Daily Mail
Police descended on a school today as dozens of furious Muslim parents protested outside after a teacher allegedly showed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad during a religious education lesson.
Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire had to delay its opening and told pupils to stay at home amid chaotic scenes at its gates, as headteacher Gary Kibble ‘sincerely apologised for the great offence to the community’.
Parents began gathering from 7.30am this morning outside the co-educational free school and could be heard chanting – with about 20 to 30 pupils also milling around at the gates, one of whom gave a speech.
By the afternoon, the crowd remained outside the school – which was founded in 1612 by a Christian, the Reverend William Lee – and police began threatening protesters with Covid fines as a road was shut in both directions.
Mufti Mohammed Amin Pandor, a local Muslim scholar, told them that the teacher had been suspended, which was later confirmed by the school, where almost three-quarters of its pupils are from minority ethnic groups.
Muslims make up 41 per cent of the population in Batley, a historic market and mill town in the Kirkless region which was the constituency of Labour MP Jo Cox who was murdered by a far-Right extremist in June 2016.
Today’s protest comes five months after history teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded on the street near his school in Paris by an Islamic extremist last October after showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to his students.
The killing shocked the country and led to a fresh debate about freedom of speech and the integration of France’s large Muslim population. It also brought back memories of a wave of Islamist violence that started with the Charlie Hebdo massacre, sparked by the same cartoons in the satirical magazine in 2015 when gunmen killed 12 people.
The latest RE syllabus for Calderdale, Kirkess and Leeds, which runs from 2019 to 2024, states that pupils should be able to ‘give reasons why visual representation of God and the prophets is forbidden – haram – in Islam’ by the end of key stage two – but does not specifically state whether teachers should show any of these images.
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