Boris Johnson, the controversial mayor of London, has said that Muslim children in the UK at risk of being “taught crazy stuff” at home by their parents should be taken into care to avoid this form of “child abuse.”
Johnson stated that efforts of counter-terrorism officers were
being blocked by “what I am obliged to call political
correctness,” and that Muslim children at risk of being fed
extreme ideologies from their parents in the UK ran the risk of
becoming “potential killers or suicide bombers.”
“This is absurd,” Johnson wrote in his column in
The Daily Telegraph. “The law should
obviously treat radicalization as a form of child abuse.”
He called for renewed efforts to imbue children with “British
values,” and the need for a stronger, clearer assertion of these
values without “fatal squeamishness over intervention.”
“It is estimated that there could be hundreds of children… who
are being taught crazy stuff: the kind of mad yearning for murder
and death that we heard from Lee Rigby’s killers,” Johnson
wrote.
His column comes in the wake of the sentencing of Michael
Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, the killers of UK soldier Lee
Rigby, who they slaughtered in broad daylight in Woolwich,
southeast London. The action preceded a rise in anti-Islamic attacks across the UK.
“The most important question [after the murder of Lee Rigby]
is how we prevent other young men, and women, from succumbing to
that awful virus: the contagion of radical Islamic
extremism,” Johnson wrote in his column.
At present there is a general reluctance of the social services
to intervene in the upbringing of kids from such families –even
when there is solid evidence to support the presence of
‘extremist views’ among parents. A ‘safeguarding law’ in place
may not support any action to take the kids into care.
However, Johnson suggested that it may not only be the children
of “extremist” Muslim families that need to be taken
into care. He told LBC radio that it could also be justified to
take away the children of far-right British National Party (BNP)
members in the most “extreme cases.”