Muslim charity that Cameron called “front” for Sharia group gets £70,000 a year in state funding

“David Cameron criticised the foundation during Prime Minister’s Questions in 2009 as a ‘front organisation’ for a radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.” Hizb ut-Tahrir is an international Muslim organization that is banned in many countries and openly works for the imposition of Sharia. Yet “the Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation is being awarded grants worth more than £70,000 a year.” That’s Insane Britannia for you. Keep out the counter-jihadis and give money to the Islamic supremacists — what could possibly go wrong?

“Charity that Cameron called ‘front’ for Islamic extremists gets £70,000 a year in state funding,”  

It is a charity was once labelled by the Prime Minister as a ‘front’ for an extremist Islamist group.

But the Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation is being awarded grants worth more than £70,000 a year to fund free school places for toddlers at its nurseries in London and Berkshire, it was claimed today.

Campaigners said the Department for Education should urgently look into the ‘appropriateness’ of the funding – and officials there said that they were investigating concerns about the foundation.

The funding is distributed by councils as part of the Government’s ‘free early education’ scheme to provide all children aged three and four, and some aged two, with 15 hours of free teaching a week.

But David Cameron criticised the foundation during Prime Minister’s Questions in 2009 as a ‘front organisation’ for a radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, reported the Daily Telegraph.

Education Secretary Michael Gove has also said in the past that half of the foundation’s trustees were Hizb ut-Tahrir activists.

Hizb ut-Tahrir was established in Jerusalem in 1953 with the aim of creating a single Islamic state ruled by sharia law, but has been linked in more recent years to the support of terrorist action.

The funding was discovered by the British Humanist Association campaign group following a response to a query made under the Freedom of Information Act.

A BHA spokesman said: ‘Five years ago Michael Gove and David Cameron made a big stand about how they should not be getting funding, yet nothing has changed since – despite four years of Coalition Government.’

The foundation is said to have received £300,000 overall in grants in 2011/12 – including £71,000 in an ‘early years grant’, which funded up to 154 pupils at a nursery in Haringey, north London.

An investigation into the foundation by the Charity Commission in 2010 said it was no longer linked to Hizb ut-Tahrir, reported the Daily Telegraph.

And the charity said in 2012 that it had been told Mr Gove’s department held ‘no concerns about extremism in our schools’. It maintains it is not an extremist group and has no links with Hizb ut-Tahrir.

A Department for Education spokesman said: ‘We are aware of the longstanding concerns about these schools and are currently looking into them.’ The charity has not yet commented.