The Sunday Ishmael: 14/12/2025

A teacher, who does not wish to be named, was suspended and sacked for an incident in which he allegedly admonished students for washing their feet in the sinks in the boys’ lavatories. Police were also called in to investigate an alleged hate crime. According to the child who made the complaint, the teacher told them the school was not a religious one but that there was an Islamic school a mile away if they wished to attend it instead. He also told them: “Britain is still a Christian state” and pointed out that the King was head of the Church of England.

After the feet-washing incident, the teacher tried to explain to the year six class the importance of British values of tolerance. It was claimed he reminded the children that Islam remained a minority religion in the UK.

In his legal claim against the local authority, lawyers for the teacher pointed out the school was a non-faith school and that prayers had been informally banned from the playground – and, by extension, that included washing feet in the sinks – and confined to a prayer room set aside for the purpose.

But the school suspended the teacher in March last year and subsequently sacked him. A month later, in April 2024, he was informed he was being referred to the safeguarding board as well as to the Metropolitan Police. The police inquiry was subsequently dropped. The safeguarding officer concluded he had made hurtful comments about Islam and that the child had been subject to emotional harm.

Lord Young, the director of the Free Speech Union, said on Monday: “This teacher lost his job and almost ended up being barred from the profession for life just because he pointed out to a class of Muslim schoolchildren that the national religion of England is Anglicanism. Things have reached a pretty pass in this country if a teacher can be branded a safeguarding risk because he says something that’s incontestably true. ”

Three children made written complaints against the teacher. Nine people examined them, including the local safeguarding officer, a detective sergeant from the child abuse investigation team, two social workers, an HR adviser and the school’s headteacher. The children claimed they were upset and scared by the teacher’s outburst and that he had shouted at them.

The teacher was sacked in February after almost three years working at the school. He argued that his summary dismissal for gross misconduct was unfair and that a teaching assistant had raised no concerns during the lecture delivered to the class about Britain being a Christian state.

The Free Speech union has compiled a dossier of more than a dozen cases in which it claims adults working with children were referred to child safeguarding boards for expressing Right-wing views.

 Jamie Michael, who served with the Royal Marines in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, had been banned as a football youth coach in the Rhondda Valley for an online post after the murders of three children in Southport in the summer of 2024. Mr Michael was charged with inciting racial hatred but cleared by a jury in 17 minutes. Following his acquittal, the local safeguarding board banned him from working with children. He is suing the board and the Football Association of Wales for £25,000 in damages.

How has Britain arrived at a place where disobedient children can have their teacher sacked for telling them the truth? That a "safeguarding board" - an extra-legal body, can deprive a teacher and a football coach of their livelihoods, and deprive their pupils of contact with anyone who does not mouth Muslim orthodoxy? I thought that safeguarding boards were designed to protect children from paedophiles. It seems they have been highjacked into upholding religious intolerance and ignorance. David Lammy's intention to remove jury trials in the majority of offence categories would remove this distressing tendency of juries to acquit defendants on the basis of common sense, defying the government's preferred policy of pandering to religious bigots.

I was curious about this foot-washing ritual - which seems to be ubiquitous amongst the Abrahamic religions - Jews, Muslims and Christians all go in for it, although Christians, sensibly, have more or less completely given it up. It stems from the fact that, if you run around barefoot or in flip-flops, you'll get dirty feet, and you can't present yourself to god with dirty feet. Muslims wash their feet  before prayer, in a process called wudu, not having adapted to the whole wearing socks and shoes thing.

Wudu involves washing specific parts of the body, including the hands, mouth, face, arms, head, and feet. Not the bits that might need it more - like oxters, bum-holes and dangly bits. Wudu is performed before each of the five daily prayers because the Prophet Muhammad told them to: "O you who believe! When you prepare for prayer, wash your faces and your hands (and arms) to the elbows; rub your heads and wash your feet to the ankles" (Quran 5:6). 

One of the many disturbing things about the story of the teacher and the dirty little bastards who put their feet into the wash hand basins at school, despite attending a secular state school that forbad the practice, is the utter indoctrination of said dirty little bastards. You'll remember that Aristotle and St Ignatius Loyola said ‘Give me a child till he’s seven, and I will show you the man’.  Adolf Hitler agreed with them,  stating, less punchily: "He alone who owns the youth, gains the future". The kids with their feet in the sinks were year six - which probably means they were ten or eleven, unless, of course, they were Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children in which dental records might reveal them to be any age up to 25. 

No question of these devout little bastards questioning the strictures of their 7th century desert religion. No question of peer-pressure in an English secular state school exerting compliance with a cheerful atheistic aesthetic. I was speaking fluent English with a Yorkshire accent by that age, my mother tongue having been tucked away in the dusty recesses of memory. I'd also stopped believing in Santa Claus. mr ishmael had two languages - street Brummy for school and Belfast for home. But these feet-washing, complaining child-Muslims seem to have avoided entirely the pressures to conform to the prevailing norm that turned mr ishmael and I, both the children of immigrants, into proper little English kids. Bugger-all chance of integration, then. 

Despite the wudu requirements of bodily cleanliness, there was no mention of washing the penis before forcing it into the mouth of a 15-year-old girl in Leamington Spa. Just after 9pm on the 10th May this year,  the girl was separated from her friends and abducted by Jan Jahanzeb, a 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker. He took her into the dark park in order to sexually assault her, then phoned his friend, Israr Niazal, to request his assistance in raping her. 

 They forced the girl to perform oral sex on them and raped her. 

The girl recorded it on her mobile phone. ‘Let me go....you are going to rape me’, she said and screamed until Jahanzeb gagged her with  his hand. The video she recorded is so disturbing that Niazal’s barrister said ‘it is horrific footage, genuinely horrific footage’ and that ‘I have no doubt that if the general public were exposed to that, we would have disorder on our hands’. They were sentenced at Warwick Crown Court this week – ten years and eight months for Jahanzeb, nine years and ten months for Niazal. This will not separate them from the malign influences of their 7th century religion, because Britain's prison inmates, as of March 2014, are 18.2% Muslim, with London prison inmates topping 27%. With the UK Muslim population sitting around 5%, this means that either Muslims are more criminal than you'd expect, or that there is a lot of institutional anti-Muslimism. I don't believe that, by the way - nobody would dare. The third alternative is that there are forcible conversions to Islam happening in Britain's gaols.

It is easy to get carried away on an anti-Muslim rant, because young Jahanzeb and Niazal are not solitary examples - there are many more - Croydon Magistrates’ Court on 8th December sentenced Iraqi asylum seeker Hawre Mohamed to eight months in prison for sexually assaulting a 20-year-old woman at Horley railway station on 22nd September; in November Warwick Crown Court, Ahmad Mulakhil, an Afghan, pleaded guilty to raping a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton; on 13th  November, Amin Abedi Mofrat, an Iranian asylum seeker, was sentenced to nine years and six months in prison for the rape of a 15-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford; and on 1st November Eid Anwar Fathi Najjar, an illegal migrant from Egypt, pleaded guilty to raping  a woman in an alleyway after abducting her from a York nightclub.

Has it occurred to anyone else that the reason these truly dreadful men are seeking asylum in Britain is that their own countries are persecuting them for very good reason? And they should be made to take them back, using robust Trumpian methodology.

I'm with the Unnamed Teacher - Britain is a Christian country, Christianity is the Established Church of England, Islam is a minority religion. And if you don't like it, there's several Islamic countries down the road where you might feel more comfortable...France, for example.

Here's a balanced, thoughtful piece by mr ishmael on these ishoos:

Pluralism, the New Inquisition: 12th December 2015

On 8 July 2014, Dame Justice Butler-Sloss was appointed chair of an inquiry into historic child sex abuse. She lasted 6 days before her suitability was questioned because her brother was the Attorney General at the time of some of the abuses in question and her perceived unwillingness to include mention of former Anglican bishop Peter Ball.

Even Tracey May had to dump her from the Full and Far-reaching Cover-up into Westminster Beasting, too bent even for the Home Office, too close to her own corruption for it to trouble her nostrils.

 Now, the old buzzard has launched a disestablishing attack on Britain as a Christian state. It isn't, she says. Or it shouldn't be. Why not?  Well, basically because she says so, and because few people go to church; statistics about church attendance serving to neutralise almost two thousand years of  history. More people go to the mosque than to the parish church, therefore we are no longer a Christian country and the very idea that we are needs to be eradicated. By positive discrimination.

 Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Beard, too, has decided that we are no longer a Christian country.  

Rowan Douglas Williams, Baron Williams of Oystermouth (born 14 June 1950), is a Welsh Anglican bishop, theologian and poet, who served as the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012.

  Beardy, the most showily thoughtful of recent Canterburys, has now resolved that C. of E. primary schools must be outlawed, that King Brian must crown-ed be by Hindi and Muslim and Jewish clergypersons.  
Beardy, wedded for life to the glaring preposterous contradiction that is ecumenism, serves none of the Abrahamic religions and betrays them all with his limp homogeneity, speed-blending Imam and Rabbi and Vicar in some pseudo-spiritual NutriBullet, producing a universal person of Faith, a GodlessHeathenBastard for all seasons.
 Despite, however, diluting to pointlessness the idea of Faith, he now wants imams and rabbis to sit in the House of Lords, presumably on the Vaguely Good benches, bringing fresh, mad superstitions to the already corrupt, unaccountable and anti-democratic place of organised crime, rotten beyond remedy, peopled with sneering degenerates.  Jesus'd fire a round of fucks into them, Beardy wants to make them a fully-representative, multi-faith LGBT knocking shop.

No matter what they say, though, the commentators,

almost everything about us is Christian in its impetus, the welfare state is a Christian Socialist idea, rooted in the Sermon on the Mount, the secular pluralists, therefore, face a paradox: the egalitarianism via which they seek to cripple tradition springs from that tradition, is its creature and the secular pluralist no more owns Freedom than do the clergy own Christianity. We all own them, Freedom and Christianity;  they are not in the gift of some bilious old lawyer, some wretched, snivelling archbishop.

How came we here, a place where we are taught to deride who we are and instead elevate some ragbag of meaningless, aspirational, inclusive, pluralist isms? How is it that somewhere along Ruin's dark highway it was decided, without debate, that the very thing which attracts foreigners to Britain - its Britishness -  must be decried, degraded  and abolished and that those who still suffer from Britishness must be cured of it, must become healthily, sneeringly secular, which means, as far as can be deduced, that anything goes:  same-sex marriage; religious cruelty to animals, the explicit or implicit suppression of women and children by religious patriarchs; the refusal of even senior health service professionals to learn English; the sprouting of alien places of contrary, hostile and violent worship; the farming of young British girls by alien men and the multiple bogus claiming of welfare benefits and the utterly fatuous proclamation that any number of people may come and live here, without even let or hindrance, just because it's kind-of right.

  The detestable, money-grubbing bandits of the race relations industry have long since diversified into a multiplicity of shouty, blaming enterprises, damning the rest of us for our every waking decision, inventing caricatures of dysthinking and dysfeeling, we are deniers of this or that, phobists of the other, they upend traditional, modest self-restraint and bawl abuse at those who see cock-waving as immodest and improper, who resist the idea of family as purchasable commodity and who refute the desirability or possibility of trans-genderisation - butchering and inverting a man's penis does not him a her make - creating a lunatic, hyper-ethical, witch-hunting climate wherein, so long as they say the right words, mouth the right clichés, the sharp operators, like Volkswagen, by pressing the right judgemental jargon buttons can delude us, extort from us and fuck the entire planet at the same time.  Merely by paying lip service to the blame-babble of poorly educated lobbyists for Grievance and Pluralism and Renewables the very ground - spiritual, educational and geo-fucking-logical - can be ripped from beneath us. Screeching, spiteful queens or rapacious energy carpetbaggers, they want to frack everybody, everybody's beliefs, everybody's values and they have devised the language by which to accomplish Ruin. Pluralism, this negligent, unsustainable, thoughtless and facetious doctrine is voiced not only cynically and opportunistically by the predator but also as though 'twere a wedding vow, by the empty-headed. 

 It is not the Christianity of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestantism to which we must cling but that of Saint Patrick, of the Venerable Bede, of Alfred the Great and Edward the Confessor, of Celt and Saxon and Norman, of those piously practical men who accidentally brought us poetry, history, order, law and the idea of our improvability.  

For the greatest part of our history, our lives were measured by the hours and days of Christian worship, by Feast days and Holy days;  for that greatest part, the Church, Roman and Anglican, created and guarded our record of ourselves, teaching and nursing us, praising and judging us; only in the Renaissance did Knowledge escape the cloister, never to be recaptured; our New Worlds were conquered with the sword and the Bible, our marital beds o'erseen from vestry and confessional; our disputes were adjudicated by abbot and bishop; our sins were forgiven, our souls bought speedy Rest by masses sung in chantries; our universities were staffed by sky pilot scholars; for the longest time the church owned Time itself, ringing bells by sundial or by guesswork, eventually owning the very first clocks and ordering our days to the minute; it owned our souls, it owned the Word and it owned the measurement and apportionment of Time.

For some time, now, though, we have practised a refined Christianity, an informal credo, undiminished, really, by our reluctance to attend formal worship - our rights and wrongs are hall-marked by it; our tolerance of Otherness, our longing for fair treatment for all; our burgeoning wonder at the Creation; these precepts are not owned by  the cheeky bastards at Stonewall, by the Green parties, by laughably unethical corporations and rotten, thievingbastard political filthsters. Restraint, respect, neighbourliness and awe, this shit comes straight from the New Testament.

We are Christian as the night follows the day, a time may come when these islands are something else, its people most likely speaking Mandarin, when Christianity is as relevant as Druidism. That time is not now. 

 This is a Christian country, it is not the case that we grow more Muslim, on the contrary, more Muslims will adopt Christian ways  than will Christians start praying to Mecca, that is axiomatic, for this is a Christian country, in language, history, law, politics, art, philosophy, architecture, idiom and custom.  It is arguable that in architecture the influence of Christianity has lessened but in the others it remains embedded, irremovable.

 Unless we launch a cultural revolution, burning everything written  from the time of Bede's Ecclesiastical Histories

 and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles up until the present day then Christianity is in every word which we read, whether we go to church or not. 

Unless we repeal every law passed for a thousand years, we remain a Christian jurisdiction. Unless we erase every note of music, from Byrd's Mass for Four Voices up to, say, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, then ours remains a Christian music.  Unless we demolish the cathedrals and churches and chapels and abbeys and monasteries - and do it far more ruthlessly than did Henry Tudor the Eighth - and bulldoze the graveyards and the war memorials and the village and market crosses, and raze to the ground the courts and the palaces and the universities, unless, in short, we nuke the whole country, then it remains demonstrably Christian.
That's near enough for jazz.

How do we, then, resist those, the pluralists, like Butler Sloss, who would tell us, sniffily, that day is night, black is white, two'n'two make five?

Be not deceived, Rowan, my man; 

God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, 
that also shall he reap.

More Pineapple News - August 2014

The fucking Muslims are kicking off, offended, yet again, by Western insensitivity to their charming Abrahamic religion.  Malaysians are choking on their Halalgoatburgers because the Commonwealth Games' opening ceremony featured a forty-strong pack of Scots terriers.  Some, it seems, in Malaysia, land of the falling aircraft, so disapprove of dogs that they want, and I am not kidding, to declare a Jihad on blokes like my little warm brown friend, Harris, a fucking Jihad, on dogs.  Living in jungleland, as they do, I can understand Malaysians wanting a jihad on, say, scorpions or cobras but not on little dogblokes. I don't know how long we can go  on importing tinned pineapple rings and pieces and juice from people like that, fucking lunatics.

Dogs are unclean, shout Malaysian muslim politicos.  I daresay they are a bit but Harris, for instance, gets regular baths and brushings, as do, I am sure, the vast majority of canine companion animals of which, mr cheekybastard muslim should be aware, forty per cent of households  have at least one.  That's a lot of tins of pineapple to be boycotted.

If he wants to see unclean Mohamud should take a walk down the Stratford Road in Birmingham and glance at the filthy produce displayed on the pavement close to passing exhaust pipes and dirty footwear, or perhaps take a peek in the ghastly but Islamo-sensitive halal butchershops; those places are really unclean.

 From the Filth-o-Graph:

Mohamad Sabu, the deputy president of the opposition Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party said: "Malaysia and all Islamic countries deserve an apology from the organiser. This is just so disrespectful to Malaysia and Muslims – especially as it happened during Ramadan. Muslims are not allowed to touch dogs, so the organiser should have been more aware and sensitive on this issue. It is hoped this incident can teach other Western countries to be more respectful in the future."

Dato Ibrahim Bin Ali, a far-Right politician, former MP and founder and president of Malay supremacist group Perkasa also called for an apology.

"I think it is unbecoming. The hosts have not been sensitive enough – especially in a so-called knowledgeable and civilised society like Britain," he said. "It is shameful and has offended not only Malaysia as a Muslim country, but Muslims around the world."

And in a display of the sensitivity for which this silly cunt screeches let me assure him and his brethren that if I ever hear anyone calling for a Jihad on dogs, or anything like it, I will punch their fucking teeth out.

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 The four-volume Call Me Ishmael oeuvre, collected and curated by editor mr verge, is available on Lulu and Amazon.

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the last, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

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Christmas is coming. Christmas. The clue is in the first syllable.