UK media has reported that under new Home Office regulations, Imams, priests, rabbis and other religious figures will have to enroll in a ‘national register of faith leaders’ and be subject to government-specified training and security checks. According to The Telegraph report:.
Imams, priests, rabbis and other religious figures will have to enrol in a ‘national register of faith leaders’ and be subject to government-specified training and security checks in the Home Office’s latest action on extremism.
The highly controversial proposal appears in a leaked draft of the Government’s new counter-extremism strategy, seen by The Telegraph, which goes substantially further than previous versions of the document
The strategy, due to be published this autumn, says that Whitehall will ‘require all faiths to maintain a national register of faith leaders’ and the Government will ‘set out the minimum level of training and checks’ faith leaders must have to join the new register.
Registration will be compulsory for all faith leaders who wish to work with the public sector, including universities, the document says. In practice, most faith leaders have some dealings with the public sector and the requirement will cover the great majority.”
With respect to the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK, the report cites the following section from the document that describes the Muslim Brotherhood as an “extremist movement”:
The document defines extremism as “the vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs,” or as calling for the death of members of the British Armed Forces.
It also names a number of specific groups – including the Association of Muslim Schools, which has close links to a number of the Trojan Horse plotters. Significantly, it describes the Muslim Brotherhood, a loose global Islamist network, as an “extremist movement”.
A Government review into the Brotherhood, completed months ago, has still not been published.
Read the whole report here: