Union boss silenced by moral cowardice
SHYNESS is not a quality that would usually be associated with Daniel Kebede, the radical leader of the permanently aggrieved National Education Union, which claims to represent almost half a million teachers. On the platform and at protests, he regularly indulges in fiery rhetoric, such as his claim last year that the teachers’ strikes were driven by the desire “to take back control from a brutally racist state”. In the same strident vein, he recently called on supporters of Palestine to “globalise the Intifada” against Israel.
But his loquaciousness dramatically dissolved during an interview with BBC Radio this week when he was asked about the fate of one of his members – a religious studies teacher from Batley, Yorkshire. He has been forced to live in hiding since 2021 because of a campaign of vicious intimidation by Islamic fundamentalists after he showed a picture of the Prophet Muhammed during a lesson. Such bullying should have provoked outrage from the teacher’s union representatives. Yet, on the BBC, Kebede, now outside his comfort zone of bashing the Tories and Israel, was almost tongue-tied in his defensiveness.
First he burbled about the NEU’s support for the teacher, which was hardly evident when the row exploded. Not only was the union slow to condemn the threats of violence, but it emerged the local NEU branch had previously donated £3,000 to a Muslim group called Purpose for Life, which had called for the teacher’s removal from the school because of his “terrorism” and “insult to Islam”.
Kebede became more incoherent when pressed about what should now happen to the teacher.
“I..I..I am not sure about answering
that specific question,” he mumbled, adding, “It is an incredibly sensitive situation.”
That was the answer of someone gripped by moral cowardice. Kebede is so invested in his simplistic model of racial victimhood that he is reluctant to speak decisively in a case where the oppressors are from an ethnic minority.
His feeble stance is typical of modern civic Britain. Indeed, Batley Grammar School, the local council and the Labour Party have been just as guilty as Kebede’s union in failing to stand up against mob rule.
Fixated by woke dogma and desperate to maintain the illusion that
“diversity is our strength” – to use the words of their favourite mantra – our rulers and corporate chiefs often seem more concerned about appeasing hardliners than protecting essential liberties.
This warped approach is creating a climate of fear, where ideological extremism flourishes and freedom of expression withers.
The blasphemy laws were supposedly abolished in Britain in 2008, yet have in practice returned for the Islamic faith. One in seven councils in Britain have adopted definitions of “Islamophobia” which could easily be used to silence criticism of this religion.
Officialdom’s widening attacks
on hate speech are also now deployed against critics of the fashionable orthodoxy, plumbing new depths of authoritarianism in Scotland, where legislation now means people can be prosecuted for private remarks made at home.
Elsewhere, self-censorship is rife, the cancel culture rampant. Even institutions that should be fighting for free speech are abandoning this basic duty. When Salman Rushdie was brutally attacked on a US stage by an assailant in 2022, the Royal Society of Literature refused to pledge Rushdie its support or condemn the assault. Its president, Bernardine Evaristo, justified this shameful inaction by stating that her organisation “cannot take sides in writers’ controversies and issues but must remain impartial”.
Despite losing an eye and the use of one hand, Rushdie is writing and lecturing again, a tribute to his boundless courage – the same virtue displayed by JK Rowling in her heroic defiance of Scotland’s hate speech laws with her spectacular satire on transgender lunacy.
Our political class needs their spirit, rather than the craven posture of woke social justice warriors such as Kebede and Evaristo.