LaTeX. To follow along you will need RStudio, MS Excel and LaTeX. Using tikzdevice to insert R Graphs into LaTeX I am a very visual thinker. If I want to understand a concept I usually and subconsciously try to visualise it. Therefore, more my PhD I tried to transport a lot of empirical insights by means of  visualization . These range from histograms, or violin plots to show distributions, over bargraphs including error bars to compare means, to interaction- or conditional effects of regression models. For quite a while it was very tedious to include such graphs in LaTeX documents. I tried several ways, like saving them as pdf and then including them in LaTeX as pdf, or any other file ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Explaining models with Triplot, part 1

[This article was first published on R in ResponsibleML on Medium , and kindly contributed to R-bloggers ]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here ) Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't. Explaining models with triplot, part 1 tl;dr Explaining black box models built on correlated features may prove difficult and provide misleading results. R package triplot , part of the DrWhy.AI project, is aiming at facilitating the process of explaining the importance of the whole group of variables, thus solving the problem of correlated features. Calculating the importance of explanatory variables is one of the main tasks of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). There are a lot of tools at our disposal that helps us with that, like Feature Importance or Shapley values, to name a few. All these methods calculate individual feature importance for each variable separately. The problem arises when features used ...
Post a Comment
Read more