Christian teacher forced out over Muslim pupil misbehaviour
LONDON: A Christian teacher … claimed he was forced out of his job after complaining that Muslim pupils as young as eight hailed the September 11 hijackers as heroes.
Nicholas Kafouris, 52, is suing his former school for racial discrimination. He told a tribunal that he had to leave his £30,000-a-year post because he would not tolerate the “racist” and “anti-Semitic” behaviour of Year 4 pupils.
The predominantly Muslim youngsters openly praised Islamic extremists in class and described the September 11 terrorists as “heroes and martyrs”.
One pupil said: “Don’t touch me, you’re a Christian” when he brushed against him. Others said: “We want to be Islamic bombers when we grow up”, and “The Christians and Jews are our enemies – you too because you’re a Christian”.
Mr Kafouris, a Greek Cypriot, taught for 12 years at Bigland Green Primary School in Tower Hamlets, East London.
The teacher claims racial discrimination by the school, its headmistress and her assistant head after they failed to take action about the comments made by pupils to him. …
“Some children were expressing delight at the death and killing of people of other cultures and religions.”
Extract from: Lucy Ballinger, “Christian teacher ‘forced out’ after complaining Muslim pupils praised 9/11 hijackers ‘as heroes'”, Daily Mail (UK), February 9, 2010.
URL: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249393/9-11-bombers-heroes-What-Muslim-children-told-Christian-teacher-forced-job-tolerating-racism.html
widely held assumption that children – babes, tweens, and teens – are innately wiser than their elders. They know better (sexual and fashion choices). They are discerning (music). They feel, therefore they understand (politics).
Or so we have come to think due to a stunning if under-appreciated cultural reversal. Once upon a time, we believed wisdom was an expression of experience and maturity. Today, we believe the exact opposite. …
It is hard to overstate the significance of this change more than half a century ago. It is this fundamental rearrangement of life’s building blocks that put successive decades on an entirely new footing from all that had come before. To say the tide had turned is to imply a temporary, cyclical shift. What had occurred – replacing the child’s duty to his parent with the parent’s duty to his child – has so far turned out to be permanent.
Extract from: Diana West, “Out of the mouths of babes” In Character: A Journal of Everyday Virtues (West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania), Fall 2009.
URL: www.incharacter.org/article.php?article=167
Decline of the stiff upper lip
The comments by Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire in Tatler, regarding the abandonment of the stiff upper lip in British society, are a welcome reminder of the days when this country still had purpose, backbone and self-control. The Duchess condemns the present “sloppy sentimental” culture in modern Britain and observes that money, illness and sex were not talked about in the old days, whereas now they are the only things people talk about.
“Self-pity and self-esteem, which are now the key things in schools, were not allowed,” she recalls. She is right. The modish cult of self-expression and self-indulgence in British schools, combined with a nanny-state culture of health and safety, is filleting all character out of the next generation. Discipline is non-existent. … Youngsters’ “experiences” and “feelings” are awarded spurious significance when what is required is enforced hard work in fields of genuine academic importance, coupled with rigid discipline. …
A vile culture of immature incivility, Philistinism and ignorance of adult life has ghettoised “students” so that they remain frozen within adolescence – as do their contemporaries outside higher education – subsidised by taxpayers.
Extract from: Gerald Warner, “Debo Deonshire reminds us of a Britain with backbone and purpose”, The Telegraph (UK) blog, February 4, 2010.
URL: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100025023/debo-devonshire-reminds-us-of-a-britain-with-backbone-and-purpose/
