British universities' terror alumni

Washington Post:

The case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man accused in the attempted bombing of a U.S. airliner, has reinvigorated a debate about whether British universities are being used as breeding grounds for radical Islam.

For three years, Abdulmutallab made the short journey from his apartment in central London to an 11-story brown brick building at University College London (UCL), where he was enrolled as a mechanical engineering student.

Before him, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was convicted in connection with the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, attended the London School of Economics. British citizens Asif Mohammed Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif were enrolled at King's College London before launching a suicide attack in Tel Aviv in 2003.

While those cases -- and others -- hardly suggest that extremists have infiltrated Britain's campuses, experts say there is evidence that Muslims who adopt radical ideologies frequently do so during their formative years in college.

Abdulmutallab, now 23, was president of UCL's Islamic society. And according to Anthony Glees, a professor of security and intelligence studies at the University of Buckingham, he is the fourth president of a university Islamic society to be linked to terrorism-related offenses in recent years. One of the former presidents, Waheed Zaman, is being retried for his alleged connection with a plot to bomb transatlantic airliners in 2006.

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Hasan said that Islamic societies have scratched off many of the most radical Islamic preachers from their speaking rosters. The voice of Anwar al-Aulaqi, for example, the Yemen-based cleric who has come under scrutiny in the Christmas Day plot, is banned from Britain. Even so, he can still be heard frequently on some British campuses via video link during conferences and other events.

"It's worrying," Hasan said. "He is charismatic, and some students listen to him."

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I think the preachers of hate are the key problem and they see these schools as prime recruiting territory. Britain has a problem in general with radical Muslims that is not limited to its universities. In someways it is right up there with Pakistan as a hotbed of radical Islam. Perhaps because it imported so many radicals from Pakistan to begin with.