German Court approves Muslim fundamentalist classes in school

An excellent Cantonese proverb says that causing trouble in your own house is "like catching a tapeworm and shoving it up your [hindquarters]."

Admittedly it loses some of the mellifluity in the translation but it applies to the decision by a German court that allows Muslim fundamentalists to teach religion classes in Berlin's public schools.

BERLIN--Told that she couldn't sit in on religion classes for the Muslim students at Rixdorfer Elementary School, Marion Berning went into the classroom anyway on the pretext of fixing a window. What she found stunned and angered her. The teacher was saying that "women are for the house, for the children. And the girls were sitting like this," she says, placing her hands in her lap, slumping her shoulders in an imitation of a meek posture, and casting her eyes downward. "While all of the boys," she is yelling now, "they were talking and playing. This is fundamentalism."

Berning isn't a nosy meddler. She is the principal at Rixdorfer school in the Berlin neighborhood known as Little Istanbul, where Turkish markets line the streets and Muslim worshipers file into discreet prayer rooms down back alleys. And these days her job is complicated by a widening gulf among her students. There have been more fights and more name-calling incidents at Rixdorfer, Berning says, since a German court granted an umbrella group called the Islamic Federation the right to teach religion classes in Berlin schools--where 8 percent of students are Turkish Muslims. Muslim girls are dropping out of sports classes and field trips, she says, and there are fewer friendships between Muslim and non-Muslim students.

So it isn't enough that intolerance and hatred be taught at madrassas or at home but it should be enshrined in schools as well? And in the meantime the English want to 'protect' fundamentalism with anti-hate speech legislation...

HT: Discarded Lies