PHOTO: British Prime Minister David Cameron: “Not speaking English makes people more susceptible to radicalization”
Britain’s Conservative Government put out a high-profile PR initiative on Monday, with Prime Minister David Cameron declaring that English-language classes for Muslim women will help defeat “radicalization”.
Apart from the possible hypocrisy — Cameron has presided over funding cuts for English-language instruction since 2010 — there is the issue of whether the Government’s approach would be effective or counter-productive.
I spoke with BBC Hereford on Monday morning about the issues.
The Government will say they are against Islamophobia by getting Muslims to integrate into British society. But the effect of what they have done is to divide society.
If you want to approach education and civic attitudes and not being “radicalized”, you do that with everybody, whether they’re Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, or atheists. Once you say that the problem is with Muslims — and the implication that the problem is only with Muslims — then you divide British society and you feed the fear that can lead to Islamophobia.
