(Ok, the first paragraph doesn’t seem to link well to the headline, but it will come together) City University in London has been accused of discrimination after it closed a room used by it’s Muslim students for friday prayers. This could have serious consequences as universities have a large number of Muslim students, particularly among the post-graduates, which take on a lot from overseas. The timetables make little allowances for fridays (unless you do communication studies, in which case there’s little point going anyway) so having somewhere on campus to pray is essential to many.
When I first saw this story I was a bit disappointed with the university, but when I looked into the reasons behind it, I was simply appalled. Basically, the university wanted them to submit their sermons for “approval” before they could use them. Understandably, they refused, as would I. They argued that their prayer sessions are open to all, so if the university were worried about what was being said they could always just turn up. As a result, they were shut down. So how did the university come up with this ridiculous idea? A fucking think tank told them to!
This think tank is called Quilliam Foundation, which focuses on counter extremism. To my amazement, it actually has Muslims in it! They said that hard line views and a confrontational atmosphere were being encouraged at prayers. No shit! I think they might have actually been paid to come to that conclusion! The bit that the university obviously missed out on is that it is a very small minority who spread extremist views and the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful. Therefore, they decided to treat their students like criminals under suspicion. I’m not surprised the students told them where to go.
Anyway, rant over. New rant starting. Every time I read a story involving a “think tank”, it’s always bollocks. It’s either poorly researched, pointing out the bloody obvious or just wrong. Take this story, saying that the NHS should cut 30,000 beds to save money. Well yeah, less beds is less expenditure, anyone who’s ever studied any form of mathematics will tell you that. In fact, the government would save shit loads by just scrapping the NHS. Maybe I should call myself a think tank and propose that, I might get paid for it. I seem to recall a story a few years back where a think tank said that the north of England was fucked and we should all move to down south, whilst not saying how southern areas would cope with the dramatic population increase. Maybe they should just send death squads to northern cities and wipe out the population. It would save the NHS money as well.
So it can’t be difficult to come up with a few examples of think tanks talking rubbish. Make a list, just try and keep the language clean like I haven’t.
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