I’ve been waiting for others to comment on the hilarious and self-serving UCL inquiry into the radicalisation of the Al Qaeda Undiebomber Abdulmutallab which, wholly unexpectedly, completely clears the university by holding that absolutely nothing that happened during his years at the institution could have given the slightest hint that he might one day try to kill as many innocent people as possible, in the name of God.
There really is so much to say about it that, for once, I’m stumped. I just don’t know where to start.I mean, imagine what the response would be if the Disciples of Fred Phelps had taken over the UCL Christian Union and the ex-President was arrested in the act of attempting to bomb the Admiral Duncan, again! And this was their response!
So, apologies for the delay. We will write it up properly, when we can whip up proper enthusiasm for it.
The report is, as we predicted when the Inquiry was announced, a joke.
There are many concerns which arise from UCL’s inadequate report. One of them is this. No doubt, UCL imagine that they have not only done themselves a favour, by giving themselves a clean bill of health, but have also managed to protect UCL’s Muslim students from prejudice, by ignoring the clear evidence of a very radical and extreme Salafi influence within their ISOC. But they have not.
If you pretend that the sort of speakers who the ISOC hosted during the period in question are untroubling, and indeed representative of Islam as a whole, you are adopting a perspective on Muslims which is identical to that of anti-Muslim bigots, and indeed which leaves you with no response to them.
Fortunately, Nick Cohen has a good article on the report in this week’s Observer, to hold the fort:
Given the precedents, the report from the official inquiry was predestined to be a lame effort. As expected, it concluded last week that university life played no part in the radicalisation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. I could attack it by emphasising that UCL had chosen to put on the inquiry team Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain. Dr Bari is high up in the Jamaat-e-Islami-dominated East London Mosque.
I can best describe the political character of the sect by telling you that the authorities in Dacca have indicted Jamaat’s Bangladeshi leaders on charges that they aided and abetted the Pakistani army’s crimes against humanity during the Bangladesh war of independence. Among the communalist imams who regularly rolled up to his mosque’s rooms was one Saudi preacher who denounced Jews as pigs and Hindus as idol worshippers. Given that Bari was reluctant take up an invitation from Panorama to disassociate himself from the cleric, the inquiry’s failure to be shocked by the company Abdulmutallab was keeping is not such a surprise.
UCL’s ISOC is already advertising events with such well known bad eggs as Uthman Lateef, Hamza Tzortzis, and Haitham al Haddad. So it is clear that it is business as usual for them.
And it will be business as usual for us as well.
HP adds
It is absolutely extraordinary that the report does not cover ANY of the speakers invited by the ISOC while Abdulmutallab
was a student at UCL. So effectively it has given the speakers a clean bill of health.
Who are they? Have a look. This list ranks them by the number of appearances between 2005 and 2008. It includes some of the worst names in British Islamism. The most popular speaker, in fact, was Murtaza Khan, for example.
Murtaza Khan 4
Abu Usama Athahabi 3
Asim Qureshi 3
Jalal ibn Saeed 3
Yvonne Ridley 3
Abdur-Raheem Green 2
Ahmed Saad 2
Martin Mubanga 2
Moazzam Begg 2
Surkeel Sharif (Abu Aliyah) 2
Uthmaan Lateef 2
Yasir Qadhi 2
Abu Sufyaan Rameez 1
Abu Suhaib Bassaam Alee 1
Abu Suhayb 1
Ather Khan 1
Chris Nineham 1
Daud Abdullah 1
Fahad Ansari 1
Haitham al Haddad 1
Hamza Tzortzis 1
Harun Yahya Organisation 1
Hasan Al-Somaly 1
Mufti Muhammad ibn Adam 1
Riyadh Ul-Haqq 1
Sheikh Shafi 1
Suhaib Hassan 1
Sultana Paveen 1
Taji Mustafa 1
Tipton 3 1
Uzma Jung 1
Victoria Brittain 1
Zahir Mahmoud 1
Ziaullah Khan 1
