“All we ask for is a bit of respect,” said Adil Shahzad, imam of the Al-Hikam Institute in Bradford. It sounds incredibly reasonable, until the follow-up. “If one teacher can [show cartoons of Muhammed], another teacher can do it five years down the line, and we do not want this to be the case. Otherwise we are not responsible for the actions of some individuals.”
The haunting, scarcely veiled threat came days after mounting protests over a teacher sharing a cartoon of Muhammad at a school in Bradford in the North of England.
The city features prominently in National Pulse Editor-in-Chief Raheem Kassam’s 2017 book “No Go Zones,” wherein Kassam warns of the disproportionate power of Muslim leaders in the area.
“We’re hoping that the school will do the right thing [over the cartoons],” Shahzad also said, “…because if this is the first case, which it is in this country, then it’s very likely that we will follow the route that France has taken, for example, or other European countries where firstly it’s ‘let’s insult the prophet’, then we’ll start banning the burqa.”
