"Sleepwalking towards segregation"
Michelle Malkin
The New York Times looks at government-funded Islamic-only schools in Britain:
The sports hall doubles as a prayer room and dining hall for male teenagers, at other times for young women, but never the two together. In the kindergarten, female teachers, warned of an impending visit by a man, draw full facial veils before receiving their guest. When the guest arrives, the children offer a chorus in Arabic: “As salaam aleikum” — peace be upon you.
“Here we can keep ourselves on the path of religion,” said Nasir Nathalia, a 15-year-old student at the Leicester Islamic Academy. His friend Mohammed Seedat agrees. “There is less chance here of going off the track,” he said.
This is the piety that Britain’s expanding Islamic schools seek to project, casting themselves as typical of the thousands of faith schools, mainly Christian, that make up roughly one-third of all publicly financed British schools.
But the visible differences — the way female teenagers wear the full-length dress and head-covering and the boys wear black robes and skullcaps — play into a ferocious debate about the sense of separateness or readiness to integrate Britain’s estimated 1.8 million Muslims, about 3 percent of the population...
Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch and Aayan Hirsi Ali of AEI comment on BBC radio about Islamic separateness, the Muslim veil, and the backdoor adoption of sharia law.
Andrew Bostom reviews Spencer's brave and invaluable new book, "The Truth about Muhammad:"
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch Parliamentarian and secular Muslim reformer, has courageously identified the taboo discussion which must take place to understand, and defuse, the scourge of modern jihad terrorism: "In their thinking about radical Muslim terrorism most politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and other commentators have avoided the core issue of the debate, which is Muhammad's example."
...Disregarding murderous threats, and the prospect of social ostracism, the intrepid author Robert Spencer -- a serious independent scholar of Islam for the past two decades -- has taken up Hirsi Ali's challenge in his compelling new book, "The Truth About Muhammad." ...
