Search This Blog

Thursday, 4 April 2019

Radical Islamic preachers gaining increasing influence in Dutch education

Janene Pieters
NL Times


Dutch intelligence service AIVD warns of radical influences in education in its annual report for 2018. According to the service, "radical Islamic boosters" play an increasingly emphatic role in the education offer for young Muslims in the Netherlands. In the long term, this could undermine the democratic legal order, the AIVD said, NOS reports.

As examples, the AIVD mentioned the "at first sight accessible and innocent" after-school lessons in Arabic and Islam. "We believe, however, that children and young people are alienated from society by this interpretation of education and may be hindered in their participation in society. This is caused by the intolerant and anti-democratic views of the initiators. According to the AIVD, "a new group of eloquent preachers" has been trained, and part of this group is not necessarily opposed to the violent jihadist ideology.

Last month NRC reported that controversial British Sharia preacher Haitham Al Haddad gave "covert" lessons at Amsterdam high school Cornelius Haga Lyceum.

The Netherlands experienced an increase in the number of incidents related to terrorism and jihad last year, the AIVD said in its annual report. For the first time since the murder of Theo van Gogh in 2004, the country was faced with terrorist violence in 2018. In the years before, terrorist incidents mainly happened in the countries around the Netherlands. But that changed last year. In May a Syrian man stabbed three people in The Hague. In August a man stabbed and seriously injured two American tourists at Amsterdam Central Station. And in September a network of seven jihadists were arrested. They were planning an attack at an event, according to the authorities.

A total of around 500 jihadists, and a few thousand sympathizers, are active in the Netherlands, the AIVD said. 


Read more

No comments:

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...