In 30 December 2024, someone under the pseudonym “God Save Great Britain”  tweeted a dire warning about schools in Holland. The photo is unattributed, but the claim is clearly alarmist.

In Holland, white primary school kids are required to learn how to pray at a mosque and show respect for Allah.

If it were your child, would you be okay with that?

According to the Manchester City Council:

The earliest evidence of Muslim life in Britain comes from artefacts from the time of King Offa of Mercia. A coin issued by the king in approximately the year 794 – known as a mancus – bears in Arabic the Shahadah, or, Islamic declaration of faith. This, alongside the Ballycottin Cross of Ireland, leads academics to speculate on the early connections between the British Isles and Islam.

In Manchester, there was a thriving business community.

Directories show that by 1798 there were four Arab trading houses in the city – drawn by the cotton trade. By 1838 the Balta-Liman commercial treaty was signed between Britain and Turkey and it was reported that the Ottoman Sultan was importing more ‘piece goods’ from Manchester than from the rest of Europe.

CREST Research reports that:

There have been Muslims in Britain since the 16th century, with communities developing from the late-1900s in the port cities of London, Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool, Tyneside and Hull. Major Muslim populations in the UK have their origins in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Yemen and Somalia.

The very same image is used by another X/Twitter account.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doing a simple Google image search, I found what seems to be the original source, a video that was reported eight years ago by British news sources.

In 2016, the British Daily Mail reported that “angry parents have demanded a primary school in Holland changes its curriculum after a video showing children learning how to pray in a mosque emerged.”

The article also notes: “In July angry parents slammed officials after discovering in a video that a class of primary school children at a Catholic school in the town of Dongen visited a mosque in Rotterdam as part of their school curriculum.”

According to Wikipedia, Dongen has a population of 22,270 and is in Southern Netherlands. According to another website, 20 percent of the Dutch are Catholic and 14 are Protestant with 5 percent Muslim.

Another tweet from Alliance of Former Muslims claims “In many European countries, non-muslim schoolchildren are being instructed to pray the Islamic way when visiting mosques.”

If you look at this 2018 report from S4C, you’ll see something else. One of the students appears to be Muslim. The article itself is misleading although it cites a Dutch organization (Klap unit de School).

There are other posts that have click-bait headlines such as “The European Country Where Islam Has replaced Christianity” (8 December 2021)  or Europe: Allah Takes over Churches, Synagogues” (22 May 2016). According to the second article from 2016:

In the Dutch province of Friesland, 250 of 720 existing churches have been transformed or closed. The Fatih Camii Mosque in Amsterdam once was the Saint Ignatius Church. A synagogue in The Hague was turned into the Al Aqsa Mosque. The Church of St. Jacobus, one of the oldest of the city of Utrecht, was recently converted into a luxury residence. A library just opened in a former Dominican church in Maastricht.

The main mosque in Dublin is a former Presbyterian church. In England, the St Marks Cathedral is now called the New Peckham Mosque, while in Manchester, the Mosque of Disbury was once a Methodist church. In Clitheroe, Lancashire, the authorities granted permission to have an Anglican church, Saint Peter’s Church in Cobridge, transformed into the Madina Mosque. It is no longer taboo in the media to talk about “the end of British Christianity.”

So some former churches have become residences or even a library. Some have become mosques.

In any case, the claim that visiting mosques is a general practice in the Netherlands doesn’t seem to be true, nor is it true for Europe. Yet consider how many people visit Catholic Churches or Protestant churches and not belong to those religions. I visited Notre Dame in Paris. I’ve visited Christian and Catholic Churches in the US. Many people visit Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples in Japan. In all cases, I try to be respectful. I might even pray. How does that damage anyone’s culture?