I did think that something that was underexplored is the extent to which one of the driving forces of the conflict wasn't pure Islamophobia, but conflict between secular and conservative religious Muslims. That is, the initial racist hoax letter purporting to be evidence of a plot by conservative Muslims to take over the schools seems to have been a hoax by a liberal Muslim woman school principal who was in an employment conflict with some conservative Muslim school employees. It seems very clear that she wrote the letter, and only a little less clear but very probable that she committed fraud to fire the employees; on the other hand, it also seemed plausible that she was being harassed and undercut by them in her position as principal.

So, I dozed off and missed major parts of the first two episodes, so I did miss parts of the original framing of the letter and how that unfolded. Maybe I should go back and re-listen to that.

This is the one where they interviewed some poor humanist for seven hours straight, after which he said he felt like he'd been beaten?
https://humanists.uk/2022/02/23/humanists-uk-comment-on-trojan-horse-affair-podcast/

Stuff like saying "at this point he walked stricken out of the room" without noting that he came back less than a minute later and continued the conversation seems a bit unethical tbf.

A key element of this was that the government minister was the author of this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius_7/7 and a major promoter of Eurabia conspiracy theories in the UK, as well as being a five-alarm bastard in all directions.

Another important angle was that other bits of the Conservative party and the Government were desperate to get patronage into different bits of West Midlands Asian life in the hope they might be able to make them into a new political constituency. This kind of happened in the 2015 elections and the 2016 referendum, and was a huge boost to some important political careers, but it also did a huge fart, which I investigated: https://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/category/biryani-project/

What were the trials for? Were they part of the moral panic or of the people who stirred it up? I can't find any criminal/civil trials on Wikipedia, just National College of Teaching and Leadership hearings for professional misconduct; is that them?

There were two inquiries into the issue, plus

The only trial, I think, was of one of the teachers involved, for abuse of a fourteen-year-old girl : https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/former-stechford-teacher-who-abused-20237905

There are two main events which are conflated at the beginning of the podcast, and become clarified, but I kept that out of the OP - there's the Trojan Horse letter, and then some separate allegations of extremist behavior at a different school which trickle up via the Humanist organization. That second one is the one that leads to the trials, but the former is the one that catches all the headlines.

Don't know what happened to that comment.

Writeup of the findings of one of the inquiries here:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jul/17/birmingham-schools-inquiry-hardline-sunni-islam-trojan-horse

No criminal conduct, but on the all-male teachers' WhatsApp group some pretty poisonous stuff.

Islamaphobia is bad, but also if the people doing this kind of religio-political indoctrination in public schools were evangelicals instead of muslims we'd all immediately see that it's terrible, right? There's a weird trichotomy where conservative muslims and conservative christians hate each other, and secular liberals sometimes take sides in this battle for good reasons, but ultimately conservative Islam and conservative Christianity are both very bad.

Yeah, I came out of the podcast disapproving of people on all sides. The initial hoaxter definitely seems to have, you know, committed a hoax accusing Muslim educators of a plot to take over the schools, and that's very wrong even though she is Muslim herself and even though she seems to have been targeted and treated badly in initial conflicts with the conservative Muslims in the school where she was a principal. The British government and media generally behaved super badly in relying on that hoax to drive investigations, rather than forthrightly making it clear that the letter was transparently faked.

On the other hand, it does seem that there were at least some Muslim educators, including the ones who were barred from working in education, who were importing inappropriate amounts of conservative Muslim religious and social mores into the schools they controlled. Any effort to roll that back should have been kept completely separate from the hoax letter, but I'm not sure the effort was misguided.

I would put the most blame on the national elected officials trying to plant the seeds of pogroms, but yes, it seems ESH.

Oooh, the OTHER Birmingham. I was so confused! That's what I get for not clicking the OP link.

In my defense, my mistake was understandable since many British press outlets are happy to cross oceans to take a dump on Muslims.

I enjoy podcasts like this one, but I've become very aware of the ridiculous lengths they will go to manufacture drama. This podcast they travel most of the way around the world to personally confront a person who they have no reason to believe will be willing to talk to them. They make it seem this is because they are so desperate they will try anything, but I'm sure that at least one of the people in charge was thinking that this would create a dramatic conclusion.

Or, as Dave Barry used to put it when he was funny, run the risk that their vacation would be tax deductible.

15: Another aspect of this is that podcasts have become big business. When Serial Productions started out, I imagine travelling around the world would have broken their budget, but by now that cost is probably not even enough to be a consideration.

Americans love Pepsi and Martin Short.

18: What? I hate it when I don't get your jokes.

I would have gone with "Americans love Corn Flakes and Ted Bundy"

I find it better to not explain my jokes because usually when people try to figure them out, they come up with something better than I intended.

20: I respect that, but I am annoyed.

Have you watched Only Murders in the Building?

22: No, but I do remember Ed Grimley.

I don't follow soccer.

23: She said, grimly.

Or maybe: She said, Grimmly. If that's still a Thing.

There's something that didn't get discussed in the podcast at all, because the podcasters don't, I think, accept one of the premises, but I was thinking about.

There does seem to be a group of religiously conservative Muslims who got involved in managing a bunch of schools in Birmingham. As I said above, while I don't think the podcasters would agree, they do seem to have introduced conservative religious social mores into the schools in a way that is a real problem, including bullying and undercutting secular employees of the schools. So that's bad. On the other hand, as the podcasters made very clear, they also improved school quality overall dramatically: kids started getting wildly better academic results. Assuming the latter statement is accurate, at what point is it worth it?

In the US, this is complicated by the whole constitutional separation of church and state thing, but in the UK that's not a legal issue. So, how do you weigh the costs and benefits?

In the US, this is complicated by the whole constitutional separation of church and state thing,

Sadly it may no longer be an issue

the original hoax letter was presented by the podcast as likely haven been written by a liberal woman muslim headteacher as part of a strategy to influence/derail an employment dispute with teaching assistants in her school who were not only more-conservative muslim women, but also a christian, anglo woman. as i recall it wasn't a neatly liberal vs. conservative muslim conflict with respect to the headteacher-teaching assistant employment dispute. it seemed mostly to be pretty dreary, standard workplace dispute.

there also seems to have been a wider community conflict between the liberal woman muslim headteacher and conservative muslim community members, and that likely did add fuel to the employment dispute - i don't see how that significantly undercuts the podcast's overall thesis that the entire situation from soup to nuts was fueled by religious intolerance of various stripes including majorly islamaphobia.

i was exposed to a wiiiide range of horrifically intolerant, misogynistic, racist christian rubbish in my merry trip through suburban u.s. public schools. i'm all in favor of stomping this out, particularly when this bullshit is perpetuated by the dominant group (internally within the birmingham muslim community this undoubtedly includes conservative patriarchal mulsims). here, local oppressive hierarchies intersected with wider, different societal hierarchies and this dance was weaponized by a whole rich array of folks acting in bad faith.

the liberal woman muslim headteacher and the conservative man muslim headteacher certainly seemed to share the quality of "high on their own supply," a common failing of charismatic, driven educators. i think it is absolutely possible to achieve great educational outcomes without unhealthy messianic personality cults, but perhaps not while viciously underinvesting in education.

on a hilarious small personal note, there was a brief period of twitter discussion of this podcast mostly by people in the uk who seemed to me to share a general impulse to take a skeptical view of the podcast mostly bc u.s. listeners were *outraged*, *outraged* i tell you! and that couldn't possibly be justifiable bc everyone knows the u.s. sucks waaay worse than the uk! anyways d davies was, imv, trying to have it both ways by saying that there was some truth in the podcast but that he had it personally from "people who really knew" that there ABSOLUTELY WAS FIRE WHERE ALL THAT MUSLIM SMOKE IN THEM THERE BIRMINGHAM HILLS WAS, and i was like - ummmm, the entire point of the podcast surely was that the entire "official" response proceeded on nothing but --- assumptions by "people who knew, or knew someone who knew" that there was --- smoke from them there mulsim birmingham hills ---

and just like that i was blocked! my only ever twitter blocking! what a thrill, ahhhh.

IDK, I think that isn't trying to have it both ways, but is actually quite a good conclusion - yes, official response was terrible because of Islamophobia in government and media, but also - as shown by witness statements, WhatsApp logs, etc, some pretty unpleasant stuff going on. Even the bit about "of course we set up an all-male WhatsApp group just for male teachers" - that doesn't ring tiny alarm bells, even before you learn just what the discussions in the boys' club involved?

Yeah, that's roughly where I ended up in 11 above.

That is, Davies may have been appealing to secret knowledge from insiders who told him things privately, which always sounds silly, but as I understand it the public investigations found a lot of problematic issues with the conservative religious educators in the Birmingham schools.

I was left thinking that the main problem with the whistleblowers at that high school was that they seemed clinically incapable of just calling it sexism and blow the whistle at that. They seemed to relentlessly mush it together with the Islamic identity. That left me unconvinced that sexism at a conservative Christian school would be pursued as rabidly, and so I landed on "witch hunt".

I mean, all-male whatsapp message threads and problematic individual teachers is exactly the kind of thing that should be dealt with locally. And while the council comes off as kind of ineffectual and lame, if the issue is that the council is ineffectual and lame, then that should have been the focus of the national hearings.

there was shitty misogynistic conservative crap going on for sure! it was reported on in the podcast! totally legit to critique the degree of emphasis! but i mean honestly a naked appeal to "i know personally from establishment people who know personally that oh boy those podcasters they sure got *that* one wrong " just strikes me as, charitably, lame & unselfaware. in a (pre block lol) follow up he retreated to pointing to news reports of bad stuff in the birmingham schools that the podcasters left out but when i looked the news reports it looked like either stuff the podcasters did include (again, you can argue without proper emphasis) or wasn't in birmingham schools. & at any rate my point is with *in this context* pointing to unspecified insider knowledge as a claim to authority. relying on shared assumptions & failing to identify & critically examine the evidence allows power to trundle along well trodden lines perpetuating oppressive systems. the male conservative muslim headteacher just thought he'd made it into the power structure & turned out to be disposable fuel for gove's unquenchable ambitions. whatever power did seems in this instance to not have provided any meaningful help to e.g. muslim kids in birmingham getting a good education without being exposed to patriarchal shit on the regular.

32: I mean, all-male whatsapp message threads and problematic individual teachers is exactly the kind of thing that should be dealt with locally.

Agreed, but in this case as I understand it the school was an "academy", which means it wasn't under the authority of the local government (as a normal state school would have been), but reported directly to the Department for Education in London. There was no way of dealing with it locally. The whole point of the "academy" setup was to take power away from local government, and that meant that anything going wrong at an academy automatically became a national-government issue.

26.2 raises an interesting question along the lines of "how much bullying, homophobia etc is worth it for a 10% increase in average performance in national standardised tests?" which is not really an angle I'd thought of taking on this, but it's an interesting one.

"Oh boy those podcasters sure got that one wrong," is the kind of tightly dependent on what "that one" is. I thought that what the podcasters intended listeners to take away from the series was that because the letter was a privately motivated hoax, all investigations and consequences following the letter were fruit of the poison tree regardless of what they found. The investigations shouldn't have happened, and the consequences were per se wrongful. And that is, I think, something the podcasters were wrong about.

34.last -- depends on how big the changes are. 10% increase in average performance doesn't sound worth it. But the podcast made it sound as if schools changed from burned-out hellholes where none of the students were prepared for higher education, to schools where most of the students were successful and ready for university or work. If that's overstating the change, that's one thing. But there's a point where you do need to think about tradeoffs.

To do the calculations, first you need to standardize measurement of homophobia.

And of course the baseline in badly functioning schools not run by conservative Muslims is more than zero bullying and homophobia.

Right. At least 7 Anita Bryants.

37: beatings per hundred pupils per year?

34.last: Bullying and homophobia and whatnot are not an inseparable part of a comprehensive educational plan, but are pursued for their own sake.