ARmy Rumour SErvice

Deliberately kept this out of the NAAFI so lets not go off on a mad racist diatribe this time...

Times Higher Education - Raising the bars a 'moral' matter

London Met's large Muslim population makes booze 'culturally sensitive'.

The vice-chancellor of London Metropolitan University is considering banning the sale of alcohol in some parts of the institution's campus because a "high percentage" of his students consider drinking to be "immoral".

Malcolm Gillies said he was "not a great fan of alcohol on campus", adding that the issue was one of "cultural sensitivity".

Noting that about 20 per cent of London Met's students are Muslim, he said that "because there's no majority ethnic group, I think it [selling alcohol] is playing to particular parts of our society much more [than to others]".

"It's a negative experience - in fact an immoral experience - for a high percentage of our students," he told an audience at the Association of University Administrators' annual conference in Manchester on 3 April.

Interesting...

I've no problem with the university establishing its own standards of conduct, however...

Recruits are forbidden alcohol in the block at some establishments/courses (so that's fair, but this seems different).

But what I would fear is the "spiral to purity" where you see almost the Mutawwa (Saudi Religious Police) spring up. You know, checking people holding hands are married, etc. it is the reason why the jilbab is not allowed as school uniform, as there is a religious uniform option and one person doing their own is a threat to the coehesion of the wider school (crikey, look at the fury wearing your beret like a flat cap with the capbadge over the left eye generates here!)

Thing is it spreads first amoungst a certain population, with peer pressure to comply. Then it may create friction with other faith groups (or those of no faith). You end up with a fractured community and some self-isolating groups. So it is a lot like the wider UK in the way it is going.

Course, what Malcolm Gillies might wish to guard against is the sort of hot-housing that leads to dislike of a syllabus and ends up in this;

BBC News - RE teacher Gary Smith's Muslim attackers jailed

(Basically, 4 lads beat an RE teacher unconscious with an iron bar for disapproving of his teaching).

We had this atmosphere at my uni in the mid-1990s, when there was Al-Muhajiroun on the campus. Creating all sort of problems with Sikh students and just generally life at uni. Couldn't go anywhere without an allegation of Islamaphobia or racism. I was minding my own business reading a book at Salahudin and next thing I knew I couldn't get rid of the bearded zealots. Cheerful at first, agreeing he was a Muslim hero and then basically saying if I didn't convert I was due for hellfire.

British Universities (especially in bits of London) have their heads up their arse in the toleration of the slippery slope to extremist violence. As one failed or successful terrorist emerges, they say "Oh must have been radicalised elsewhere" and blame everyone else but themselves.

I'd no more tolerate a Student's Union policy which would assist in making the Angry Brigade or other secular extremist group possible. I don't equally think those Jewish areas of London with certain areas "wired off" for movement during the Sabbath, etc. Seems too much like a Ghetto, but as long as it isn't forced outside a Jewish faith community.

For starters on religious loons there's the white-wash job UCL did of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly from the University of Bedfordshire at Luton, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh of the LSE, those four jokers I linked to on the BBC. I'm sure there are more, and different ones too.

I accept universities are not there to police their students, but it seems they don't co-operate when those whose job it is to police find where the opportuinity for radicalisation occurs.