Michael Weiss asks a good question about the man who continues to deny that his campus or any other in Britain has got a problem with radicalisation:
Just last month, Grant repeated his catechism to the Evening Standard, reaffirming that radicalisation “doesn’t exist” at schools here and “there seems to be no evidence of a casual connection between attendance at university and engagement in religiously inspired violence”.
There is one of two possibilities for Grant’s long-standing position. Either he’s got a very poor understanding of the definition of “evidence,” in which case he is unfit to fulfill his academic responsibilities and should perhaps enroll in some courses himself, or he’s mistaking those responsibilities for public relations.
Abdulmutallab pled guilty last month to all eight charges against him including attempted murder and attempted use of a WMD, making him the fifth president or executive member of a UK student Islamic Society (ISOC) to be convicted of, or to have committed suicide in, an Islamist terrorism-related offence. He is also the third graduate of UCL to engage in terrorist activity. Before him came Samar Alami, a chemical engineering graduate, who blew up a car outside the Israeli Embassy in London in 1994, and Mohammed Abushamma, who matriculated in 2008 following his arrest on terrorism-related charges. (In that instance, UCL faculty only realised something was amiss when Abushamma kept missing classes to attend his court hearings.)
Student Rights gives examples other prominent terrorists who have passed through London quadrangles in recent years:
• Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, convicted of the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. Sheikh went to LSE and joined up with Hizb ut-Tahrir while there;
• Anthony Garcia, convicted in the 2004 Al Qaeda-linked “fertiliser bomb” plot against UK targets. Garcia said he warmed to mass murder after watching a video about Kashmir at an event hosted by the University of East London ISOC;
• Jawad Akbar, Garcia’s co-conspirator, who joined the now-banned Islamist group al-Muhajiroun while at Brunel University;
• Mohammed Naveed Bhatti of the “dirty bomb” plot of 2004, another Al Qaeda-affiliated attempt on US and UK targets. Bhatti was another Brunel student who met the main plotter, Dhiren Barot, at the university’s prayer room;
• Abdulla Ahmed Ali, the ringleader of the “liquid bomb” plot of 2006. He went to City University where he passed out leaflets on campus and met with members of al-Muhajiroun.
One begins to detect some evidence.
