British Universities have long been centers of radicalism, usually of the brand of amateur socialism espoused by the Socialist Workers Party or its ugly sisters Militant and the Worker's Revolutionary Party. Pretending to understand Dialectical Marxism and Trotskyite "permanent revolution", the leftist radicals infested, and still infest, campuses across Britain.
Since the 1970s, these activists have promoted the myth of Palestinian perpetual martyrdom, and portrayed Israel as a bogeyman. During the 1980s, they supported the women who camped rough outside RAF Greenham Common, a US-linked air base in Bedfordshire, Britain. Though ignored by most students, activists promoted an agenda of anti-Americanism and anti-semitism that has infected at least two generations of post-graduates.
Ultimately they contributed to British media's fawning over the notion of Palestinian, and by extension all Muslims', victimhood. Now grown up, the former student union activists are the first to hurl the term "Islamophobe" at anyone who questions the spread of radical Islam. In such a climate, it has been easy for Islamic radicalism to flourish, and even to be welcomed on Britain's campuses.
On September 26, 2005, Britain's Social Affairs Unit published a report by Professor Anthony Glees and Chris Pope from Brunel University. This report, entitled "When Students Turn To Terror", listed 24 universities where radicalism flourished, including Birmingham, Brunel, Durham, Leeds, Leeds Metropolitan, Luton, Leicester, Manchester Metropolitan, Newcastle, Nottingham, Reading, Swansea, and Wolverhampton.
Coming out while Britain was still reeling from the horrors of 7/7, when 52 people died on London Transport, Professor Glees' report galvanized the UK media. Already mosques and radical preachers had been named as contributing factors to the bombings of July 7, 2005. Universities had thitherto been ignored. Yet Britain's campuses had long been the playgrounds of amateur radicals and Islamists.
Many leading Muslim terrorists have been educated at Britain's universities. Azahari bin Husin, the senior bomb-maker from Jemaah Islamiyah who masterminded the Bali bombings of October 12, 2002 (killing 202 people) and October 1, 2005 (killing 20), studied at Reading University in the 1990s. He gained a doctorate in engineering before going off to join Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
On February 26, 1993, Ramzi Yousef drove a truck carrying a 1,200 pound bomb laced with cyanide into the car park beneath the World Trade Center. The ensuing blast killed six and injured 1,000. Four years before he committed this atrocity, Yousef completed a degree in engineering at West Glamorgan Institute (now Swansea Institute of Higher Education).
Dr Rihab Rashid Taha al-Azawi, Saddam Hussein's "Doctor Germ", responsible for his biological warfare programs, learned her trade in Britain. In 1984, she gained a PhD in plant toxins at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of East Anglia.
Individuals such as the above did not flaunt their Islamist credentials at college. Other individuals in British universities linked to terrorism have been allowed to lecture. One such person is 52-year old Bashir Musa Mohammed Nafi, (pictured) who is alleged to be a founder of the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Like Sami al-Arian, who formerly lectured at the University of South Florida, Bashir Musa Mohammed Nafi was, as recently as 2003, an occasional lecturer at Birkbeck College at the University of London. Here, he taught Islamic studies. In the 1990s, Nafi collaborated with al-Arian in Florida. Accused by the US of being the UK leader of PIJ, Nafi has denied the claims.
In 2004, Professor Anthony Glees claimed that academics in Britain's universities were actively hampering attempts by security services to defend the nation against Islamist threats. He claimed that many academics were "hostile to the idea
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