UK: Judge bans anti-LGBT protesters gathering outside primary school gates

Is he Islamophobic?

A judge has banned a religious protest over LGBT lessons outside a school after finding the demonstration exposed children to more sexualised language than they would have heard in the classroom.

Muslim parents began the controversial action outside Anderton Park Primary earlier this year after discovering that their children were being taught about same-sex relationships.

The parents argued that the lessons go “against the teachings and beliefs of our children’s individual faith” and it was discrimination to make them continue.

One Imam was filmed outside the School accusing teachers of “pushing a paedophile agenda” by teaching LGBT rights. Another female protester claimed that pupils were being taught to touch themselves inappropriately, videos shown before the court revealed.

Ruling against the parents, Mr Justice Mark Warby concluded: “It is noteworthy that the Imam’s wild and untrue statements were made in front of a large crowd, including children. The children were thereby exposed to sexualised language going far beyond anything they were exposed to in the controversial teaching of the School.

An interim injunction was granted to the council in June amid safety fears about repeated large-scale demonstrations, often involving people with no direct connection to the school or from outside the West Midlands CREDIT: RICHARD VERNALLS/PA
“Some of it would seem, on the protestors’ own view of matters, to be inappropriate for the ears of children.

“In a democratic society protest must be allowed, but that does not carry with it a right repeatedly to cause distress to primary school children by aggressive shouting through megaphones or microphones using amplification, or to inflict months of distress on teachers and local residents, causing anxiety to the staff, and leading some residents to consider selling up their homes.”

Yesterday’s decision followed legal proceedings that began in June, when an interim injunction was granted to Birmingham City Council amid safety fears about the protests.

Mr Justice Warby yesterday upheld the ban indefinitely, adding that what was being taught at the school had been "misrepresented, sometimes grossly” by the protesters.

Anderton Park Primary School is located in Sparkill, an inner-city area of Birmingham with a large muslim population, and the majority of their pupils are of British Pakistani heritage.

The protests began in March after one muslim parent noticed that her four-year-old son was sent home with extracts from a book called ‘Princess Boy’.

It sparked months of demonstrations with parents gathering to chant slogans including ‘Our children our choice’ and ‘Don’t confuse our kids’.

Shakeel Afsar, who led the protests despite not having any children of his own at Anderton Park, said the protesters would not accept the outcome.

"These young children are not being taught the status of law,” he said. “What they are being taught is that there is nothing wrong with this: that it is ok to be gay and it is ok to marry the same sex.

"Well, like it or not, we do not accept this and will not accept this.

Despite keeping the physical injunction outside the school gates in place, Mr Justice Warby yesterday lifted restrictions he had placed on social media criticism of the LGBT lessons in the June hearing.

His acceptance of the argument for free online speech came after the intervention of a Christian blogger John Allman.

“The judge has accepted the distinction between vocal protests outside a school and legitimate discussion on social media about what children should be taught about sex,” Mr Allman said after the judgement. “We need a grown up discussion; not the closing of debate.”

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Geography has become 'soft option for not very bright, posh 6th formers', complains Oxford professor

He sounds a very unhappy man

It's a subject that has been studied by luminaries including Prince William, Theresa May and Mother Teresa.

But a leading Oxford professor says geography has ‘become a soft option’ for teenagers from wealthy backgrounds who do not have the sharpest brains.

Professor Danny Dorling claimed geography departments ‘have some of the narrowest and poshest social profiles’ at universities.

He insisted: ‘Geography in the UK has become a soft option for those who come from upper-middle class families where increasingly you are expected to go to university.’

Professor Dorling said geography’s association with the ‘English upper classes’ can be traced back to the late 1970s.

Previously, boys from top private schools tended to enter the military or the City aged 18.

Writing in the journal Emotion, Space and Society, the academic said of students: ‘They were more and more usually seen by their peers as not having done that well and hence having had to apply to study geography.’

The 51-year-old, who went to state schools, also attacked the careers that geography graduates embark on.

He said: ‘Many of them can then take their university degrees and head out to banking, advertising and management and make the world an even worse place.’

He claimed geography remained ‘the favourite subject of those who create hostile environments for immigrants, who create political parties that border on the fascist, of warmongers, bankers and imperialists’.

He said climate change and growing global inequality has helped revive interest in the subject.

‘But geography in the UK has become a soft option for those who come from upper-middle class families...especially for those who were privileged (and so often have high GCSE marks) but are not actually that good at maths or writing or reading or science or imagination,’ he added.

He also criticised the exams system. He said: ‘As educators we are left in Britain with the very tricky job of explaining to students who may have been awarded an A, A*, or 9 or 8 at maths or English at GCSE that this does not mean that they are brilliant at these subjects and will be able to think imaginatively about data or write engagingly about a topic.

It usually just means they were taught how to jump through the hoops of the British GCSE marking system well.’

Yesterday, Professor Dorling conceded that the outlook for geography is ‘beginning to change’. But he stressed: ‘We could do, nationally, with a far wider range of applicants.’

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A politically correct but mostly imaginative rewrite of Australian Aboriginal history

If indigenous author Bruce Pascoe is correct, most of what we were taught of how Aboriginals lived prior to the arrival of Europeans was based on a combination of ignorance, omissions and lies.

In his landmark book Dark Emu, Pascoe claims indigenous Australians were not hunter-gatherers but were sophisticated in the ways of food production, aquaculture, and land management. They were not nomads but lived in large towns in permanent dwellings. Their civilisation was, he wrote last year, “one that invented bread, society, language and the ability to live as 350 neighbouring nations without land war, not without rancour … but without a lust for land and power, without religious war, without slaves, without poverty but with a profound sense of responsibility for the health of Mother Earth for more than 120,000 years.” According to him they also invented democracy and government.

The book won the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Award and has sold over 100,000 copies. The ABC and Screen Australia have provided funding for a documentary series written by Pascoe. According to the head of ABC Indigenous, Kelrick Martin, the book “offers a revelatory context for future generations of Australians and ABC Indigenous is proud to work alongside Bruce Pascoe … to correct these stereotypes.” A children’s version, “Young Dark Emu: A Truer History”, is now part of school curriculums.

Much of Dark Emu’s positive reception has to do with Pascoe’s masterful presentation skills, for he is naturally telegenic. Showing a knack for reading his audience, he can be avuncular, affable, disarming, reserved, and even melancholic. He is articulate, an orator, persuasive and endearing. Complementing this is his disdain for modernity and his claim that we can control climate change by using the techniques of the “old people”, as he refers to them, thus “calming the bush down”.

He has admirers aplenty. Such is their effusiveness, you could say Pascoe is the Tom Jones of historians. To his detractors, he is a revisionist and fantasist. Writing for the Weekend Australian Magazine in May this year, journalist Richard Guilliatt observed “many academic experts also believe Dark Emu romanticises pre-contact indigenous society as an Eden of harmony and pacifism, when in fact it was often a brutally tough survivalist way of life”. But as Guilliatt also noted, there is a reluctance in academia to make public these criticisms given the author’s popularity and aboriginality.

If you think that is too much of a stretch, remember that this year the University of NSW’s science faculty distributed guidelines to lecturers, warning them that it was “inappropriate” to specify an estimate of when the first human migration to Australia occurred. Instead, staff were told it was “more appropriate” to say Aboriginals have been here “since the beginning of the Dreaming/s”, as this “reflects the beliefs of many Indigenous Australians that they have always been in Australia, from the beginning of time, and came from the land’’.

That a science faculty would resort to this is ridiculous. While some studies estimate that Aboriginals have been here for as long as 65,000 years, the conservative estimate is 50,000 years ago. You would think then that any public figure who claimed it took place 120,000 years ago would be asked to justify that estimate. Yet I know of at least three occasions this year when Pascoe has repeated that claim when interviewed by an ABC presenter, none of whom even so much as sought clarification.

The ABC’s political correspondent, Andrew Probyn wrote this month that Dark Emu “demolish(es) the myth that Australia at the time of white settlement was a wilderness occupied by merely hunter gatherers”. ABC presenter Wendy Harmer referred to Pascoe as an “oracle”, and chief political writer Annabel Crabb tweeted admiringly regarding Dark Emu: “I don’t think I’ve ever learned so much from one slim volume”. Another ABC presenter, Benjamin Law, said “reading it should be a prerequisite to non-Indigenous citizenship”. Just this month RN Drive host Patricia Karvelas concluded an interview with Pascoe with a fawning endorsement of the book, urging listeners to buy it. “Just do it now,” she stated.

If scholarly authenticity in the fields of history and anthropology were determined by the number of “oohs” and “aahs” uttered into an ABC microphone, Dark Emu would be nothing short of magisterial. In reality, such recognition is properly realised only through sources that are both primary and verifiable. Even then, the mere inclusion of this material is nothing more than window dressing if the analysis and conclusions are far removed from those sources. The “feel-good” factor should never be a criterion in such evaluations.

Those giving accolades to Pascoe seem oblivious to the many instances, particularly on the website Dark Emu Exposed, where readers have highlighted stark inconsistencies regarding what appears in his claims and what is outlined in the respective primary source. Peter O’Brien, a Quadrant magazine contributor and retired military officer, has written a book “Bitter Harvest: The Illusion of Aboriginal Agriculture in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu” highlighting what he claims are Pascoe’s omissions, mischaracterisations, and distortions.

The stoush has been described as a resumption of the history wars, a term I think unhelpful, for it leads to much distraction in fruitlessly arguing solely about the motives of historians. If anything, and for once I am not being facetious, the modern historian’s role is in one way analogous to that of today’s comedian. Both professions now operate according to the woke expectation that practitioners must always “punch up”, never down. A historian can be sure of at least a favourable reception, as in Pascoe’s case, if he or she promotes and defends the wretched at the expense of a so-called privileged demographic.

To do the reverse, however, is taboo. Many of you will remember the furore that erupted in 2002 following the release of historian and now Quadrant editor-in-chief Keith Windschuttle’s book “The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Van Diemen’s Land 1803-1847”. Taking issue with many historians, Windschuttle disputed the theory that indigenous Tasmanians were the subject of genocide, arguing they had succumbed largely through introduced diseases. He also dismissed the romantic theory that the original inhabitants had engaged in “guerrilla warfare” against Europeans, stating their attacks were motivated by a desire for tea, sugar and flour.

To question the narrative was unforgivable, but what made it worse in the eyes of leftist academics was that Windschuttle both exposed and embarrassed many a historian by forensically analysing their footnotes. What he demonstrated was both revelatory and disconcerting. Historians had inflated the figures of killings, misquoted colonial administrators to give the appearance of malevolent intent towards Aboriginals, and even listed as sources local newspapers that had not yet existed at the time of the historical incidents in question.

The response from the historical establishment was both defensive and risible. As reported by The Australian’s Ean Higgins in 2004, the Australian Historical Association even discussed enacting a code of ethics to prevent historians from criticising their peers’ integrity in public. One academic described his astonishment at the “pack mentality” of his fellow historians. “It was like ‘let’s get a group of people together to ambush Windschuttle’,” he stated.

The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen wrote nearly 10 years ago to this day of visiting the National Gallery of Victoria and seeing an exhibition surrounded by a fence. In the confines pasted individually on the floor were the 472 pages of Windschuttle’s book. The work, by artist Julie Gough, was designed for visitors to walk over the exhibition and thus, in her words, “blacken and erase this text”. As Albrechtsen states, this was an example of “the Left’s addiction to emotion, feel-good symbolism and an infantile rejection of facts as heresy”.

Despite the many misgiving concerning Pascoe’s research and findings, Dark Emu shows every sign of being regarded as the most authoritative text in its field. Whether it be apathy or pusillanimity, our public institutions accept without question his conclusions, irrespective of the anomalies, or how ludicrous his premises. Only last year Pascoe wrote “Almost no Australians know anything about the Aboriginal civilisation because our educators, emboldened by historians, politicians and the clergy, have refused to mention it for 230 years” – a claim that can only be described as a conspiracy theory.

Indigenous and non-indigenous Australian students alike are entitled to a history curriculum based on fact, whether the subject matter is triumphs, tragedies or atrocities. To have it any other way is a politicisation of the discipline. It is time Pascoe responded to his critics. Only then can readers decide whether Dark Emu is historical fact or a flight of fancy.

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