A Christian teacher yesterday claimed he was forced out of his job after complaining that Muslim pupils as young as eight hailed the September 11 hijackers as heroes.
Nicholas Kafouris, 52, is suing his former school for racial discrimination.
He told a tribunal that he had to leave his £30,000-a-year post because he would not tolerate the 'racist' and 'anti-Semitic' behaviour of Year 4 pupils.
The predominantly Muslim youngsters openly praised Islamic extremists in class and described the September 11 terrorists as 'heroes and martyrs'.
One pupil said: 'Don't touch me, you're a Christian' when he brushed against him.

Others said: 'We want to be Islamic bombers when we grow up', and 'The Christians and Jews are our enemies - you too because you're a Christian'.
Mr Kafouris, a Greek Cypriot, taught for 12 years at Bigland Green Primary School in Tower Hamlets, East London.

According to Ofsted 'almost all' its 465 pupils are from ethnic minorities and a vast proportion do not speak English as a first language.
The teacher claims racial discrimination by the school, its headmistress and her assistant head after they failed to take action about the comments made by pupils to him.
He said there was a change in attitude of the pupils after the atrocities of September 11, 2001. They told him: 'We hate the Christians' and 'We hate the Jews', despite his attempts to stop them.
He said he filled out a Racist Incident Reporting Sheet but claimed headmistress Jill Hankey dismissed his concerns.
In a statement submitted to the Central London Employment Tribunal he said: 'Miss Hankey proceeded to excuse and justify the pupil's behaviour, conduct and remarks to me as if I had no right to be offended by the child's remarks and conduct.
'Amongst Miss Hankey's justifications for the child's remarks, she said, "If the child was older, say 15, I might take it more seriously. He's only nine - he's only doing it to wind you up".'
He added: 'I felt the head's behaviour and conduct towards me amounted to direct religious discrimination. I was intimidated in the way she spoke to me which indicated "Don't come back with such issues again".'

Mr Kafouris, a bachelor, said the comments became more frequent after the head did nothing about the initial incidents.


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'In late November and December 2006, a number of unacceptable and blunt racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Christian remarks were being made by various children in Year 4 where I taught, such as, "The Twin Tower bombers are heroes and martyrs".
'Some children were expressing delight at the death and killing of people of other cultures and religions.
'In the last week of November 2006 a child was talking about stabbing another child and I told him this was dangerous talk and that a lawyer had recently been stabbed by teenagers. His reply was, "I'm glad that man died". "Why?" I asked. "Because he's a Christian and English and we're Muslim".'
He claimed that during a religious education lesson about Jonah and the whale, one of the pupils asked if Jonah was a Jew, before shouting: 'I hate the Jews, they're our enemies.'
Mr Kafouris said he again tried to speak to Miss Hankey about it. 'The head's response was hostile and offensive again. The very first thing she said to me was, "Oh, you again! You're the only teacher that reports these things! Nobody else does!"
'Four times she repeated, "It's because of your lack of discipline that they're saying these things".'
Mr Kafouris was signed off with stress by his GP at the end of February 2007 after assistant head Margaret Coleman warned him not to challenge the pupils in class about their remarks.
He says the lack of support from the school has made him clinically depressed and unable to work. He was sacked in April last year.
The case continues.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249393/9-11-bombers-heroes-What-Muslim-children-told-Christian-teacher-forced-job-tolerating-racism.html#ixzz0fHBAqOnz

   
NSW judge sends terror plotters to jail

15:15 AEST Mon Feb 15 2010


Five Sydney men convicted of plotting to commit violent jihad on Australian soil have been jailed for maximum terms ranging from 23 to 28 years.
In sentencing the men in the NSW Supreme Court on Monday, Justice Anthony Whealy said their motivation had been "an intolerant and inflexible fundamentalist religious conviction".
Last October the men were each found guilty of conspiring to commit an act or acts, in preparation for a terrorist act between July 2004 and November 2005.
Justice Whealy said the enterprise was "very deliberate and very determined", adding the "defiant and brazen nature" of its activity was very significant.
He said each offender intended that the terrorist act would involve at the very least serious damage to property, which would create a very serious risk to the health and safety of the public.
"While I cannot be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that any of the offenders intended directly to kill or take human life, it is clear beyond argument that the fanaticism and extremist position taken by each offender countenanced the possibility of loss of life, if that were to occur," he said.
He sentenced a 44-year-old man to a maximum of 28 years with a non-parole period of 21 years, a 36-year-old man to a maximum 27 years with a non-parole period of 20 years and three months, a 32-year-old man and a 40-year-old man each to a maximum of 26 years with a non-parole period of 19 years and six months, and a 25-year-old man to a maximum of 23 years with a non-parole period of 17 years and three months.
Justice Whealy outlined their stockpiling of chemicals and firearms, as well as describing the instructional, extremist or fundamentalist material found at their homes.
Some of the material showed the execution of hostages or prisoners by mujahideen, which the judge said were "particularly brutal and graphic".
"It is impossible to imagine that any civilised person could watch these videos," he said.
Justice Whealy found the "criminality involved in the enterprise to which each man willingly participated was of the most serious kind falling only marginally short of the most serious case".
He also commented that each of the men, who have been in custody since their arrest, appeared to wear "their imprisonment as some badge of honour".
The judge said none of the men had shown remorse or had stepped back from the clear extremist views they held.
Family members of the convicted men criticised the hefty sentences handed out in Sydney's terrorism trial.
One relative said not even murderers received maximum sentences as long as those handed out on Monday to five Sydney Muslim men, ranging from 23 to 28 years in jail.
"That's a very big sentence," the sister of the youngest of the men sentenced said.
"Not even murderers get sentenced that much.
"Twenty-three years, that's half of his life.
"It's not fair to him, our community or our religion."
Relatives of some of the other men yelled out expletives as they heard the sentences via closed-circuit TV outside the court at Parramatta in western Sydney.

“Not even murderers get sentenced that much”

    "It's not fair to him, our community or our religion."

THEIR smiles said it all. Moments after judge Anthony Whealy ordered the five Sydney terrorists to serve jail sentences ranging from 23 to 28 years, the men looked calmly around the courtroom and smirked.
If nothing else, their reaction seemed to confirm the judge's assessment that not one of the five had any remorse for plotting violent jihad on Australian soil.

In fact, the judge said, the men seemed to "wear their imprisonment like some kind of badge of honour", seeing it as "a test of their faith and a burden willingly borne as a duty arising from their fundamentalist religious conviction".

Having presided over the 11-month trial -- one of the longest and most expensive in Australia's history -- Justice Whealy yesterday took four hours to deliver his sentencing remarks in the NSW Supreme Court in Sydney.

He said the group's actions "fell only marginally short" of the most serious case of criminality.

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The jailing of the men was challenged by members of the Muslim community, with cleric Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali saying the case had the "scent of hysteria", and the five had "no connection to acts of terror whatsoever".

The men, aged between 25 and 44, were found guilty last October of conspiring to do acts in preparation for a terrorist act or acts between July 2004 and November 2005.

Their crimes involved stockpiling explosive chemicals, firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition which they intended to use in a manner that "would at the very least create a very serious risk to the health and safety of members of the public".

"While I cannot be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that any of the offenders intended directly to kill or take human life, it is clear . . . that the fanaticism and extremist position taken by each offender countenanced the possibility of loss of life if that were to occur," the judge said.

"Each conspirator intended that the ultimate act or terrorist act was to be an effective one."

The prosecution never identified any particular target as the focus of the group's activities, but the jury accepted the crown's argument that an attack could have been imminent at the time of the men's arrest in November 2005.

Yesterday Justice Whealy said "the driving fanaticism" of the conspiracy ensured that the plot would have quickly swung into action "once sufficient material had been assembled".

"There is no reason to doubt that, absent the intervention of  the authorities, the plan might well have come to fruition in early 2006 or thereabouts," he said.

The five men were not the only ones involved in the conspiracy. Four co-conspirators, aged between 28 and 33, pleaded guilty to terror-related offences prior to the conclusion of the trial, and were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 3 1/2 years to 14 years.

Before the men were arrested, police monitored several members of the group when they travelled to a property in western NSW for an alleged terrorist training camp.

But Justice Whealy said yesterday he was not convinced beyond reasonable doubt that the trips were anything more than "bonding camps". One week before the group's arrest, the police operation went into "overdrive" when an off-duty officer witnessed one of the men under surveillance purchasing a large amount of chemicals from a hardware store.

Most of the group had little personal wealth but they were not motivated by financial reward or private revenge, Justice Whealy said. "Rather, an intolerant and inflexible fundamentalist religious conviction was the principal motivation for the commission of the offence.

"It was the duty of each individual offender, indeed a religious obligation, to respond to the worldwide situation (the perceived attack on Islam by the US and its allies) by preparing for violent jihad in this country, here in Australia."

During the trial, crown prosecutor Richard Maidment SC said the men were driven to plot violent jihad in retaliation for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They spent months working together to acquire chemicals, firearms and ammunition, and extremist literature found in their homes showed they had violent intent, he said.

Justice Whealy yesterday referred to an instructional video file found in the possession of four of the offenders, which showed a masked mujahidin with an Australian accent say: "You kill us, so you will be killed. You bomb us, so you will be bombed."..........

When the oldest of the three skipped the country, his father was forced to sell his small farm on Sydney's outskirts to pay the $150,000 bail. But the father blames the police, ASIO and airport security for allowing his son a ''safe way'' to Lebanon. He seriously suggests that authorities gave his son his false passport and encouraged him to flee Australia. ''I don't know if he [was] kidnapped,'' he says.

He has not tested this theory on the son, to whom he has not spoken for years. But it conflicts with the son's account while in jail in Lebanon in 2005. He then told The Australian that he had renounced his criminal past, confirmed that he supported violent jihad against groups opposed to Islam, and described Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as good men. The son said police from Australia had offered him a deal to fly home if he pleaded guilty to planning an attack on Sydney Harbour and informed on six men he allegedly recruited. While he denied urging the men to strike in Australia, he was quoted saying that he had been 30 per cent likely to launch an attack.

Brought back to Australia, he was convicted in February 2007, along with the triple killer, of maliciously wounding a man in 1998. The crime was described as a ''kneecapping'' but they had shot him in the foot, thigh and buttocks. Sentencing this son in the District Court, Judge Stephen Norrish accepted his claim of being tortured in Lebanon. The court heard he was hung upside down, beaten on his head, feet and body, subjected to water-boarding and electric shocks, and tied to a metal pole and spun ''like a chicken on a rotisserie''.

The judge jailed him for a maximum nine years and a minimum 5½, but took into account his time in jail in Lebanon. He would have been due for release soon, but on April 9 he will be sentenced for the Lakemba police station shooting. He can expect another stretch in jail. Police would not comment on whether they are still pursuing him for any alleged terrorist plot.

The NSW government will put the younger of the three and his co-conspirators through a program aimed at ''deradicalising'' them. Many other prisoners at the ''supermax'' prison at Goulburn have turned to radical Islam, the triple killer among them. His murders included the assassination of his former crime boss.

The brother who was jailed in Iraq did not want to talk to the Herald. He has previously claimed that ASIO put his name on an international blacklist, and this prevented him entering Jordan. He had travelled instead to Iraq, where he was helping to build a mosque in Mosul and hoped to find a wife. He denied he was trying to join the insurgency. And he claimed he was chained in prison and handcuffed for three months.

When the father left to spend some time in Jordan three years ago, he says ASIO spoke to him at the airport. They talked to him a few other times. ''They were very nice people … very, very good people.'' They are not all bad, he says. Like his sons.