Camp Quest don’t get to be a charity, but guess who do?

A little under a year ago, Camp Quest UK applied for charitable status. Being run on a tight budget by a team of volunteers, this is something that would help them a great deal, both with tax issues and with the amounts of funding they’d be able to raise. Their application was turned down, by way of a rather long e-mail I’ve been shown by their director Sam Stein; below is a truncated summary of the relevant section, which she’s permitted me to reproduce here.

From the information we have it appears that your purpose is to promote a ‘critical thinking’ or ‘freethought’ approach to life over a ‘faith-based’ approach. The fact you have received donations from the British Humanist Association and individual atheist groups, and your activities are publicised by the National Secular Society, would seem to support this. It is difficult to see how this furthers a recognised charitable purpose.

For example, your website says that the camp is part of the children’s ongoing education. Advancing education has a particular meaning in charity law … [it] does not necessarily have to be value-free and completely neutral. It can be based on broad values that are uncontroversial and would be generally supported by objective and informed people.

I think you will agree that promoting a ‘freethought’ approach to life rather than a ‘faith-based’ approach is controversial. Even if you can demonstrate educational merit or value for the subjects, it is difficult to see that you are advancing education because you are promoting a particular point of view.

Let me see if I have this right: teaching a naturalistic and faith-free approach to factual claims is controversial? Right, well that’s the nation’s science teachers taken care of I suppose. Of course the BHA and the NSS support Camp Quest: education along secular and critical thinking-based lines doesn’t amount to ‘pushing atheism’, atheists just tend to value it especially highly. We’re clever, you see.

What would uncontroversial educational principles look like anyway, if not this? Religious ones certainly don’t pass the test, with 2 in 5 people against any form of faith school in 2010 . Private schools too, absurdly , have automatic charitable status, and that includes the religious ones, so exactly what values underpin their pedagogical approach?

Hassan Radwan, who took this photograph, is a blogger and a member of the Council of ex-Muslims in Britain. For over a decade he taught at Islamia Primary School, established by Yusuf Islam (the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, yes); the school went into the public sector in the early days of Tony Blair’s first government, but before that was financed through the Islamia Schools Trust, which to my knowledge still funds the private boys’ and girls’ secondary schools linked to the primary.  

In one of Hassan’s blogs, he details his experiences teaching there. The entire post is extremely well written and merits reading, but here once again is a series of extracts from it:

‘Hadrabak ya walad!’ yelled Teacher Rafiqa, the large Egyptian lady seated in front of a class of five-year-olds. The words meant ‘I will hit you, child!’ … She was teaching them Arabic, and ‘Hadrabak!’ was a phrase the children picked up quickly.

***

At first the school adopted many of the strict Salafi views, such as not allowing musical instruments or the drawing of faces and the censoring of material deemed un-Islamic according to strict Salafi criteria. … Most of those Yusuf employed in the Trust Office were Salafis [who] felt they had the right to impose their views on the school.

***

A parent who had studied in Saudi Arabia was appointed by the Trust Office as ‘Islamisization Officer’ to check school books for ‘un-Islamic’ content. … One book that was stamped “Un-Islamic Content” was a story about a boy who woke up one day as a girl and had to spend the day like that before being magically turned back. … Amongst other texts that received this treatment were a set of books that related Greek myths and fables, a story about a boy who wrote letters to his girlfriend and a book that explained the story behind the ‘Willow Pattern’ commonly found on Chinese pottery.

***

On one occasion while teaching a class of six-year-olds I was stopped by a mother wearing the Niqab (face veil). ‘My son says that you are teaching them music! … I don’t want my children learning Kuffar (infidel) songs. I don’t allow them to listen to such things at home, nor do I allow them to read Kuffar books! … Music is Haram! I sent my children to a Muslim school to be free from such Kuffar influence! … I also need to talk to you about my son’s Dyslexia; he requires special help!’ It was true that her son was having difficulty reading and writing, but I suspected his problems may have had more to do with being deprived of hearing infidel nursery rhymes and infidel books from an early age than with any medical condition.

***

The Trust Office let out the school premises to … a group of Salafi brothers, [who] were using my classroom as a crèche. I had a display of World War II aeroplanes hanging from the ceiling … The children were jumping on tables pulling the planes down and throwing them across the classroom, smashing off the propellers and breaking the wings. I … went angrily to see the organiser, a muscular, full bearded brother wearing a grey Jilbab and black soft-leather slippers. ‘Look what the children have done to my display,’ I said as I held out the broken fuselage of my Lancaster bomber.

‘Astaghfirullah, brother, you are upset about models of Kafir planes, while we are here struggling to raise money for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Fear Allah!’

I realise the best part of two decades has gone by since most of this took place, and that Hassan goes on to acknowledge the worst excesses of extreme Islam were curbed once the school received state funding – but how, seriously how , was this more deserving of charitable status than Camp Quest was in 2011? (I should point out, too, that the secondary schools the Islamia Trust still runs will presumably not have seen the moderating influence of public funds.)  

For fear of appearing overly Muslim-centric, a concern which has dogged me recently, let me name another group of fanatics who, like all registered charities, have been deemed to benefit the public. You’ve heard of Christian Voice? Stephen Green et al.? Yes. Them.

Christian Voice operate under many aliases, including Repent UK and March for Repentance, but are registered with the Charity Commission as The National Council for Christian Standards in Society, with the ostensibly charitable aim ‘to reestablish biblical Christian teaching throughout the nation’. Their income last year, donation-based from what I can tell, amounted to £127,944.

In case you weren’t aware, or need reminding, or happen to work at the Charity Commission and are masochistic: this is a group who say the penalty for sodomy should be death ; who say rape can’t occur within a marriage ; who compare abortion to the Holocaust ; who, somewhat more comically at least, responded to the Atheist Bus Campaign by saying ‘Bendy-buses, like atheism, are a danger to the public at large’ . (For entirely and shamelessly point-scoring reasons, I’d also like to point out that their origins lie within the Conservative Party – specifically the Conservative Family Campaign in the 1990s.)

What do Camp Quest do? Oh yes: they play a game about invisible unicorns.

If not for their charity status, how much less money would Christian Voice have? Goodness knows what they’re doing with it or where it comes from, but it’s worrying that Stephen Green’s people have large amounts of money at their disposal. (I should add that if you’re interesting in contacting or perhaps trolling him, Green’s mobile phone number is 07931 490 050. Not that I’d usually pass on personal details, but unbelievably, it’s listed alongside his home address on the Christian Voice site.)

With the strangeness and the stupidity of their policies in mind, I’ve just made a Freedom of Information request to the Charity Commission and am told I’ll hear back from them within two weeks. What I asked, and what we all ought to ask ourselves if only as a brain-teaser, is the following:

1. What charitable purpose (as defined by the Charities Act 2006) do Christian Voice pursue, and what benefit does it render to the public?
2. Exactly how does the Commission define encouragement or promotion of violence or hatred toward others , cited in its literature as an example of harm which renders groups uncharitable? (Does advocating the killing of MSM s not make the cut?)
3. Surely ‘Working for Godly Government’, the organisation’s self-described mission, constitutes a political (and therefore legally uncharitable) aim?
4. Has no one tried previously challenged, or even questioned, their charitable status? And how did the Commission respond if so? Any mind which can account for their continued presence in the register must be tied in so many knots it resembles cold spaghetti.

We surely can’t, and shouldn’t, continue in a situation where the furthering of religion is itself a recognised charitable aim. We shouldn’t continue acknowledging jihadists are more worthy of tax exemption than scientific skepticism. We certainly shouldn’t be picking up the bill for Christian Voice with secular tax money.

But as I’m tempted to tell him over the phone right now, my next eight sex acts will be dedicated to Stephen Green.

Alex Gabriel