It's the Saudis, stupid

Melanie Phillips

That fine journalist John Ware has performed yet another important public service with his expose on BBC One’s Panorama tonight of the hatred and sedition with which children are being indoctrinated in some British Muslim schools. His revelations were sufficiently shocking to have been exercising this morning’s papers in advance of this evening’s transmission. In some of these schools, even very young children are being taught to regard the country of which they are citizens as an enemy to be fought and defeated; how to murder homosexuals and where to cut off hands or feet of others who have transgressed sharia law; and to hate all unbelievers but especially the Jews about whom these children are taught monstrous lies and libels.

Of course the school inspection authority, Ofsted, is totally useless in even detecting let alone doing anything about all this. The Education Secretary Michael Gove – who in another life wrote a book about the global threat of radical Islam – declared on camera that, regardless of respect for freedom of speech, these materials ‘should not be used in English schools’ and that ‘We cannot have antisemitic material of any kind in English schools’. (To which one could say, well that means banning half the Eng. Lit. canon; the point that Gove undoubtedly meant, however, was that such bigotry must not be taught uncritically as if it is true and thus teaching racial libels and inciting hatred, which is what these Muslim schools are doing).

Does anyone think for one second, however, that the promises to reform the inspection system and get a grip on all this amount to more than a row of beans? Of course not. The Policy Exchange think-tank has produced a report to coincide with tonight’s Panorama which makes a number of suggestions about how to police all faith schools. Does anyone think for one millisecond that this list of worthy ideas will make a ha’porth of difference -- to a problem which in any event involves only Islamic schools? Of course not.

What John Ware’s fine report has revealed is merely the tip of an enormous iceberg on which the UK Titanic has holed itself below the waterline. The most extreme material he discovered was in part-time weekend and evening Islamic schools, which are teaching from textbooks provided by Saudi Arabia and which teach the school curriculum of Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia is the wellspring of the Sunni Islam jihad against the free world. It is a foaming geyser of fanatical Islamic bigotry against unbelievers and especially Jews. It was Saudi Wahabbism that radicalised the Muslims of Pakistan who, when they immigrated in large number into Britain in the 1980s, accordingly imported with them jihadi educational institutions -- which then radicalised Muslim children born and bred in the UK and turned them into fanatics, often to the utter dismay of their parents.

Saudi Arabia isn’t just behind some part-time Muslim schools in Britain. It is funding Islamic studies at British universities, subverting the very basis of objective western scholarship by turning such courses into fanatical religious propaganda. Saudi Arabia is also funding extremist mosques in Britain. Saudi Arabia is also promoting sharia banking in Britain. Saudi Arabia is also helpfully establishing partnerships with more and more cash-strapped British and multinational companies.

In short, Saudi Arabia is buying up Britain and establishing within it an ever-expanding bridgehead for sedition in the furtherance of jihad and the ultimate goal of Islamisation. The most important measure to be taken to rid British schools of the scourge identified by John Ware is not to beef up Ofsted or improve ‘due diligence’ in enforcing English law against extremism. It is to ban all Saudi funding of such schools – indeed, to ban all Saudi funding of British educational and religious institutions.

What are the chances of Britain taking such action against this arch-enemy of the west? Nil. For the British regard Saudi Arabia as its friend and strategic ally. Why? Well, because it has oodles of boodle and all that oil for starters (the reason the US, too, is in Saudi’s pocket). And also because, having spawned al Qaeda, it is now having to defend itself against the jihadi monster that regards Saudi too as its enemy – thus causing British diplomats to murmur admiringly about the clever and pioneering Saudi strategy of reprogramming jihadis into quiescent citizens. Well pardon me if I don’t send up a cheer.

Do the British know that the Saudis speak out of every side of their mouths simultaneously? Yes of course they do. But because they are British, they think they can outwit them. That’s because the British think they are wholly superior to backward Arab johnnies whom they’ve been dividing and ruling for centuries.They think this is the cleverest game in town.

But it’s the Saudis (along with the Iranians) who are playing the longest and the shrewdest game in history. While the British stupidly and suicidally appease the Islamists, trying to play one bit of the Muslim Brotherhood against another and blaming everything but Islamic fanaticism for global terror -- thus refusing to acknowledge the religious war that is being waged against the west on many different fronts and thus ensuring that the British will be defeated by an enemy they cannot even bring themselves to name -- the Saudis are reeling in the United Kingdom like a fish on a line.

That is the terrible truth behind tonight’s Panorama.