Why is my council tax funding a school linked to Islamists?

As Andrew Gilligan has reported, Haringey Council, the north London failed state that spent £2.2m on public relations last year (not quite enough to erase the damage done by the Baby P case, or its various other disasters) has given £113,000 of public money to a school run by supporters of the separatist Islamic group, Hizb ut Tahrir

The Islamic Shaksiyah Foundation is a bilingual school which, as its website says, teaches in Arabic because:

"The decline of Qur’anic Arabic as the medium of education has contributed enormously to the decline of the Muslims. Without the capacity of direct understanding of the Qur’an and hadith the Muslim Ummah has lost much of its vitality.”

I don’t about you but "the decline of the Muslims” is dog-whistle Islamism if ever I’ve heard it, and if anyone uses it you know you won’t find Friends of Israel listed among their Facebook groups. Maybe the school is just insensitive about how non-Muslims interpret words – so when it offers "specialist course essential for all educators who wish to ‘Islamize’ their practice” they’re unaware that that the verb has controversial connotations in Europe.

I’m not against Islamic schools, incidentally, even taxpayer-funded ones, especially when most of the comprehensives in inner London are dreadful, but the emphasis must be on making young English men and women, not on separatism. I went to an overwhelmingly Irish Catholic school and we (...)