Weekend schools teach anti-semitic and homophobic texts in UK

At the schools,which offer the Saudi National Curriculum and run under the umbrella of ‘Saudi Students Clubs and Schools in the UK and Ireland’,BBC said,diagrams are shown to children how to hack off hands and feet of thieves.

It says that these ‘weekend schools’ teach that the penalty for sodomy is execution and that the main goal of the Zionist movement is for the Jews to have control over the world and its resources’.

The schools are not state-funded,and do not use Government buildings. They are able to exploit a loophole which means weekend schools are not inspected by Ofsted,the report said.

However,the BBC Panorama claims that a building used for one of the schools,in Ealing,West London,is owned by the Saudi government.

The report touched off an uproar with Education Secretary Michael Gove responding that anti-Semitic and homophobic sentiments have “absolutely no place in English education or in public life in Britain.”

“I have no desire or wish to intervene in the decisions that the Saudi government makes in its own education system… But I’m clear that we cannot have anti-Semitic material of any kind being used in English schools,” Gove said.

“Ofsted are doing some work in this area… They’ll be reporting to me shortly about how we can ensure that part-time provision is better registered and better inspected in the future,” he said.

The programme also claimed to have uncovered evidence apparently linking the schools to the Saudi embassy. But officials at the embassy deny any link.

In a statement,the Saudi embassy said: “Any tutoring activities that may have taken place among any other group of Muslims in the United Kingdom are absolutely individual to that group and not affiliated to or endorsed by the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia.”

The Saudi Ambassador told the BBC it was “dangerously deceptive and misleading” to discuss some of the texts outside of context.