HUH? Universities in Britain will now enforce gender apartheid because Muslims are demanding it.[Please Email Them]

Universities UK has just ruled that Muslims’ right to segregate the sexes in college lectures trumps any woman’s right to sit wherever she want. Apparently, tuition from Middle Eastern students is more important than human rights for everyone else.

Voice your protest here:

Students take to the streets in protest as Universities UK approves gender apartheid for all 132 of its colleges.

UK Daily Mail  (h/t George W) Universities can allow men and women to be segregated if religious extremists demand it for their debates or lectures, official guidance revealed today. The decision has sparked protests with campaigners calling it ‘gender apartheid’.

In the past year there have been a small number of Muslim groups who forced men and women to sit apart when they spoke at British universities. Having considered the issue Universities UK says its 132 members should be allowed to agree to these demands but campaigners say it violates women’s rights.

Campaigner Ahlam Akram  told the BBC’s Today programme: ‘I stand firmly against this segregation. It’s a decision that is going to take us backwards. ’It is a violation of women’s freedom to sit wherever they want. ’Universities are the place for planting freedom of thinking and freedom of speech’.

PHD student Erin Marie Saltman told Channel Four News: ‘This is a bigger issue of racism of lower expectations, of avoidance. There is a fear of offending the Muslim community but there are a lot of modern Muslims that would never allow gender segregation’. In May a Muslim group was banned from a university after segregating men and women during a debate.

Visitors to the event at University College London were told to use men’s or women’s entrances by the Islamic Education and Research Academy (iERA), who also told women to sit at the back, while men and couples were sent to the front.

A month earlier Leicester University spoke of its concerns over photos showing hand-written signs requesting that male and female students sit in separate areas at a public talk by the university’s Islamic Society.

The meeting – which discussed God’s existence – was addressed by Islamic speaker Hamza Tzortzis, who speaks at various campuses and was involved in controversy at another university last month. Four sheets of paper attached to an entrance door with the words ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ and arrows pointing in opposite directions.