Back in January 2011 I wrote a post entitled 'Only the deaf, dumb, blind and those lacking a sense of smell would buy The Guardian'. Today I would add radical Muslims to the list. In The Telegraph, Andrew Gilligan, one of the very best investigating journalists of the day, examines the offal that constitutues the reporting(?) of The Guardian's education editor, Richard Adams. He, Adams, has, er, 'investigated' the so-called 'Trojan horse' scandal in which the governing bodies of various schools in Birmingham have been infiltrated by radical Muslims who have sought to impose their own religious, social and educational opinions onto their pupils via a more or less reluctant body of teachers. Mr. Adams, a 'Guardianista' with impeccable credentials has looked very closely at this story and come to the conclusion that there is nothing to it, it is all 'got up' by the likes of The Daily Mail.
In turn, Mr. Gilligan, in his usual careful and painstaking way, proceeds to examine Mr. Adams' analysis and thereby proves that my characterisation of a typical Guardian reader as indicated in the title of my old blog post also applies to their journalists:
Over the last few months, I’ve carefully read all the “evidence against” that Mr Adams has produced in his exhaustive investigative researches. It appears to consist largely of making escorted trips to the schools concerned during which he spoke only to pupils and staff chosen by the management – an exercise summed up by one of the commenters under his own article as “Everyone was happy on our state guided tour of North Korea.”
A letter written by twenty "education experts" upon which Mr. Adams and The Guardian leaned heavily turns out to be a travesty of the truth and anyway, most of the signatories have a dog in the fight. I should add that when this story first broke I was reluctant to leap to conclusions because I see no harm in a school in a heavily Muslim populated area teaching Islam in an educational way, as opposed to a conversion way, provided that they also teach Christianity in the same manner. Nor, as it happens, do I object to their insistence that girls and boys be separated; I often wonder if my own education might not have been more successful if I had not been surrounded by burgeoning womanhood all the time! Obviously, it would have to be a requirement that girls were taught the same curriculum as the boys. However, it seems clear, well, clear to everyone except Mr. Adams and The Guardian, that this was not at all what was happening in Birmingham. Of course, the real, ripe stench arises when you imagine how the 'Guardianistas' would shriek and howl if the Catholics had mounted such an operation!
Well done, Mr. Gilligan, reporting at its best!