British Student union president sparks controversy by saying she would like to 'oppress white people', everyone should read the Koran and that men and women must not be friends

All that is pretty orthodox Islam.  The only wonder is that non-Muslim English students voted for the garbage

A Muslim student union leader has claimed she would like to 'oppress white people' and has suggested there would be an Islamic takeover if more people read the Koran.

Zamzam Ibrahim, who was elected President of Salford University's Student Union in March, also suggested friendship between men and women is un-Islamic and is opposed to the government's anti-radicalisation strategy.

The Swedish-Somali student officer also described the government's Prevent strategy as 'disastrous' and 'racist'.

As well as being president of Salford's Student's Union, Ms Ibrahim is an officer with the National Union of Student's Block of 15 committee

As well as being president of Salford's Student's Union, Ms Ibrahim is an officer with the National Union of Student's Block of 15 committee

In one message she responded to a question on AskFM on what book everyone should read. She said: 'The Quaraan. We would have an Islamic takeover!'

In another message on the topic of the possibility of friendship between a man and a woman, she replied: 'I've had this debate with many friends! Maybe in some cases but Islamically it's incorrect for girls to be friends with a guy anyway!

'So I'm gonna say NO not the kind of friendship they can have with the same gender there is always boundaries.'

In one tweet from May 9, 2012 under the hashtag #ifIwasPresident, she wrote: 'I'd oppress white people just to give them a taste of what they put us through!'

Ms Ibrahim was also recently elected to the National Union of Students Block of 15 committee.

She has also completed a BSc in Business and Financial Management.

During her campaign for election with the NUS, Ms Ibrahim, who is a Muslim, claimed: 'Since Brexit referendum result, there has been a rise in hate crime by 41 per cent. NUS needs to continue the great work on combating racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic and ableist hate crime.

'If elected, I will continue to work with NUS Officers and ARAF campaigns to develop networks to support students and activists affected by Hate Crime, to fight against the disastrous racist PREVENT strategy and support international students and migrant communities.'

The student union at the college - where Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi attended - is opposed to the government's PREVENT strategy.

According to The Spectator, Ms Ibrahim has deleted a large number of messages form her social media accounts. 

According to the Student's Union: 'The government’s Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 places a statutory requirement on public bodies – including universities – to "prevent people being drawn into terrorism".

'The Prevent agenda, as part of the Government’s "anti-extremism" work has been used to create an expansive surveillance architecture to spy on the public and to police dissent, systematically targeting Black people and Muslims.'

The students claimed the government's prevent strategy was 'demonising Muslim students on campus'.

One college source told MailOnline: 'Given that as Student Union President involved working with students of all all walks of life its a bit inappropriate for someone like her to hold the role of representing students.'

MailOnline has approached the National Union of Students and Salford Unversity's Students Union to seek a comment from Ms Ibrahim.

They responded: 'NUS has a Code of Conduct for its elected officers and we take all complaints seriously.'

Ms Ibrahim's comments follow the controversy surrounding former NUS president Malia Bouattia, who failed to get re-elected earlier this year.

Ms Bouattia became subject of a Commons home affairs committee meeting after she described Birmingham University as a 'Zionist outpost'.  

In scathing findings, the committee said that she did not appear to take the issue of campus anti-Semitism 'sufficiently seriously' and showed a 'worrying disregard' for her duty to represent all students and promote balanced and respectful debate.

Ms Bouattia's statement in a co-authored 2011 blog that Birmingham 'has the largest Jsoc (Jewish Society) in the country whose leadership is dominated by Zionist activists' was condemned in the MPs' report as 'unacceptable, and even more so from a public figure such as the president of the NUS'.

SOURCE 





Ireland: Catholic schools to stop faith-based admission

Richard Bruton plans to scrap the baptism barrier which prevents children who are not being brought up following a religion from accessing certain schools.

State-funded schools will no longer be allowed to block local children who do not subscribe to the Catholic faith.

Exceptions will be made for the country’s 191 Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, Methodist, Islamic, Quaker and Jewish schools to ensure that children of those faiths can still access places based on their religion.

The education minister said he was hoping to introduce the legislation as quickly as possible but it is unclear whether it will be in place for admissions next year.

SOURCE 





Making high-quality career training central to American schooling

At a dinner for Silicon Valley executives in early 2011, President Barack Obama asked Apple CEO Steve Jobs what it would take to bring iPhone manufacturing back to America. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” the typically blunt Apple cofounder told the president. Examining Jobs’s claim, the New York Times looked at Apple’s vast Chinese operations and found that workers there not only worked for less than Americans did; more of them were skilled. To oversee production and guide some 200,000 assembly-line workers, Apple, for instance, needed 8,700 industrial engineers—positions that required more than a high school diploma but less than a full college degree. While abundant in China, these kinds of employees are harder to find in the United States. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need,” an unnamed Apple executive told the Times.

That’s a refrain that more and more American business executives are uttering these days. Even as politicians argue over how to create or keep “good jobs” in the U.S., a recent National Federation of Independent Businesses survey reported that the percentage of small businesses saying that they get no or few qualified applicants for available jobs has hit a 17-year high. Studies estimate that hundreds of thousands of positions in manufacturing firms went unfilled, even during the post-financial-crisis downturn and subsequent weak recovery, because of the lack of skilled workers. “Open manufacturing jobs are at an all-time high,” the former CEO of Siemens USA, the industrial giant, observed in December.

Much of the problem, say business leaders and employment experts, is an educational failure. Career and technical training in the U.S. hasn’t evolved to keep up with the transformation of the modern economy—with many schools even slashing funding for vocational education. Worse, parents, guidance counselors, and even politicians keep pushing students to enter four-year college programs that provide no clear paths to employment. Meantime, jobs in traditional blue-collar trades—from manufacturing to automobile repair—have grown more sophisticated and demanding. A huge gap between job seekers’ skills and employers’ needs has resulted.

The good news is that some visionary businesses, educators, and nonprofit funders are intensifying efforts to revamp and upgrade career education—twenty-first-century vocational education—in the United States. The obstacles to such efforts are many, including school officials’ reluctance to partner with industry and lingering prejudices against vocational schooling. But for the rising number of students participating in programs that tailor education to career goals—programs that emphasize work-related experience and teach to the high standards necessary for modern jobs—the payoff has been impressive. Now the challenge is to build on those successes to ignite a broader cultural change that makes high-quality career training central to American education.

Congress may have had good intentions in 1917 when it passed the Smith-Hughes National Vocational Education Act to promote vocational training in agriculture, industry, and trades. But the law, which required any student receiving trade-skill instruction with federal funds to spend at least half of his time in vocational training, tended to cut off vocational training from public school education. Career education eventually developed into something that teachers and guidance counselors encouraged students of low academic achievement to pursue.

Though the robust post–World War II American economy provided many of these students with a solid middle-income living, vocational school became stigmatized. That stigmatization only intensified as American industrial jobs, battered by global competition and automation, started to disappear during the early 1980s, making four-year college seem for many the surest route to better jobs and higher earnings. Policymakers reinforced the message with subsidized student loans and other initiatives that sought to make college readily available to all.

Unfortunately, many students wound up enrolling in four-year colleges who weren’t suited for it, and the results haven’t been pretty. These days, only 55 percent of college students graduate within six years, leaving many with no degree and dismal job prospects. Meanwhile, student-loan debt has swelled to a monstrous $1.3 trillion.

Many of the students would have been better off receiving some kind of vocational training. Both as candidate and now as president, Donald Trump has tapped into widespread blue-collar discontent with his call to overhaul free-trade agreements to keep jobs from heading overseas. The reality, though, is that plenty of good-paying jobs are already available for properly trained workers. These positions typically fall into a category known as middle-skilled, meaning that they require some postsecondary education—for instance, a certified apprenticeship or a two-year associate’s degree from a community college—but not necessarily four years of university. These jobs are found in health care, information technology, manufacturing, and construction, among other fields. According to a 2013 Brookings Institution study, more than half of all jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) do not demand four-year degrees—and they pay an average annual salary above $50,000.

Further, while high-paying STEM jobs requiring advanced degrees do cluster in a few major urban centers, plentiful middle-skilled jobs—ranging from cybersecurity specialist and web designer to robotics engineer and industrial-engineer technician—are dispersed throughout most American metropolitan areas, making them within geographical reach of most Americans.

Yet many of those jobs go unfilled. A 2011 survey by the consulting firm Deloitte and the Advanced Manufacturing Institute found that more than eight out of ten manufacturing firms reported a shortage of high-skilled workers—at a time when unemployment nationwide was above 8 percent. (By one estimate, some 1.5 million manufacturing jobs that America has added since the 2008 recession have been for workers with more than a high school education.) Even though the U.S. is graduating some 3 million high school students every year, nearly half of whom will enter the job market instead of continuing school, an estimated 1 million middle-skilled jobs in all fields remain unfilled.

    A 2011 survey found that more than eight out of ten manufacturing firms reported a shortage of high-skilled workers.

Encouragingly, policymakers have begun to offer programs to train students for such good jobs—and the early results are promising. In 2008, a task force commissioned by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg recommended overhauling and expanding the city’s career and technical training. Among the suggestions that the city adopted was a push to instill in high school technical programs “a strong academic foundation in literacy and numeracy” to prepare for today’s job market.

The city also reformed vocational schooling to include apprenticeships, intern programs, and other work-related learning, seeking to ensure that students who don’t go on to college have some kind of certification or path to further training. Based on the task-force recommendations, the city has opened 25 new career and technical schools since 2010 and added vocational training to many others. New York now runs 50 schools entirely dedicated to career education and another 75 career academies within larger general-education schools, serving some 26,000 students in all.

Some of the leadership in the modernization of vocational training is coming from employers trying to reshape career education to fit the kinds of jobs they need filled. Siemens USA, a division of the German industrial powerhouse, has been working with high schools and community colleges around America to educate students via apprenticeships, based on a model common in Europe, where typically 60 percent to 70 percent of young people enroll in on-the-job training initiatives. In Germany, according to Eric Spiegel, former CEO of Siemens USA, the company has 10,000 paid apprentices; each year, it offers jobs to 2,500 students who graduate from its program.

SOURCE