A Royal Air Force cadet was reportedly suspended from his training programme after proclaiming that Islam represented the greatest security threat to the United Kingdom.
During a question-and-answer session in which around 50 cadets were quizzed by superiors on the dangers facing British society, an RAF trainee responded that he believed Islam was the chief concern.
For this, the Air Force cadet was suspended from the officer training course amid an investigation, the Daily Mail reported.
This comes despite MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, openly stating that “Islamist terrorism is the most significant terrorist threat to the UK by volume.”
Islamic terrorism has been responsible for some of the deadliest attacks on British soil in recent years, including the 2005 “7/7” London Underground and bus bombings, in which four jihadist suicide bombers detonated homemade explosive devices on public transport, killing 52 people.
Meanwhile, multiple suspected Islamist terror attacks have taken place in London in recent weeks against Jewish institutions, in apparent retaliatory strikes over the conflict in Iran.
Retired rear admiral Chris Parry said of the cadet’s suspension: “If this cadet had answered ‘the far-Right’, I doubt he would have been suspended.
“If I’d asked that question and got that answer I would have also asked the cadet to expand on his thinking and got some critical thinking going rather than suspend him,” Parry said.
“Clearly, Islamic extremism is the issue and not Islam, but how are young people expected to develop critical thinking around these complex issues if they are shut down in this way?”
The incident was also criticised by the Free Speech Union, which noted that “Parliament abolished blasphemy laws in 2008, and concern about Islamist extremism is a legitimate and widely held view in Britain after a series of heinous terror attacks perpetrated by Islamists.”
“We now have an official definition of Islamophobia — repackaged as ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ — which has already been used to shut down legitimate criticism and debate about Islam. But even before this, we effectively had a cultural Muslim blasphemy law,” the FSU said.
Earlier this year, Fiyaz Mughal, the founder of a service that tracks anti-Muslim incidents in Britain and a former government advisor, accused the left-wing Labour government of attempting to stop him from speaking out against the scourge of Islamism in public.
This came after Mughal disclosed that during a Home Office meeting on extremism last year, it took over an hour and a half before the issue of Islamism was raised at all.
A previous report from the Henry Jackson Society think tank found that political correctness and a disproportionate focus on the threat from far-right extremists resulted in the downplaying of the dangers of jihadis in Britain.
Responding to the report of the suspended cadet, a spokesman for the Royal Air Force said: “We are aware of an alleged incident of inappropriate behaviour involving a cadet at RAF Cranwell.
“An investigation is ongoing, we are unable to comment further.”
The Royal Air Force has already recently weathered a major social engineering scandal after it emerged it had told its own staff to stop recruiting “useless white male” pilots in a bid to boost diversity. Incredibly, the leaked internal email made clear the RAF was happy to recruit fewer pilots overall, or even suspend recruitment, if there weren’t enough “BAME and female” recruits to “balance” white men.
The Force was eventually forced into paying compensation to those men it had discriminated against and issued an apology.
The statement issued at the time could not have been described as wholly sincere, however, given its insistence that the military’s attempt to discriminate against white men had been driven by “the best of intentions” and it hadn’t discouraged the RAF from its “long-term aspirational goals set by senior leadership to improve diversity”. The RAF also insisted the discrimination had “no impact on operational effectiveness”, a claim that was later challenged when it emerged the Force was suffering a shortage of pilots.
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