The Trojan Horse Affair - Part 6

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I didn't feel great after I gave Hamza a hard time for going off on Richie Thompson, the British humanist.

And truth is, it wasn't the first time I'd done something like that, where I called him out for crossing lines I thought he shouldn't be crossing as a journalist.

The first time was early on in our working together.

I'm good.

What's going on?

Okay.

Um, well, it's not great, honestly.

Oh, good.

So I just got this email.

This was when we were looking into Adli Primary School, trying to find information about the head teacher, Rasvana Dar, and the four teaching assistants who said their resignation letters had been faked.

When Brian requested records from the Employment Tribunal about the case, the tribunal contacted the people involved to ask whether they wanted the records released.

Turns out, some of them did not.

Brian started reading a letter to me that had had just been sent to the tribunal by the three Muslim TAs in response to his request.

The main responsibility of a journalist is to report the news in a truthful, unbiased, and apolitical way, and to educate the public about events and issues and how they affect their lives.

I do not believe these matters will be reported in, quote-unquote, an unbiased and apolitical way.

The lead figure in this exercise is Mr.

Syed, a student journalist who intends to use Mr.

Reed's radio station as a medium to advocate his opinions.

Oh, wow.

We have received letters directly, indirectly, slash indirectly from Mr.

Syed attached.

They've attached my letters.

They have.

Oh, boy.

It is the contents of these letters which raise concerns.

We quote a paragraph from the letter addressed to Mr.

Aslam.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

Oh, no.

Mr.

Aslam is the brother of two of the teaching assistants from Adeli Primary School.

Brian and I had a weird phone call with Aslam early on to ask if he'd connect us with his sisters.

He's reluctant to admit it was him we were speaking to.

He asked suspiciously how we got his number for his law office, even though it was just advertised online.

And then he hung up on us.

It seemed like all he heard were the words journalist and Trojan horse, and he shut down.

We decided to follow up with a letter.

Usually, Brian and and I look over each other's emails and letters to potential sources before we send them, but Aslam had seemed especially distrustful of reporters.

Shortly after we talked, he actually changed his WhatsApp profile picture to a Malcolm X meme about media controlling the minds of the masses.

So I said to Brian, let me try a more personal appeal with this one.

Let him know there's someone with some shared background involved in this project.

Brother to brother, I think are the words I actually said to Brian.

And so with this one letter, I drafted it on my own, sealed it in an envelope, and I dropped it off at Aslam's office.

I never heard back.

Until now, as Brian read to me, the court finding that he and the people involved in the Adley case, including Brisvanada and the Bone City Council, had just been sent as well, quoting my letter to Aslam.

Quote, I'm on a master's program for investigative journalism currently.

I graduate this September.

The Trojan Horse began as my dissertation project,

as my first attempt to start writing wrongs.

I never believed in the official narrative regarding the Trojan horse.

I never believed the letter was authentic.

I never believed Tahir Alam was masterminding the sinister Islamic plot.

I never believed Birmingham City Council.

I never believed Peter Clark.

I never believed Michael Gove.

I never believed Razwana Dar.

And I never believed your sisters wrote those resignation letters.

What I believe is I'm going to change this narrative, inshallah.

End quote.

Oh boy.

With each oh boy,

I was coming to terms with both both how bad and how confusing the situation was.

By this point I knew the TAs didn't want to participate in our story.

I've been trying to get in touch with them all sorts of ways including through other family members who told me the TAs didn't want this painful chapter dredged up again.

And the TAs said as much in this letter to the tribunal.

In fact they went further, saying they worried that being thrust back into the public eye could put their safety at risk somehow.

But in addition, the TAs were now making the bewildering argument that they didn't want me to have the records from their case because I was too biased in favor of them.

We trust the above sets out clearly our position as the applicants in this case.

Yours faithfully, Shanaz Bibi, Yasmin Akhtar, Rahana Kanom.

And then they've attached both your letter to Aslam and then your letter to Rohana

as evidence.

Um.

So.

It's one thing, as a reporter, to have a read on a situation, to have theories.

It's another to have such an unambiguous take and to spell it out in writing and send it around to people.

Others could do exactly what the TAs were doing, brandish what Hamza had written to try and discredit our work.

It could cause people to distrust our reporting.

Plus, we hadn't even asked Rasvana Dar for an interview yet.

She's obviously one of the key people we were reporting on, and I was hopeful she might talk to Hamza and me.

But this letter, this was likely Rasvana Dar's introduction to us.

Hamza writing that he never believed her.

Dude, I wish you hadn't wrote this this way.

I gotta be honest.

Yeah, I know.

I know.

I don't even know what to do now.

I am genuinely, genuinely so sorry for writing that, mate.

Clearly, I was just trying to

strong just to get him on our side, you know.

It wasn't a word that I thought would be, like, being passed around.

I thought, okay, we're not going to be able to win him

with anything kind of half-fast.

Might as well just kind of go all in.

Listen, I understand why you wrote this and you're this is new for you i get it's your first story um

but like i'm sorry yeah just out of um i fucked up mate i fucked up i'm sorry no i'm not trying to dude i'm not i'm not trying to shame you into an apology don't worry about that but i just uh

like it's not a front the the like you know like but i want to be clear like i'm open to any possibility you know of the truth here

you know yeah and i think you are too i like you know know, I don't read this and it doesn't feel accurate to how you feel.

It's not just that we have our, as a journalist, we have our opinions, but don't say them.

I really try to

really be open while letting facts lead me towards conclusions.

It's not like I have some conclusion and then just don't say it, you know?

I'm not trying to lecture you, I'm just trying to talk it out.

That's all.

You there?

Yeah, man, I'm just, I'm just, uh,

I've, you know, I've killed it.

Oh, man, can you just, can you just call me back in like five minutes or something?

I kind of just need to just

need to just go drink some water or something.

Yo.

Hey, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to.

I did, I did, did.

I feel like I was lecturing you there.

I didn't mean for it to come off that way.

I'm really sorry.

No, no, listen, listen, listen.

You got nothing to apologize for in this situation.

I have fucked us both up, and it's my fault.

And, you know, you're being surprisingly patient with me, if I'm honest.

If I was,

trust me, I would not be this diplomatic with you if that was you who done that.

Man, whatever.

I'll own those words.

I will own those words, you know.

What do you mean, own them?

Do you believe them?

Like, like are they true well okay here's

let me let me uh let me just be frank here okay what's that list again who am i saying that i don't believe

um

you never believed in the official narrative regarding the trojan horse that seems fair that's fine yeah i never believed the letter was authentic take that one

You never believed Tahir Alam was masterminding the sinister Islamic plot?

I didn't.

I never believed Birmingham City Council.

I don't.

I still don't.

I never believed Peter Clark.

I don't.

I never believed Michael Gove.

I don't.

I never believed Rizvana Dar.

I don't.

I feel like what you have there

is like

the reality of just a human being.

You have my

mindset as a person of what I thought this incident was, and you have my approach as a journalist of the way I'm pursuing it.

As a journalist, as I begin with like a hunch, like an instinct, you know, based on things that I've researched, that doesn't mean that

when facts suggest otherwise, I remain stubborn and I'd stick to my original premise.

There's a reason this story isn't broadcast yet.

I understand what you're saying, but also the wording is: I never believed, you know?

Yeah, never is a strong word.

I know.

I am not defending my language nor the fact that I wrote or anything along that lines.

It just poisons everything.

It poisons everything.

Because now it's not in the hands of impartial journalists.

Now it's in the hands of like a biased, you know, mob.

God, I just wish we'd.

Oh,

God.

Oh, man.

I'd worked with Hamza long enough to know that what he was telling me was true.

Sure, he had suspicions, but he was working hard to uncover facts and following the facts where they led.

I was frustrated that he'd written this breathless letter that didn't properly capture the work I knew we were doing.

But what I realize now, listening back to this call, with all my sorry man's and my discomfort, is that I was in the middle of a change in how I understand my work.

There was a way I'd gone about my job for years that I'd begun to doubt without really admitting it to myself.

This change crystallized for me after our next leg of reporting, when we teased apart the government's investigations into Birmingham schools.

We dove into those investigations and the reports they produced because for a year and a half, Hams and I had been hearing that there wasn't any value in focusing on the Trojan horse letter, on its source or its purpose.

The letter, people would say, whatever its unknowns or factual errors, didn't matter anymore, because all the subsequent investigations had found that something troubling was happening in Birmingham schools.

The most damning investigation was also the most prominent one, conducted on behalf of the National Department for Education by the former head of counterterrorism at Scotland Yard, Peter Clark.

And once we delved into Peter Clark's report, that's when it really set in for me what Hamza is up against, as a journalist covering this story and as a person.

From Serial Productions and the New York Times, I'm Brian Reed.

And I'm a pain in the ass.

This is the Trojan Horse Affair.

Alright, Peter Clark.

As I've made inconveniently clear in my letter to Aslam, which is now filed away in the Midlands West Employment Tribunal, I was, you know, sceptical of Clark.

But I wasn't alone in that.

The decision by the Department of Education to appoint the former head of counter-terrorism was described as desperately unfortunate by the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police.

Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, was the one who chose peter clark to run the trojan horse investigation and people started grousing the moment gove appointed him the issues in birming schools seem to be about school procedures curriculum hiring religious practice clarke was known for executing high-profile terrorist things

why would you need someone with that background for this investigation terrorism we're dealing with allegations here we're not dealing with al-Qaeda we've had a number of but gove sent peter clark to birmingham anyway

if people have been unfairly alleged to have taken part in activities of which they're entirely innocent, then there can be no more effective figure to exonerate them of those charges than Peter Clark.

For three months, Clark posted up in my city.

He and a team of DFE officials conducted 43 interviews, many on condition of anonymity, with staff connected to schools in East Birmingham and others.

And at the end of it, he published his report.

His conclusion was this, that there had been, quote, coordinated, deliberate, and sustained action carried out by a number of associated individuals to introduce an intolerant and aggressive Islamic ethos into a few schools in Birmingham, and that these people, in positions of influence, quote, espouse, endorse, or fail to challenge extremist views.

Clark writes that he conducted his investigation in an atmosphere where there was a great deal of rumor, speculation, and unevidenced assertion.

And so, quote, I've treated the entire investigation as an exercise in fact-finding and in establishing a sound, verifiable, and whenever possible, fully corroborated evidence base.

When I read Peter Clark's report for the first time, though, I was not seeing a fully corroborated evidence base.

Far from it.

For instance, let's look at Parkview School, to which Clark devotes a lot of attention in his report.

In one chapter, he includes a bullet point list of allegations about Parkview.

And at the very top of the list, the first item.

Peter Clark speaks about

a terrorist video in the school.

Terrorist video in the school.

This is Deher Alam, Parkview's former chair of governors.

When we asked him about Peter Clark's investigation, he remembered this video thing immediately.

It's one of Clark's most incendiary findings from any school.

Quote, IT technicians recording what appeared to be al-Qaeda terrorist videos into a DVD format.

Now, what impression do you get from that?

In a school should there be terrorist videos?

The answer is no.

So the school's done something wrong haven't they?

Now what information did Peter Clark have from the people in the school?

That particular video was brought in by somebody who was working for the police.

According to him, someone doing an anti-crime program for the cops had noticed that the school had a DVD burner and asked if they could use it.

And the video they were copying.

The terrorist video happens to be a panorama program.

You know that show.

It was no terrorist video, it was a documentary done by the BBC Panorama Program about maybe Afghanistan.

The hair says Parkview shared this explanation with Peter Clark and his investigation team.

In fact, they shared a lot of mitigating and controverting evidence for the claims people were levying against them.

Yet Peter Clark includes little reference to that information in the report, beyond one line saying, quote, it is only fair to point out that Parkview had disputed most, if not all, of the allegations.

Today, if you go on the government's website, you'll see the terrorist video still leaves the list of claims about Parkview, even though the Department for Education later wrote an internal memo that we've seen admitting they can find no proof to back it up.

I wanted to evaluate the other claims in Peter Clark's report.

I knew that a year or so after the report came out, many of the allegations had been interrogated in public hearings at what was known as the National College for Teaching and Leadership when the government tried to ban a number of the Parkview staff from the teaching profession.

During those hearings, Parkview leaders and their lawyers had the opportunity to put forward their side of the story and cross-examine not Peter Clark himself who didn't testify in the hearing and also declined to speak to us, but the DFE officials who investigated Parkview with him and Clark sources from inside the school.

So Check out the transcript of the hearing against Parkview's senior leadership team.

It was thousands of pages and took a whole summer to slog through.

I'm going to take the next 2,000 hours to walk you through each allegation.

I'm kidding, sort of.

I am going to take you through a bunch of the Clark allegations, ones the government focused on in their case against the teachers, because it's the only way I can think of to fully convey the sinkholes in Clark's investigation.

and why I don't think anyone should be basing their understanding of the Trojan horse affair on this report.

A number of the claims in Clark's report we've discussed already, as part of our interview with Sue and Steve Packer.

Peter Clark reports on the sex education class, the tennis lesson, the lack of promotion and opportunity for women.

But there are a lot more.

For one, Clark writes that Parkview student prefects, our version of whore monitors, were trained, according to some staff, to operate as morality police.

That they would provide the headteacher with the names of pupils who say had a boyfriend or a girlfriend, or of a girl who wasn't sufficiently covered.

At the disciplinary hearing a year later, the government was unable to put forward any student who remembers this.

They actually put forward no students to testify against the school at all.

The testimony the government did provide to support this claim was from one Parkview teacher who said on the stand that she believed student prefects were monitoring the school as religious police because she saw kids in detention and didn't know why they were there.

And another teacher told her it was because they were in a relationship.

The school denied that was a reason students would be in detention, but regardless, this teacher doesn't explain how she got the idea that it was student prefects who had snitched on their classmates.

Meanwhile, a number of other teachers testified that they never heard about prefects acting as a morality squad.

And a former prefect took the stand to say they weren't asked to do anything like that.

There's a lot in the Clark report about the assemblies at Parkview School being anti-American or anti-Christian or anti-Israeli with indoctrination of students going on.

But at the hearing, from what I gathered reading the transcript, and this was confirmed by a lawyer involved with the case, most of the staff who made claims about the nature of assemblies admitted they'd never been to an assembly at the school.

Sue Baker was one, Sue testified the school assemblies were only ever led by men.

And when confronted by a lawyer with the names of women on staff who'd hosted assemblies at the school, Sue said her statement about it only being men was based on her quote, belief that that was the case.

One teacher who testified had attended assemblies.

He said during one of them, Parkview's acting head teacher, Mos Hussain, told children that quote, the answer to everything is Ikra,

which he found concerning because while ikra does mean read or seeking knowledge in Arabic, it's a religious term from the Quran and this teacher felt uncomfortable with that.

He also testified that he didn't agree that ikra is the answer to everything.

Peter Clark wrote that some East Birmingham schools had, for religious reasons, prevented students from hearing musical instruments and from singing.

At the disciplinary hearing, a DFE investigator admitted that he hadn't checked inside the cupboard in Parkview's music room where the music teacher says the instruments were kept.

School staff spoke of Parkview students singing at assemblies, of children being on stage with Roger Waters, the bassist of Pink Floyd.

Clark also writes that he found financial mismanagement at Parkview School.

One of his fellow investigators from the DFE stated at the hearing that they found no such thing.

This is the problem with the Clark report.

He provides no clear sourcing or verification for the vast majority of his allegations.

There are scant facts or figures or footnotes or context, which is not, by the way, Peter Clark's normal style.

After the Trojan Horse affair, he went on to become England's prison inspector, and in the reports he produced for that job, he's way more transparent about his work and how his findings are corroborated.

The prison reports are annotated, full statistics.

Whereas in his Trojan Horse Report, you kind of have to take his word for it.

Even claims that were based on something that did occur, there was often more to the story than what Clark reported.

For example, Clark writes that there were attempts to stop Christmas celebrations at Parkview.

It's true that Tahir Alam and others believe that some parents would object to their kids participating in certain Christmas activities, such as playing a Christian figure in a nativity play.

The student body was around 97% Muslim.

But what's missing from Clark's report is that the school did put up Christmas trees, held a Christmas assembly where a pastor spoke about the holiday, organized a Christmas music concert.

At the hearing, Steve Packer, who seemed most concerned about Christmas, testified that all this was true, though he said there weren't Christmas songs sung at the Christmas concert.

Clark also writes that Parkview did not have a procedure for vetting external speakers invited to the school, which leadership acknowledged.

Peter Clark returned several times to this one Imam who visited from Australia, who despite the fact that the Australian government has called him a widely respected Islamic figure in the country and a moderating influence on Muslim youth, Clark says has a history of extolling extremist views.

The Imam's name is Sheikh Shady al-Sulaiman, and the specific quote Clark references from an old sermon of Sheikh Shady's was actually read into the record of the House of Commons by Michael Gove.

The school invited the preacher, Sheikh Shadi al-Suleimin, to speak, despite the fact that he is reported to have said, Give victory to Muslims in Afghanistan.

Give victory to all the mujahideen all over the world.

O Allah, prepare us for the jihad.

I know Gove was reciting those words from Sheikh Shady's old sermon, as if they're scary.

But at least from my experience, that's a pretty generic sounding sign-off for Friday prayers.

And we've read a lengthy dossier the Home Office prepared about Sheikh Shady after Peter Clarke's investigation, in which officials agree.

They're right, quote, this rhetoric is likely to be heard from Imams and mosques around the UK and overseas when they make specific prayers for people affected by wars and other calamities.

These words are, quote, used in a very common prayer uttered by Muslims everywhere.

Peter Clark's overarching allegation, the big charge that all these other claims fed into, was that there was too much Islamic influence at Parkview and other schools, that they'd become faith schools, as he puts it, in all but name.

But it's totally unclear from Clark's report what standards or benchmarks he used to make that assessment.

The Department of Education provides pretty clear direction as to how schools should incorporate religious education and collective worship, none of which is referenced in the Clark report.

And that may be because of a stunning revelation made during the hearing.

Clark's lead educational advisor, the person from the Department for Education who's supposed to lend expertise about school regulation and management to his inquiry, admitted under cross-examination that she had never read, nor provided Peter Clarke, any of her own department's guidance on religious accommodation in British schools.

If she had, Clark might have had to explain in his report how Parkview had run a file of the requirement that schools should quote, aim to provide the opportunity for pupils to worship God, to consider spiritual and moral issues, and to explore their own beliefs.

Instead, Clark's argument that there's undue Islamic influence in the schools, or Islamic influence of the wrong kind, is untethered to the statutory guidelines.

A broad, free-floating, subjective critique.

It's basically an opinion that there's too much Islam.

Peter Clark marshals this menagerie of allegations, some true, some kind of true, some that turned out not to be true, to lay out a wider story about East Birmingham schools.

A narrative which he interleaves through the allegations that I'd summarize something like this.

A lot of these schools were doing pretty well until a bunch of Muslim governors came in and started agitating for changes in line with an extreme Islamic worldview.

Their methods and motives were improper.

They started taking control at a bunch of schools.

And because the complaints and outcomes repeat from school to school, that means these these aren't isolated incidents.

They're connected.

The school at the epicenter of all this Islamization is Parkview.

The person at the epicenter of Parkview is Tahir Alam.

Tahir,

he's the main villain in Clark's report, which is not my phrase, by the way.

As officials with the DFE's counter extremism unit were working with Peter Clark to put the finishing touches on his report, one of them sent an email we've seen which refers to Tahir and three other Muslim men who worked with them as governors as their, quote, main villains.

You will see Clark published a spider diagram on me, okay?

We actually have that printed out.

We wanted to show it to you and get your take on it.

Yeah, I don't deny any of it.

After the list with the terrorist video, turn the page, and you'll see a tiny 90s clip art image of a man, who looks white, by the way, labeled Tahir Alam.

There are lines emanating from him in all directions, like a web crisscrossing and connecting between Tahir and icons of schools and office buildings and other white-looking clip-art educators with Pakistani names, all individuals and organizations that Tahir was associated with.

This is painted as

some kind of network, but these are things that I'm very proud of.

Alexis here, for example, he worked for Birmingham City Council as a governor trainer.

Wow.

He's a vice chair of the Association of Muslim Schools.

How bad is that?

And Birmingham Governors Network Association.

I was a was a member of the Birmingham Governors Network for many years, contributing to improving governance across the city.

So obviously, that's not maybe good either.

Let's go through it.

There's only a few more left.

Academy Governor.

So chair of governors, Academy Governor.

More than a few, but Tahir insisted on finishing them.

He was a member of the local multi-faith organization, SACRA.

He'd been the chair of education for the Muslim Council of Britain, a big national organization.

He was a trustee at the Birmingham Central Mosque.

So Peter Clark, with his tons of experience as a terror expert, you know, hunting extremists and terrorists down around the country, he's produced this.

It's basically your CV.

It is taken from my C V.

It's possible.

Tahur had provided his resume in an application to the DFE some years before, which had this information on it.

I submitted all of this.

They made it into a spider diagram and you're using it against me.

It's amazing when you take all the things that would in a CV be arranged like a resume and arrange them in a spider diagram and

it's a bit of a a different by a police officer, by a counter-terror official.

It just has a whole different vibe.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, that's right.

It's being crafted to give a certain image.

And the spider diagram is supposed to give an impression as if I'm some kind of criminal who has infiltrated all these different organizations.

This is supposed to serve the idea of the Trojan horse.

This is giving reality to the Trojan horse.

There's a critical fact about Tahir in Parkview that Peter Clark left out of his report.

A fact that, if he had included it, could have thoroughly undercut his entire narrative.

Parkview and Tahira Lam were taking over other East Birmingham schools because they'd been asked to by the Department for Education.

Parkview was considered this huge success, and there were two other schools nearby that really needed help.

And so the whole takeover was authorized and set in motion by the DFE through a program that Michael Gove himself was championing, the Academy's program.

Amazingly, Peter Clark never explains this.

So you'd be forgiven if you came away from reading his report with the idea that Muslim governors were making these moves illegitimately, if you thought they were scheming under the radar.

Omissions like this, along with all the allegations printed without context or rebuttal, the spider diagrams, It all contributes to a strong impression that Peter Clark did uncover a plot in Birmingham.

But when you read the report closely, this is another confounding thing about it.

Clark never actually says whether he found a plot or not.

He does write, quote, the key question is whether what has happened has been an organized plot as described in the Trojan horse letter.

But then he never explicitly answers that question, yes or no.

This obfuscation, which is at the very heart of the report's findings, led to a telling moment as Peter Clark was testifying in the House of Commons about the Trojan horse affair when a member of parliament said to him, Can I just ask Mr.

Clark first in relation to some of the evidence that you adduced to demonstrate that there was a plot?

And in particular...

Apparently, this MP read the report and took away from it plot.

Clark had to correct him, tells him, I haven't actually said that.

I haven't said I found a plot.

Coordinated concerted action, yes, plot to me means something slightly different as Ian's.

The MP pauses for a moment,

then asks,

This is out of interest.

How is that different from concerted action?

Well, you can have a continuum.

At one end, there's a lot of spontaneous things just happen.

At the other end, you've got a group of people, perhaps in a darkened room, sitting around a candle, deciding to do something in a very furtive way.

Somewhere between them, you will have people,

as I believe we have here, who, with a common mindset, common objectives,

known to each other, worked in the same organizations, work in the same profession, have shared the objectives and set about achieving those objectives using a set of tactics which are remarkably similar every time they emerge and remarkably similar as

it happens.

Peter Clark's report, rather than clarifying that the Trojan horse letter was a fake, the plot unevidenced, spun a web of legitimacy.

around both.

To take my cue from Peter Clark,

I want to share some concerns I have about some people with a common mindset who know each other, have worked in the same organizations, had common objectives and set about achieving those objectives.

Two people who fit that description are Peter Clark and the man who appointed him, former Education Secretary Michael Gove.

Those two have known each other for many years, mainly through Peter Clark's affiliations with think tanks that Michael Gove helped establish, which could form their own spider diagram, honestly.

These think tanks and the politicians and journalists and officials who are part of them have long advocated a view that ultimately made its way into the Conservative government's policy agenda that in order to prevent terrorism authorities have to target so-called non-violent extremists.

Michael Gove has been pushing this strategy for years.

In the past, there was an attempt to say that the only way in which we could deal with this problem is if we dealt with extremism when it became violent, and we waited too late.

He argues that there's a pre-violent stage to extremism during which Muslims get drawn into the ideology of Islamism.

Islamism is a totalitarian view like communism, like fascism, and in that respect, the only way in which one can understand the motivation is if you look at the totalitarian roots of the ideology rather than simply thinking that al-Qaeda are a national liberation movement like other terrorist organizations.

You mentioned the IRA like that.

The difficulty with this is

what many people see as early signs of extremism, the markers of pre-violence, can be hard to distinguish from the elements of daily life for many Muslims.

Deciding to attend mosques more frequently, dressing traditionally, growing a beard, associating with certain Muslim groups like the Muslim Council of Britain, and having a worldview in which our religion and political opinion are intermingled.

For instance, identifying with Muslims around the world who are being victimized, criticizing Western powers for oppression abroad, or wearing a niqab, which Michael Gove in his book Celsius 7.7 characterizes as quote, not so much a mark of Islamic faith as a badge of allegiance towards Islamist politics.

It marks the wearer apart as one who has become an internal exile.

Slightly more poetic, I guess, than our current Prime Minister, who called women who cover their faces letterboxes and bank robbers.

Essentially, the concept of pre-violence puts all Muslims on a spectrum, in which we are all capable of sliding towards violence, and so we all need to be kept under surveillance.

This conveyor belt theory of radicalization has been pretty roundly debunked.

Academics and MI5 and the US Department of Defense and former CIA agents have all pointed out that there's no empirical evidence to support it.

Experts who study radicalization haven't found a single discernible pathway to terrorism and warn that trying to pin down some sort of pattern or ideology can be counterproductive because it's not proven to work and it can make people feel criminalized and alienated in their own countries.

Still, many of the people who've shaped counter-terror policy have held on to this theory.

Gove, Clark, the Prime Minister at the time David Cameron, future Prime Minister Theresa May, people in the US too.

By the time the Trojan horse had came round, Michael Gove had spent years and a lot of political currency investing in this worldview.

If you read the Clark report with the theory of pre-violence in mind, suddenly it makes a lot more sense.

Especially when you consider the most damning evidence in the Clark Report, his smoking gun.

That's next.

Tomorrow

it's gonna be okay.

Who would do this to me?

A lifetime original movie.

A husband to die for.

The Lisa Aguilar story.

Do you know know where your husband was at the time of the attack?

He's been wrongfully charged.

Sometimes betrayal wears a familiar face.

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It was a group chat.

That was Peter Clark's smoking gun.

We've mentioned it before.

It was a men-only WhatsApp group that a bunch of Parkview staffers were part of called the Parkview Brotherhood.

Somebody gave Clark a transcript of some 3,200 messages from the chat, a year's worth, and he devotes a whole chapter to them because, he says, the messages are proof of the Muslim educators' collective mindset.

According to Clark, most of the messages were mundane, about school events, job postings, ideas for assemblies, but among them were texts that he saw as evidence of the ideology these men ascribed to.

What Clark called an intolerant and politicized form of extreme social conservatism that claims to represent and ultimately seeks to control all Muslims.

The messages he found concerning included an article about pro-European bias in the teaching of world history, a debate about the pros and cons of teaching boys and girls separately, criticism of the British military, an image of the Israeli flag on a roll of toilet paper, scepticism and theorizing about media reporting on terrorist attacks, and a discussion about possibly having students write letters to the government to protest a far-right Islamophobic group as part of their citizenship lessons.

Alongside those, Clark flagged several really offensive messages, which, if you follow the Trojan horse inquiries at the time, you'll probably remember hearing about in the headlines.

These were primarily from one teacher whom we've interviewed for this series, Roswan Faraz.

In one exchange, Roswan makes a comment about women belonging in the kitchen serving men.

In another, Razwan linked to an article about gay marriage and said, these animals are going out full force.

Another time, a teacher posted a link about a shrine in Pakistan being used as a meeting place for gay men.

Several teachers in the chat registered their disapproval, including Roswan, who wrote, quote, the problem of homosexuality is rife in Pakistan.

These messages are misogynistic and homophobic and clearly troubling coming from a teacher.

Clark's report makes mention of staff of some schools who reported that they had to hide their sexuality.

If true, that's awful, obviously.

When we asked Roswan about the messages, he told us that Kitchen Comet was a joke and that he's since changed his views on homosexuality and become an advocate for gay and transgender rights.

But after Clark published Roswan's comments, a judge found that they went beyond protected religious beliefs and amounted to a breach of professional standards.

Whether and how to talk about sexuality and gender in British schools is still an active controversy.

In 2019, a progressive new sex ed curriculum debuted at a primary school in East Birmingham and parents lost their minds, protesting in large numbers.

Their opposition included some ugly homophobic arguments.

Some parents even pulled their kids out of schools.

This isn't shocking, or at at least it shouldn't be.

Many Muslims who adhere to a conservative religious interpretation, the Hiralam among them, aren't accepting of LGBTQ people.

The same is true of devout Christians in the UK.

Only 40% of them support gay marriage.

I'm not saying homophobia or sexism doesn't matter because we're not the only ones.

I'm saying it does matter because we're not the only ones.

These problems require good faith engagement from leaders.

And yet, rather than grapple with the important issues at hand, here's what our government did in response to these WhatsApp messages and the Clark report.

Other news now in the government is to fast track a tough new crackdown on extremism.

It's a follow-up to promises made in the aftermath of the Trojan horse affair in Birmingham and the jailing of extremists such as Peter Clark's report was presented to Parliament by the Department for Education.

Politicians set about using it to make sweeping changes to combat pre-violent extremism, which would have implications far beyond Unham Rock.

Although as we reported at the time, no evidence of radicalisation was ever found, no evidence of violent extremism was ever found, there was no organised plot, but this is about the potential for problems in the future.

In a speech in Birmingham today, the Prime Minister compared the threat of extremist Islam to that of Hitler, communism and the IRA.

And in the past years...

In 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron stood in front of a Birmingham school and invoked the Trojan horse affair to lay out the rationale for a robust reimagining of of the country's counter-extremism strategy.

We undertook an immediate review when it became apparent that extremists had taken over some of our schools in the so-called Trojan horse scandal here in Birmingham.

But I have to be honest here, one year on, although we're making progress, it's not quick enough.

The think tanks made head of it.

The Home Secretary at the time, Theresa May, made her own trip to Birmingham to deliver a Trojan horse-inspired speech about extremism.

Even the Queen got on board at the request of the Tories in her own curt way.

Measures will also be brought forward to promote social cohesion and protect people by tackling extremism.

This all culminated in the government expanding their counter-extremism policy.

It's called PREVENT, in a way that we're still living with today.

Citing the Trojan horse affair, the government mandated that public employees would now be obligated to be on the lookout for people exhibiting the early markers of extremism or other behavior they find suspicious.

Which means now, in Britain, citizens are informing on each other to the state based on their own judgment about whether an action or comment is extremist.

Doctors are informing on their patients, workers, on their colleagues, teachers, on their students.

In the years since the Trojan horse affair, we've had an 11-year-old referred to the Prevent programme because, in response to a question in school about what he would do if he came into a lot of money, said he would give alms to the oppressed, A-L-M-S,

which is misheard as arms to the oppressed.

and a four-year-old who was referred for drawing an illustration of his father with a cooker bomb that was later understood to be a cucumber.

We can laugh at all this, except erroneous reports like these can easily follow kids all the way into adulthood that they were flagged to prevent.

They remain people of interest.

And these are just the crazy incidents that made the news.

The program has been found by numerous academics and human rights groups to be discriminatory against us.

We're referred in hugely disproportionate numbers.

As a director of an organization that monitors the program, put it not long ago, prevent inject suspicion and discrimination deep into the imagination of frontline workers, to the detriment of Muslims.

We asked Peter Clark, Michael Gove, and the Department for Education if they could explain some of the flaws we've seen in Peter Clark's report.

In return, the DFE sent us a

saying, the Trojan Horse investigation, led by Peter Clark, rightly focused on whether the events and behaviors alleged actually happened, and the findings have subsequently been confirmed by a number of independent reports, end quote.

So, just for a minute, a word about those other independent reports.

One the DFE mentioned, by the Education Funding Agency, was not independent of Clark's.

The Education Funding Agency was part of the DFE, and some of the same people who conducted that inquiry were also part of Peter Clark's team, even drafted whole chapters of his report.

Another investigation the DFE cited was by Ofsted, the school inspectors who had downgraded Parkview from the agency's highest ranking to the absolute lowest.

A downgrade that dramatic is nearly unheard of.

Ofsted said it was because the school wasn't doing enough to prevent the possibility of extremism.

But a lot of people, including prominent education experts, claimed Ofsted had succumbed to political pressure.

Ofsted's chief inspector was even dragged in front of parliament and grilled about it.

And lastly, the DFE mentioned Birmingham City Council's Trojan horse investigation by Ian Kershaw.

Kershaw collaborated closely with Peter Clark too.

They did joint interviews, shared evidence.

And while he did determine that some governors had overstepped in pushing for academic and religious changes at their schools, unlike Clark, he did not allege a sinister ideological threat.

When we interviewed Kershaw, he really minimized the whole affair, telling us, quote, one should not overblow the Trojan horse.

Some people say scandal.

It wasn't big enough to be a scandal, end quote.

One of the recommendations Peter Clark made at the end of his investigation was that the Department for Education should consider taking action against teachers who might have breached professional standards.

The DFE did.

It restricted or outright suspended more than a dozen teachers, mostly from Parkview, with the charge that they had agreed to the inclusion at the school of a, quote, undue amount of religious influence.

And the department started holding those disciplinary hearings to determine if the teachers should be permanently banned.

As we mentioned, the most prominent of the cases was against five of Parkview's leaders, people who'd been head teachers and assistant heads and the like, though not to Hir Alam, because he was a volunteer governor, not a teacher.

He was just banned outright.

And when he appealed, he lost.

This hearing.

It was the first time the Parkview teachers would get a chance to try to formally clear their names.

Arshad Hussein was one of them.

The initial set of dates, I think the hearings were for three months, ended up going on for two and a half years.

They were making it up as they go along.

During this time, Arshad and his colleagues, two of whom, interestingly enough, aren't Muslim, would schlet themselves to a drab building in Coventry, where the government would argue that they weren't fit to work in schools.

You know, you can't teach.

Your hearings are scattered across the two years, so you got a day here, day there.

It was just horrendous.

By this point, the charge against Arshad and his colleagues had been watered down significantly from when the Trojan horse allegations first emerged.

As the government's attorney said in his opening statement, Despite what you may have read or heard, this case is not, and I cannot stress this enough, this case is not about an evil plot to indoctrinate young children in extremist ideologies or anything like it.

He said the Department for Education was not suggesting that the educators were, quote, malicious or ill-willed.

It was not suggesting that Parkview hadn't had great success.

What the government was arguing, the attorney said, was that the teachers had failed to respect diversity by going, quote, too far in inculcating their own vision of the cultural identity they wished these children to have.

An all-white panel sat and listened to all-white lawyers argue about this until the case finally concluded in May of 2017, three and a half years after the Trojan horse letter arrived on Sir Albert Bohr's desk.

This essentially marked the end of the Trojan horse affair, and the end was its own magnificent, enraging shambles.

It was the final hour.

The disciplinary panel was drafting its decision, and there had been this back and forth that had been going on since the beginning of the proceedings about the transcripts of interviews that Peter Clark's team had conducted with witnesses from Parkview School.

The Parkview teachers had asked for these transcripts repeatedly.

They had a right to see them.

And the whole time, the Department for Education's lawyers had said they didn't have them, that they weren't relying on those interview transcripts to argue their case.

But that wasn't true.

It emerged at the very last minute that the DFE did have them, and they had used them to mount their case.

The whole time, years, the government's lawyers have been deliberately withholding crucial evidence from the Parkview teachers, their legal teams, and the panel.

The government had been sitting on at least 1,600 pages of documents, including the Clark transcripts.

When the disciplinary panel learned this, on the eve of reading its decision, the panelists demanded that the senior solicitor for the government's legal team appear in front of them and explain herself, explain how she'd let this happen.

But she didn't show.

She said she had a partner's meeting for her law firm that she couldn't miss.

And so, the panelists discontinued the case.

They issued no findings.

They wrote a new decision which said, of the DFE's lawyers' actions, quote, there has been an abuse of the process which is of such seriousness that it offends the panel's sense of justice and propriety.

What has happened has brought the integrity of the process into disrepute.

The whole thing is a blur.

Arshad Hussein remembers sitting in the hearing room as the panel read its decision.

As they started,

you know, pushing in that direction to abuse of process and hearings going to be dropped, you know, I started literally getting flashes in

front of my eyes, you know, thinking

this has happened because somebody has withheld evidence.

The solicitor had withheld the evidence.

And she couldn't come to the hearing because she was on a flight that evening conveniently.

And

she couldn't come and answer the questions.

Whereas we'd been answering questions for two years,

she just wasn't up to, you know, available to answer the questions and explain why this happened, happened, you know, why she'd done that.

You know, you've messed how many people's lives up and you just can't bother to show up.

I don't know, my mind just, you know, I don't know, it just went,

you know, I just couldn't cope with it that somebody had decided to do that, you know, for this amount of time.

And yet, I'm the one sitting here, you know, and

just sort of

broke down, I think.

it just felt like

you know when you when you step on a beetle you know on the street or you you know you step on an insect

and there's no

you know consequence there's no feeling of oh what have I done it's just yeah that's just part of what it is you know this we've trampled on on on these people yeah okay they'll

get through it

yeah we haven't won this one but let's just carry on on.

Eventually, every teacher's case in the Trojan Horse affair, except for one who was not from Parkview, was thrown out because of the government's lawyers' misconduct and their unwillingness to share the underlying material from Peter Clark's investigation.

After all the drama, the headlines, the investigations, the parliamentary hearings, the banning orders, the million-plus pounds spent prosecuting teachers, the new prevent requirements compelling people to surveil each other, the commandeering of schools in East Birmingham and worsening academic outcomes for students.

That was how the Trojan horse affair ended.

It was officially resolutionless.

Parkview's teachers weren't banned, but nor were they vindicated.

So that's what I saw.

when we finally turned to Peter Clark's report.

This investigative document that became the most common response by officials to questions about the Trojan horse setter.

To not worry about whether the letter was a hoax or not or where it came from because Peter Clark produced a far more reliable document.

Well, it turns out that wasn't true either.

The Clark report was also, in its own ways, bogus.

After I internalized that conclusion, I experienced a level of dejection that was hard for me to understand.

After all, this is what I believed to be true when I began the story, that the Trojan horse was much ado about nothing.

And yet the work of reporting on the Clark Report, aka Britain's official narrative of the case, was emptying.

Sitting there and surrounded by documents, I struggled to imagine what other group of people you could do this to in Britain and get away with it.

Trying to come to terms with how worthless people must think we are.

That they'd be comfortable assembling an official report riddled with errors and mistruths, submitting it to Parliament, sharing it with prominent journalists to write articles about, or with no expectation that people wouldn't believe them.

More, far from repercussions, a number of Clark's team, including Clark, were promoted after the publication of his inquiry into the Trojan horse.

And then there was a process by which I'd arrived at this point, that being journalism.

A field in which was made absolutely clear to me when my awesome letter surfaced.

I am obligated to keep an open mind, to be fair with the likes of Peter Clark and Michael Gove,

to consider their perspective, try to understand the choices they made, and even if I'm going to come at them critically, to rein in my tone and words so it doesn't feel like I'm just out to get them in some way.

It did not seem like that kind of respect was mutual.

I've always known that reporting this story is a much different experience for Hamza than it is for me.

Ever since the beginning, when we burst out of Council House after our first interview with Albert Bohr.

What the fuck was concerning?

Tell me what's concerning, mate.

This became the subject of an ongoing discussion between the two of us about how you're supposed to do this work.

We go through this step by step, kind of side by side,

but you are just like unflappable.

Hamza perpetually bewildered as to how I was able to take the things we were encountering and learning in stride the way I do.

I'm not gonna lie to you, I do think about you sometimes and I do wonder how you're wired.

Really?

Sometimes I wake up and I think I should be like that and that's how I need to be in order for me to do well in this field.

And me constantly struggling to explain me and my motivation.

What are you doing here in Birmingham?

I don't know.

You're asking me to be introspective in a way that's difficult.

But by the time we were wading through the Clark investigation, the tenor of our debate had changed.

I noticed Hamza becoming increasingly bitter about being a journalist.

And he started to talk more about how maybe this new field he'd entered wasn't right for him.

Something about the job felt unnatural.

And he told me he was thinking he might not keep doing it after this series came out.

Which was dispiriting for me, because sure, Hamz had done a couple things during investigation that seemed to me ill-advised.

But he's a good journalist.

Dogged, sharp, intuitive, original.

He seemed as well-suited as anybody for this job.

But here's what I've come to realize Hams and I were experiencing differently, working alongside each other on this story for so long.

The Trojan Horse.

And I don't mean the Trojan Horse letter or the Trojan Horse Affair.

I mean the idea of the Trojan Horse.

This idea which infected every aspect of the events we were investigating.

The idea that Muslims who are participating in civic life in the West are in actuality using Western democratic systems duplicitously as a vessel to sneak into societies and countries that are not really their own so they can subvert them.

That phrase, Trojan horse, in reference to Muslims, it's not taboo.

It's perfectly acceptable to use it in the name of official reports submitted to parliament, or as Michael Gove did in Celsius 7-7 as the title of a chapter in your book about the Muslim threat, or in in the name of your podcast.

It's acceptable to use it in your campaign for president of the United States.

This could be the great Trojan horse of all time.

Because you look at the migration, study it, look at it.

Now they'll start infiltrating with women and children.

Donald Trump used the Trojan horse metaphor to speak about Muslims over and over in his run for president.

It was part of his stump speech.

Tens of thousands of Syrian refugees who probably,

in many cases, not probably, probably, who are definitely, in many cases, ISIS-aligned, and we now have them in our country, and wait till you see this is going to be the great Trojan horse.

This trope of Muslims as a Trojan horse, it's a racist lie, one that strikes me as not dissimilar in its potency and danger to, for instance, the anti-Semitic lie.

about a cabal of Jews nefariously controlling Western institutions.

That lie, it's worth noting, was also proliferated by a hoax document, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The canard that Muslims are surreptitiously infiltrating Western countries also shows up in some scary places.

White supremacist literature about the so-called replacement theory, white supremacist terrorists like Anders Brevik, who killed 77 people in Norway, or the man who massacred 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand.

They both wrote at length.

about the threat of Muslims as invaders.

In the last few years, governments around the world have drawn on these same bigoted views to justify assaults on Muslims, the Uyghurs in China, the Rohingya in Myanmar, the terrible treatment of Muslims in India, which seems to be getting worse, the US banning immigration from many majority Muslim countries.

People are carrying this trauma around.

Late last year, a relatively new Muslim member of parliament, Zahra Sultana, gave a heartbreaking speech about what her time in British politics had been like.

Before being elected, I was nervous about being a Muslim woman in the public eye.

Growing up, I had seen the abuse prominent British Muslims were subject to.

I knew I wouldn't be in for an easy ride.

When young Muslim girls asked me what it's like,

I'd like to say there's nothing to worry about.

That they would face the same challenges as their non-Muslim friends and colleagues.

But, Madam Chair, in truth, I can't say that because in my short time in Parliament, that's not my experience.

So, let me read out a few examples.

One person, for example, wrote to me, and I quote, Sultana, you and your Muslim mob are a real danger to humanity.

Another wrote, I'm a cancer everywhere I go, and soon they said Europe will vomit you out.

I have discovered that to be a Muslim woman, to be outspoken, and to be left-wing, is to be subject to this barrage of racism and hate.

It's to be treated

by some as if I were an enemy of the country that I was born in,

as if I don't belong.

Madam President, this Islamophobia doesn't come from a vacuum.

It's not natural or ingrained.

It's talk from the very top.

These fires are fanned by people in positions of power and privilege.

Today, our Prime Minister mocks Muslims as letterboxes and bank robbers, and far from scrapping scrapping Prevent, earlier this year, his government announced who would lead a review of the programme.

William Shawcross, a man who once said, and I quote, Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future.

Islamophobia is very real in Britain today.

This is what Hamza was facing, that I wasn't.

And thinking about Hamza's approach and reactions to our investigation this way, his outspokenness, his anger, his urgency, his sometimes crazed feeling that no matter what we tried in our reporting, it was never enough.

It makes every kind of sense.

We have to stop holding back, mate.

We have to stop holding back.

Every single opportunity we have to go hard, we pull back, we pull back, we pull back.

So I don't care if you think I'm rude, I don't care if you think I'm a dickhead, I want you to know.

And it makes every kind of sense why this journalistic process, which the way I'd learned it, encourages a detached standpoint, gives space for all relative sides to weigh in and get their perspectives, would in this instance, with this story, repulse Hamza.

I'm absolutely sick of this.

Because what if the dominant perspective in a story is one that's enmeshed with a racism against you?

With him pointing out the money.

I understand.

I am with you.

But also remember, we are in a long game.

I'm not listening, man.

I'm not listening.

I have never let myself just be shat on the way I have for a year and a half.

Never.

Never.

Fucking sit there and take it because I'm a journalist.

Fuck that fuck this title.

Seriously, I'll throw this title in the fucking river if it means I can just be myself.

If I think back to the reasons I got into journalism, if you asked me back then why I was drawn to it, I would have told you, I like stories.

I want to learn the craft.

I'm interested in people.

I do distrust authority.

I want to hold them accountable.

Making a change in the world would have been in there, but not at the top of the list.

But Hamza has been clear from the get-go about his reason for getting into this work.

In fact, aside from that unfortunate paragraph in his letter to Aslam, in which Hamza lists all the people he never believed, most of what he wrote in that letter amounts to a moving mission statement.

If you believe journalism is an evil organ capable of causing great damage, Hamza wrote, then by default, you believe that same organ can reach as many people to cause great change.

That's the concept I've decided to dedicate my life to.

He would pursue this work, he wrote, as a Muslim first and foremost, and as a journalist, second.

Next, on the Trojan horse affair, officials tell us we've gotten a story all wrong.

So wrong, they threaten to go to a judge to gag us from talking to you about it.

And we realize, actually,

we did miss something.

That's coming up in the detail of the deputies.

The Trojan Horse Affair is produced by Brian Reid and me, along with Rebecca Lex.

The show is edited by Sarah Koenig.

Additional editing by Ira Glass and by contributing editor Aisha Manazir Siddiqui.

Fact-checking and research by Marika Cronolli and Ben Phelan.

Original score by Thomas Meller with additional music by Matt McGinley and Stephen Jackson.

Sound design, mixing and music supervision by Stephen Jackson and Phil Domahovsky at the Audio Non-Visual Company.

Julie Snyder is our executive editor.

Neil Drumming is managing editor.

Supervising producer is ND Chubu.

Executive Assistant is Alberto de Leon.

Sam Dornick is an assistant managing editor of the New York Times.

Audio is licensed by BBC Motion Gallery, Getty Images, and Lola Clips ITV Archive.

Special thanks to Fahid Qureshi, Faisal Patel, Shoka Turawa, Andrew Fox, Frank Lankfitt, Clemency Wells, Dan Dolan, and Sam Johnston Hawk from Reprieve, Al Ryan, Leila Aitlihaj, and Paul Ruest.

Some books and articles we found really helpful that we want to mention.

John Holmwood and Teresa Tool's Countering Extremism in British Schools, as well as Against White Feminism by Rafia Zakaria, The Muslim Problem, Why We're Wrong About Islam and Why It Matters by Tassif Khan, Michael Gove, A Man in a Hurry by Owen Bennett, It's Not About the Burqa, edited by Mariam Khan, Shameem Mia's Muslim Schooling and Security, Trojan Horse Prevent and Racial Politics, and Samira Shackle's piece in The Guardian: Trojan Horse: The Real Story Behind the Fake Islamic Plot to Take Over Schools.

Also, British Pakistani Boys, Education, and the Role of Religion in the Land of the Trojan Horse by Karama Iqbal, James Ferguson's Albertania, My Country, Medina in Birmingham, Najaf and Brent by Innes Bowen, and Cut from the Same Cloth, edited by Sabina Akhtar.

The Trojan Horse Affair is made by Cyril Productions and the New York Times.

It's gonna be okay.

Who would do this to me?

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