1

When Students Turn to Terror:

Terrorist and Extremist Activity on British
Campuses

Anthony Glees and Chris Pope

The Social Affairs Unit

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© The Social Affairs Unit 2005

All rights reserved

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

All views expressed in this publication are those of the authors, not those of the Social Affairs
Unit, its Trustees, Advisers or Director

ISBN 1-904863-07-8

Social Affairs Unit

314-322 Regent Street
London W1B 5SA
www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk
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Contents

Definition of terms used

Students at British universities who turned to terror/extremism

British universities where extremist and/or terror groups have been detected

Introduction: How safe are Britain’s universities?

Chapter One: The problem with British universities

Chapter Two: Target Britain

Chapter Three: Islamists on UK campuses

The London Bombers and UK campuses
Saajid Badat
Babar Ahmad
Omar Sheikh
Zacariaus Moussaoui
Ramadan Shallah
Zeeshan Siddique
Feroz Abbasi
Other terrorists found on UK campuses
Noteworthy Islamist groups on UK campuses
Hizb ut-Tahrir on UK campuses
Al Muhajiroun on UK campuses
MPACUK on UK campuses: Islamic or Islamists, pressure group or extremist organisation?
The campus situation abroad
Chapter Four: The British National Party on UK campuses
Tony Wentworth at Salford University
Mark Collett at Leeds University
Nick Griffin at Cambridge University
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How the BNP operates on UK campuses

Chapter Five: The Animal Liberation Front on UK campuses

Chapter Six: The response from the university authorities

Chapter Seven: The response from Government and Police

Conclusion: So what should be done?

Appendix: Policy recommendations

The authors

Notes and references

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Definition of terms used

When we use the words terror, terrorist, extreme or extremist in this report it should be
stressed that are not simply referring to groups found on our campuses who are part of wider
national groupings prepared to use explosives and other weapons designed to cause bodily or
material harm (for example, baseball bats and other implements) in order to terrorise
individuals and those with political authority (both inside and outside higher education). We
also use those words to define those who seek to exploit the threat of terror against third
parties or innocent individuals in order to advance their own political purpose (in order to
demonstrate their power) or to maim or kill perceived opponents (who may be people who
hold certain political or scientific beliefs or come from a particular ethnic background), as
well as those who attempt, for political purposes, to justify and glamorise illegal violent acts.
Britain, we affirm, is a mature liberal parliamentary democracy in which political change
proceeds, and must always proceed, as the outcome of democratic decision-making processes
regulated, in particular, be European, national and regional or local elections to appropriate
parliaments or assemblies.

Any actions which seek through violence, or the threat of violence, to undermine the
authority of parliamentary democracy to determine what is or is not lawful behaviour by the
Government or by individuals are, by our definition, illegal and subversive. Our definition of
subversion is taken from the one provided by the parliamentary Intelligence and Security
Committee, namely, “actions intended to overthrow parliamentary democracy by political,
industrial or violent means”.1

There are, of course, grounds for arguing that this phrase is neither legally nor
philosophically watertight but simply a convenient and practical way of describing the kind
of plans and terrorist acts which should attract the attention of the various security agencies.
Terrorism and revolutionary extremism of all political varieties are hereby deemed serious
threats in a suitably workmanlike but catch-all way. An “action intended” could be an isolated
act (possibly designed to have a minor impact) but intended to cause a major political change.
Whilst such acts might, in reality, be most unlikely to achieve their goal (since parliamentary
democracy is so firmly entrenched in Britain), the threat of attempting to do so is properly
viewed as a grave threat by any society which values law, order and peacefulness. In this
sense it is undoubtedly a threat to national security. Equally, this definition covers the
activities of groupings or organisations who might seek, for example by means of armed
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force (a putsch) or by violent industrial action, to undermine or overthrow our parliamentary

democracy.

There could also be said to be a conceptual distinction between subversion and

terrorism. In particular, it could be said that a terrorist does not need to belong to an
organisation whereas a subversive must do so. However, it is perfectly sensible to argue that
before becoming a terrorist (that is, someone who commits terrorist acts for political
purposes), the individual in question will first have had to become a subversive (a member of
an organisation or group which might consider the use of terror or violence, threaten it, but
has refused actually to practise it).

When we write here of terrorists and extremists, we intend to imply that where such people
subscribe to a set of political beliefs, they are more than simply violent criminals and
represent a security threat of a different order because of the political beliefs they seek to
advance.

Finally, we distinguish throughout between Islam and Islamic on the one hand, and
Jihadism and Jihadist or Islamist on the other, accepting the distinction made by Islamic
leaders that the religion of Islam is totally opposed to terrorist acts and is, and should be,
fundamentally apolitical. However, it is clear that for some Muslims, including some of its
foremost scholars, Islam is itself a revolutionary faith which supports the overthrow of
western liberal democracy. Although we adhere in this report to the authoritative distinction
that is currently being made by Islamic leaders between that which is effectively Islamic and
that which is Islamist, we are mindful of the fact that in the weeks and months ahead, this
definition may break down. In this sense, our distinguishing between the two concepts may
prove to have been over-optimistic and could be overtaken by events.

In respect of racist views held by individuals or groupings, we argue that however

odious they may be, they are not, in themselves, to be equated with terrorist views. Anti-
Semitic attitudes in themselves are, in the same way, not prima facie evidence of terrorist
ambitions. To verbally abuse someone because they are ethnically other, however disgusting,
is not to use terror. To physically abuse them, cause serious damage to their property or to
verbally threaten them, either directly or by implication, with violence or murder is. The
dividing line between anti-Semitism and terror is, however, a thin one and the use of anti-
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Semitic acts and words to seek to intimidate or terrorise Jews is one feature of Islamist
terrorism. Certainly, it is something that must be kept under review.

Similarly, acts of student violence may have nothing to do with terrorism.

Sit-ins and demos - unless they are specifically designed to support terrorism - are not
terrorist actions even if terrorists might regard them as helpful to their cause.

What we are concerned with here, then, is actual terrorism, where the threat of death
or extreme violence is used to try to achieve aims which would either take very long to be
achieved through parliamentary means or might never be achieved in a democratic system.

Our report shows that there are people within our system of higher education who
have armed themselves there with terrorist ideas, who have learned to glorify them and
peddle them there, and have then gone on to act them out against all the people of Britain,
irrespective of their ethnic background or their religious beliefs.2
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Students at British universities who turned to terror/extremism

 Zacanias Moussaoui: One of the Hamburg cell responsible for the September
11 attacks. Had completed a Masters at South Bank University.
 Omar Sheikh: Currently awaiting execution in Pakistan for the murder of
journalist Daniel Pearl. Had been a student at the LSE and an active member of the
LSE Islamic Society.
 Ferroz Abbasi: Captured in Afghanistan. Had attended Nescot College, Ascot.
 Saajid Badat: Would be shoe-bomber. Attended university in London before
travelling to Pakistan for terrorist training.
 Ramadan Shallah: Studied for PhD at Durham University from1985-90 on
Islamic banking and went on to be a lecturer at the University of South Florida (USA)
and is suspected of the Tel Aviv terror attack.
 Babar Ahmad: Worked in the IT centre at Imperial College and a committed
Jihadist.
 Azahari Husin and Shamsul Bahri Hussein: who studied at Reading University
and Dundee University respectively, both wanted in connection with the Bali
bombing.
 Afzal Munir: Studied at Luton University and later killed fighting in
Afghanistan
 Asif Hanif and Omar Sharif: the 2003 Tel Aviv bar bombers were students in
Britain.
 Mohammed Sidique Khan, and Shehzad Tanweer: Both former Leeds
Metropolitan University students and two of the 7 July bombers.
 Nick Griffin: BNP leader and former Cambridge University student.
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British universities where extremist and/or terror groups have been detected
 Birmingham Islamist
 Brunel BNP, Islamist
 Cambridge BNP
 City Islamist
 Coventry Islamist
 Dundee Islamist
 Durham Islamist
 Greenwich BNP
 Imperial College Islamist
 Kingston Islamist
 Leeds BNP, Islamist
 Leeds Metropolitan Islamist
 Leicester Islamist
 LSE Islamist
 Luton Islamist
 Manchester BNP, Islamist
 Manchester Metropolitan BNP
 Newcastle Islamist
 Nottingham Islamist
 Oxford Animal rights extremists
 Reading Islamist
 Salford BNP
 South Bank Islamist
 SOAS Islamist
 Sunderland BNP, Islamist
 Wolverhampton Islamist
 York BNP
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Introduction - How safe are Britain’s universities?

The terrorist attacks on London of 7 and 21 July 2005 provided graphic and chilling evidence
of the existence in Britain of violent radical groups and murderous terrorist cells. All the
evidence indicates that those responsible were in some way connected, or believed
themselves to be connected, with the murderous Al Qaeda Jihadists. Yet all the 7 July
bombers had grown up in Britain and had benefited from the opportunities and the freedoms
of contemporary British life. They could have been assumed to have been totally loyal to
British values. However, these British citizens hated Britain. They were part of a completely
genuine fifth column, seeking to destroy this country from within, and fighting alongside the
enemy abroad.

One matter which has received less attention than it deserves is that at least two of
those involved with 7/7 had studied at British universities and colleges of higher education.
Mohammed Sidique Khan, who detonated the Edgware Road bomb, had been a student at
Dewsbury College and then Leeds Metropolitan University, together with the Aldgate
bomber, Shehzad Tanweer.

Germaine Lindsay (also known as Abdullah Shaheed Jamal) and Hasib Hussain had
not studied in higher education, but Hussain had been in Pakistan along with Khan and
Tanweer from 2004 to early this year.3 Tanweer had dropped out of Leeds Metropolitan to go
to Pakistan. Of Hussain, his school said: “There was nothing unusual about his school records
except that he was withdrawn by the school from all of his GCSEs except GNVQ Business
Studies.”4 The four Britons murdered 52 people in London and maimed or wounded another
seven hundred individuals.

There is, at the time of writing, some evidence to suggest that all four were in some
way in contact with Magdi el-Nashar (33). El-Nashar himself is a PhD student at Leeds
University, working in the biochemistry department there, who may also have undertaken
some tutoring in the subject. El-Nashar denies that there was anything sinister about his
connection to some of these bombers.

On 4 July 2005 Animal Liberation Front activists carried out an arson attack against
Oxford University, causing an estimated £500,000 of damage. Luckily, no lives were lost in
this outrage, but at the very least those of the fire fighters were at grave risk. A reliable claim
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of responsibility described the event in the following terms: “On July 4 an ALF cell travelled
to Oxford with an incendiary device containing eleven litres petrol…they broke into Oxford
University’s Hertford College boathouse and deployed the devices among the boats…”5

On 23 August 2005, a Staffordshire farm which breeds guinea pigs for medical
research was forced to close after a long and carefully organised campaign of threats and
intimidation by ALF members which included the desecration of the grave of one of the
farm’s original owners. (Her earthly remains were stolen, to be returned only when the farm
stopped breeding guinea pigs.) It was depressing but also highly significant that the BBC
reports on that day, and on its website news subsequently, doggedly referred to the ALF either
as activists or as radicals but not as terrorists.6 Yet, by our definition, the ALF cell responsible
for the closure of this factory, which was engaged in quite lawful work, was an act of terror.7
That the police should be seen to be incapable of countering it successfully is no less
disturbing and raises the issue of whether the police, rather than MI5, are the correct body to
be dealing with the ALF. This is a matter we explore below.

In addition to having to address these specific acts of terror, Britain also faces
extremist and militant onslaughts from many other quarters, all of whom are represented in
British universities, whether they be of the extreme left or right, whether militant Zionists,
Palestinians or Marxists.

All of these extreme and extremist groupings are making efforts to recruit previously
unaligned students at universities and colleges to their cause, recognising the fact that mass
higher education in Britain offers easy pickings. Members with the perceived kudos of a
degree are much more likely to be taken seriously than less educated street fighters. Students
at one university claim to be threatened by the presence of a BNP recruiter on campus. His
very presence there, however, seems to suggest that today’s BNP seeks the imprimatur of
higher education, which is some distance removed from the more traditional skinhead, one as
well as an obvious wish to gain student recruits to its cause.

How safe, then, are Britain’s universities? Safe does not simply mean safe from
attack by extremists of whatever leaning. It also means safe in the sense that university
students and facilities are properly protected against infiltration and penetration by extremist
groups and individuals who may also exploit the possibilities for recruitment and organisation
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offered by each of Britain’s hundred or so universities. The question is truly important,

although it is scarcely ever asked. Our reply, alas, is a disturbing one. They are not safe now,
and there is every reason to believe that unless major changes are effected they will be even
less safe in the future. There are two fundamental arguments that underpin this report.

The first is that if we examine the careers and life-events of the British terrorists about
whom we know something, we see that although there may be numerous reasons why they
turned to terror, one important fact about them is that many of them spent time at a British
university. It is one red line that links a significant number of British terrorists to each other.
We ask what, if any, is the significance of this and suggest the link, which we describe, is
indeed significant. It may not be the only red line, and it may not be the most significant one.
(Jihadist beliefs, attendance at radical mosques, even work-outs at specific gyms may be
equally or more significant.) However, the university dimension is without doubt a key one.

Ideas lie at the heart of higher education. Ideas (admittedly, quite different ones) lie at
the heart of all violent and terrorist political movements, from Jihadism to Animal Liberation.
Training young minds to be receptive to ideas is what universities do. Recruiting and
exploiting young minds who have been opened to ideas is what extremists do. No one
believes that young people, or indeed people of any age, should be robbed of the opportunity
to learn how to use ideas. Yet no one in their right mind could possibly believe that using
ideas to murder other humans is a legitimate or acceptable way to put the theory of higher
education into practice. Terror is the antithesis of intellectual activity. We suggest that we are
currently under attack, not quite at war, but certainly engaged in a different kind of war. Our
work shows that universities seem blissfully unaware of their own duties at such a time and
remarkably naïve when it comes to understanding how what they provide could be used to
attempt to destroy the very values they stand for.

Our second argument is that if there is something in the culture of contemporary

British higher education which can, under certain conditions, fuel terrorist ambitions, then
universities must urgently devise ways of mending what has clearly become broken. At a time
when higher education seems to be more about selling education to customers and making
money in the process, universities may have become too driven by profit, too ready to take
short-cuts. Universities should remember that they are serious institutions. To be dedicated to
the world of ideas is in itself important, but they must do more than this, for they are also
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concerned with the exchange of ideas and dialogue. They are places where attitudes are
formed but also changed, charged with equipping their students with the wherewithal to
undertake useful and constructive lives. What better mission could there be for today’s
universities and colleges but to think carefully how they might actively prevent young
radicals from becoming people who could do us harm? We believe that many students,
particularly, perhaps, Muslim students want to discuss and explore views about politics,
history and their faith. Where better, where safer, than on a properly run campus?

What is more, universities are public institutions, chiefly funded by the taxpayer. The
public should be satisfied that they examine what goes on inside them, particularly, at this
heightened time of crisis, in respect of the students they admit, how they manage student
matters, what they teach them, and how well they get to know them. There is evidence that,
as a rule, this is poorly done, if at all. Universities should also seek to be transparent to the
outside world, allowing outside inspection of what goes on inside them. Inspection, naturally
enough, could also, with luck, lead one straight to the identification of individuals in higher
education who may be a threat to our way of life.

In stating our case in respect of British higher education, we seek to make a

contribution to the wider question of how Britain as a mature liberal democracy can be made
more secure. This is because we not only identify groups and individuals in order to construct
a template for understanding the present and future threat but also because we conclude our
report with specific policy proposals. These stem from our view that the desperate situation in
which Britain now finds itself might well have been prevented in part, if not in whole, had
certain measures been taken at the right time. These proposals are, of course, aimed only at
universities and colleges of higher education for that has been our remit. We must repeat that
we understand, of course, that there is unlikely to be either a monocausal explanation for
terrorist acts or a single remedy for them. Rather, we argue that many things must happen
before a person turns to terror but that if one of those things can be prevented from occurring
then the transformation from a radical young student into a terrorist can be perhaps be
avoided or postponed while other things happen. Here, that one thing has to do with higher
education. Attending to this matter now, we suggest, could help prevent the formation of
terrorist groups in the future.
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Although we did not know at the time (and received no indication of the fact in our
research), the British Government had been presented, behind locked doors, with a similar set
of arguments about a year ago.8 In a paper prepared in 2004 in the wake of 3/11, the Madrid
bombings, to which Sir Andrew Turnbull, the Cabinet Secretary, and Sir John Gieve, the
Permanent Under Secretary at the Home Office, had contributed, the Prime Minister’s
attention was directed to “the first pillar of the Government’s counter-terrorism strategy”
which was “prevention…to diminish support for terrorists by influencing relevant social and
economic issues”. Mr Blair was told: “extremists [are] known to target schools and colleges
where young people are inquisitive and more susceptible to extremist reasoning and
argument”. The report added: “British Muslims who are most at risk of being drawn into
extremism and terrorism fall into two groups. First, those who are well-educated with degrees
or technical/professional qualifications, typically targeted by extremist recruiters and
organisations circulating on campuses [our emphasis] and, second, underachievers with few
or no qualifications and often a non-terrorist criminal background, often drawn to Mosques
where they may be targeted by extremist preachers, or radicalised or converted in prison.”

There is today every reason to believe that these conclusions were correctly drawn –
although these two groups are by no means as discrete as they might appear to be. The high
drop-out rate in many British universities, and the large number of students with very poor
qualifications happily accepted into British higher education show that many campuses bring
together those who are academically strong with those who are weak, sometimes hopelessly
so. Similarly, as we shall see, there is almost certainly a cross-over between those sufficiently
hungry for ideas and skills which can be provided by higher education and those who also
seek a different sort of satisfaction from the ideas and skills provided by mosques or other
centres which can propagate extreme ideas. The extent of interaction between university,
college and mosque still needs to be researched but it is not hard to believe that it is
frequently a vigorous one. Instead of encouraging students to reflect on the values and virtues
of liberal democracy, universities may be teaching them subjects or theoretical tools for
understanding the world – Marxism, for example - which could encourage them to believe
Britain and other western states are in terminal decline. Moving from campus to mosque,
students convinced by their dons might gain further inspiration from radical mullahs.

In particular, where Muslims are concerned, it seems safe to say that a relatively small
number of them per head of population, added to a university which recruits locally from
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areas with large Muslim populations, rather than nationally, could easily encourage students
to avoid any idea of assimilation into a shared Britishness, simply reinforcing already existing
links to a local mosque. In this way, issues these people might have with aspects of British
politics, actions perceived (rightly, perhaps) as unjust or prejudiced against specific
minorities could so easily be internalised and then radicalised, rather than being diffused
through contact with extraneous influences. Isolated and smaller communities of minorities
anywhere in the United Kingdom might find it easier to convince themselves that extremism
or terrorism were acceptable forms of political action more easily than larger communities in
more cosmopolitan environments.

It follows that universities that recruit locally, where local communities may not
broadly reflect the ethnic background of the country as a whole, might find it harder to
dissect and deconstruct dangerous radical thinking than universities who recruit exclusively
according to national criteria of excellence and achievement in a national market place. It is
one of the many unintended consequences of changes to university funding that students now
have an incentive not to leave home and not to escape their local communities. No one
foresaw how this would dramatically change the nature of many of Britain’s apparently
national institutions of higher education.

Britain’s universities and colleges should reflect very carefully on these facts. It is
wrong to make Britain’s overstretched police forces, or even its Security Service, MI5,
responsible for every security issue facing Britain today. Certainly, MI5 has a statutory duty
to safeguard Britain’s national security and terrorism is correctly seen as a threat to the
national fabric of this country. MI5 should, of course, be in the forefront of the fight against
it, as is, broadly, the case. And, patently, it does not always succeed in this task. What is
more, in the wake of 7/7 and 21/7, there are doubtless going to be specific sins, both of
commission and omission, for which MI5 must and will have to answer. Every terrorist
success is, after all, an MI5 failure.

Many of MI5’s operational errors are likely to have complex origins (lying in difficult
subjective decision-making or even in its leaders’ often overdone political sensitivity), and
even the sins of omission, where the Security Service should have done things which it did
not do, are not necessarily always MI5’s responsibility. MI5 certainly dropped its guard in the
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1990s, when it ceased to work against subversives in the UK, and it was possibly a mistake to
leave the Animal Liberation Front to the Special Branch.9

Yet MI5’s job has been made immeasurably harder by the lack of a clear political will
to tackle extremism and by what has often been the shambolic way in which security matters
have, or have not, been addressed. The outgoing Saudi Ambassador, Prince Turki al-Fasal,
has convincingly and clearly described the chaos that has undoubtedly existed in part of
Britain’s security management.10 Criticising the Government’s “inadequate response” to
dealing with extremist Muslims he said: “When you call somebody, he says it is the other
guy. If you talk to the security people, they say it is the politicians’ fault. If you talk to the
politicians, they say it the Crown Prosecution Service. If you call the Crown Prosecution
Service, they say, no it is MI5. So we have been in this run-around for the last two and a half
years.”

According to The Times, the Saudi authorities have repeatedly taken up the matter
with Tony Blair who had promised to deal with it but nothing had ever happened. The Prince
said: “We have been urging the [British] Government to send them back since 1996, if not
earlier. During my two and a half years here it was one of the most persistent and consistent
topics.”

Yet there are many areas where MI5’s tasks could have been considerably lightened.
In particular, university administrators and academics have failed, or have not been
instructed, to do some fairly basic and straightforward things which have allowed radical
terrorists to emerge from our campuses. Individuals who went on to put British security at
risk could certainly have been identified whilst still undergraduate students had certain
safeguards been put in place by universities. What is more, many if not most could probably
have been turned away from terrorism by effective control, containment and careful teaching.
We explore this point in detail at the end of this report.

In short, whilst MI5 and the police have the lead role in trying to provide security for
Britain, others are also responsible. Universities and colleges, in particular, should have been
far more aware of specific ways in which they could have discharged their obligation to their
students and the rest of us to help make Britain safer. They should, for instance, have taken
more care in the recruitment of their students and screened them more fully, especially during
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the annual Clearing process in which they seek to sell empty places at high speed to less able
students. Many universities fail to interview Clearing students properly and cannot therefore
come to a considered evaluation of their individual commitment to learning. Students are
taken on, sometimes with very little supporting evidence of achievement or even identity.
How, without a formal in-depth interview, can a university be sure that a candidate for a place
is coming because they are keen to learn from the dons rather than from extremist fellow-
students? How can they know whether the person in question is, in fact, a student at all or
whether they have turned up simply to recruit other students? The answer is blindingly
obvious: under existing procedures they cannot know.

Once on campus, they should have required academics to know their students
adequately, and been more mindful of the ways in which academic freedoms can be exploited
by extremists using the medium of student unions, groupings and websites. Universities were
wrong to chase fees to the exclusion of real talent, not least because failing students are
always a source of trouble and can all too easily become disaffected with a system which they
believe has failed them. There was, after all, copious evidence to show that both 7/7 and 21/7
were foreseen in outline, even predicted, but that too little, if anything, was done to try to
prevent them from happening. Various reports by the parliamentary Intelligence and Security
Committee argued from 1997 onwards that there were “dangerous terrorists in the UK who
want to attack the fundamentals of our life”, that they represented “major national security
issues”.11 One former senior anti-terrorist officer told a London audience recently that we had
now reached a “new threshold of terror” in which “politically motivated groups were now
prepared to use terror as a weapon”.12

The idea that we (where “we” means all of us who work in public institutions and not
just the security forces) cannot defend ourselves against terror, that the “bomber will always
get through” (an off-the-cuff comment by a senior British politician on BBC Radio following
7/7), is not just only factually inaccurate but, from a terrorist’s viewpoint, a dangerous
incentive to action.13 Things must be done to prevent the bomber from getting through;
measures must be taken to provide a proper culture of security in Britain. After all, the
provision of security to a citizen is one of the basic duties of representative government and
everyone who can assist in delivering it must do so.
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Some of the measures that will now have to be used will inevitably resemble existing
measures. That is to say they will be reactive measures of last resort – calling in the police
once a terrorist cell has been spotted, or the “shoot to protect life” policy currently found on
the streets of London. Others, however, must be pro-active ones. It is in this field that MI5,
the police and campus authorities have been failing. Pro-active measures against terrorists are
far more likely to meet with success precisely because they are pro-active. Seeking out
potential sites of radicalisation and then seeking to contain them by starving them of recruits
and cash could extinguish them before they become hotspots for terrorist activity.

This report seeks to explore - in the specific context of Britain’s higher education
system - some of the pro-active security and counter-terrorist policies we should now be
considering. This context is a key one, not just because we argue that higher education
provides one of the points of entry into terrorist thought and culture, but also because higher
education could also marginalise and dissipate terrorist thinking. It always makes sense to act
preventively at minimum cost.

This is the argument underlying our report. But it is not a theoretical one. As we show
here, there are good grounds for believing that Britain’s universities are no longer safe for a
variety of reasons and that some of them may have become, and may still be, safe havens for
terrorist ideas and recruits.

As one of us (Anthony Glees) argued in a paper to the Political Studies Association

early in 2004, anyone concerned to protect the UK as a liberal democratic political system
was even then, before 7/7 or 21/7 obliged to confront the fact that university campuses in the
UK were increasingly - if inadvertently - playing host to extremist groups.14 Some of these
groups, it was argued then, might easily support the use of terror as a political weapon.

Today, of course, “the rules of the game have changed”, as Tony Blair put it after the
July London bombings, and there is a far greater consensus amongst all Britons, whatever
their faith, that we must now focus our attention more carefully on perceived radical Islamist
or Jihadist terrorist groups. Even so, we forget at our peril that these are by no means the only
groups to worry about. Any extremist group using terror to achieve its aims, whether political
or religious, must be classified as extremist. This report, therefore includes Islamist groupings
 19

justifying terror, militant Zionist groups, extreme left and extreme right wing ones and also
the Animal Liberation Front.

There are, of course, two sides to the cultural role that universities and colleges must
play in today’s liberal democracies. On the one hand, as institutions dedicated to the pursuit
of learning, knowledge and the free exchange of ideas, universities are, or at any rate should
be, sites of tough argument and robust debate. As places which must (or, at least, ought) to be
blind to colour, race or gender, universities can also execute the important task of bringing
disparate individuals together as student members of a greater community, dedicated to the
ideals of learning. Each individual shares the status of student and each student is a vital part
of the academic community - which is what a university ought to be. Students are vital for
without students, there can be no universities. Students themselves are not the problem; the
problem lies with the ways in which they are admitted, and the general ignorance that exists
about what students do when they are not studying. In this way, universities can also
homogenize bona fide disparate social or political groups, and may even help in defusing
conflicts articulated by their students but generated outside universities. Universities can (and
should be) systems for integration, whose power to do so relies wholly on their core values of
rationality, wisdom, critical analysis and value-free and objective observation of the external
world.

On the other hand, precisely because modern western universities are free institutions,
which only flourish if there is free speech (a concept which is, in fact, a relative one rather
than an absolute), they are places which can be exploited by groups who do not themselves
support or uphold the liberal attitudes which produced them in the first place. Where poor or
failing students are involved, they may start off with good intentions but be dragged into
disillusionment and alienation by their limited ability or lack of comprehension about what
higher education actually consists of. The exponential growth in plagiarism, which causes all
universities so much concern, is not just a function of the Web but of the lack of a personal
commitment to the values of the academic community and an awareness by many students
that they are not up to the job in hand.

Hiding behind demands for free speech and the unrestricted right to organise, or
seeking to make up for academic failure, universities make it easy for single persons or
groups of individuals to construct societies or wider groupings which are dedicated to the
 20

destruction of liberal values, to feel free to glorify acts of terror and to incite fellow students
to use violence in pursuit of their aims. What is more, not every student is necessarily a bona
fide student. Evidence from more that one university suggests that some universities may be
little more than covers for people who have no intention of spending their time on study but
every intention of being inspired by the trade of terror or recruiting others to do so.

There is nothing new here. Throughout the twentieth century, British and non-British
universities were being used systematically as recruiting groups for extremists and terrorists
of all kinds, exploiting the freedoms of the campus for their own violent purposes. There are
many other reasons, apart from their statutory duty to provide free speech, why universities
are such obvious targets for extremists. People going to them are, on the whole, interested in
ideas and changing themselves. It may be their first experience of adult life beyond the reach
of parents, families and home-based peer groups. They may also, because many of them are
young, be keen to change the world along with themselves (change is sometimes said to be in
the “DNA” of the young). David Trimble, the senior Ulster politician, told a London audience
recently that terrorism “involves well educated people, the rising middle class are susceptible
to it, especially students and academics; one need only to look at the role that Marxism
played in the universities in the 1970s and 1980s”.15 Trimble’s point is spot-on. What is more,
the generally left-wing bias in academe (itself a product of the “revolutionary sixties”),
reinforced by the ageing of the young radical dons of those times who have now become
higher education’s senior academics, may be one reason why universities have found it so
hard to lay down the law on campus extremism. Some of the senior figures still hold that a
strong security culture is not the solution to the problem of terror but its cause.

Trimble was also right to warn against assuming that extremism is a function of
autocratic regimes and that democracies will not spawn terrorism. He pointed out that
terrorism is found in democracies more frequently than in autocracies. He singled out the
German Baader-Meinhof gang as an example of a middle-class terrorist movement, whose
leading members were almost all highly educated and lived in one of the most liberal and
democratically adroit polities of our age.

Whilst there is some merit in his contention, it is by no means the full story: the
Baader-Meinhof gang in fact hated parliamentary liberal democracy as it was developing in
the Federal Republic of Germany in the late 1960s and 1970s, because the emphasis on
 21

consensus and liberalism acted, they rightly saw, as a obstacle to the extreme Marxist and
Communist policies it desired.16 The Baader-Meinhof gang were, of course, quite right to see
that successful liberalism would make Communism impossible to achieve and that it might,
in fact, even overturn it. However, rather than live with majority decisions, the gang tried to
impose minority dictatorship, justifying this with the same sort of hate campaigns (against
America, Israel, Zionists, Jews, Nazis and so forth) that Jihadists press.

We, in turn, must learn the lessons of this frightening period in modern German
history which can certainly illuminate Britain’s position in 2005. The first is that the leading
gang members were trained in the use of weapons either by the East German Stasi or by Arab
terrorist groups. Nothing was done to prevent this from happening, on the basis that what was
out of sight should also be regarded being out of mind. Second, the relatively small number
of murderers was generated by a far wider group of sympathisers. By 1977, the West German
Federal Criminal Agency had a terrorist index which contained the names of some 4.7 million
suspects and sympathisers, many of them university students and at one time or another it had
had 6,047 individuals under surveillance. The third point to note is that attempts to treat the
gang with kid gloves by seeking to appease them, and re-integrate them into German life,
merely increased the incidence of terrorism (in the process destroying the reputations of
politicians and church leaders advocating dialogue). It took decisive military action, the
storming of a Lufthansa jet (whose passengers had been taken hostage) in October 1977 in
the deserts of Mogadishu to break the gang’s murderous reign of terror.

Unlike the terrorists of the 1970s who tried to justify their killings by targeting
prominent West Germans whom they accused of having been Nazis, Jihadists, as we discuss
later on, target perfectly ordinary people, including other Muslims. They take no interest in
who they are, or even what their ethnic background might be. However, as we show, Jihadists
can profit from a very large group of sympathisers and potential sympathisers, particularly
amongst what appear to a very large majority who opposed the Government’s Iraq policy.

Some attempt has been made to quantify these. The 2004 report prepared for the
Prime Minister, described above, said that “the number of British Muslims actively engaged
in terrorist activity whether at home or abroad or supporting such activity is extremely small
and estimated at less than ten per cent”.
 22

This translates, it was suggested, into there being 16,000 potential terrorists out of an
officially listed Muslim population of 1.5 million (2.7 per cent of the total population of the
UK). The Sunday Times claimed that MI5 believed that the number of those who were
actually prepared to commit terrorist offences might run into hundreds.

It is interesting and perhaps revealing to contrast these figures with those coming
from a poll taken between 15 and 22 July 2005.17 Whilst 77 per cent found the London
bombings to lack any justification whatsoever, six per cent of interviewees said “on balance”
the attacks were justified; 24 per cent said they had either a lot, or a little “sympathy with the
feelings and motives of those who carried out the attacks” (with 13 per cent saying they had a
“lot of sympathy”); 56 per cent said they could “understand why some people behaved in this
way”. Only one per cent of those asked said they believed Muslims should use violence to
bring about the collapse of western society but 31 per cent agreed with the statement that
“western society is decadent and immoral and Muslims should seek to bring it to an end but
only by non-violent means”. Only three per cent said they would not tell anyone if they got to
hear of a terror attack but 10 per cent said they would not tell anyone if they found
themselves being recruited by extremists.

As we have seen, it takes no more than four bombers to unsettle a major world city
with many millions of inhabitants. If the Security Service believes that there are possibly
hundreds of Jihadists prepared to use terror to achieve their political ends, that is a large
number of potential terrorists to be concerned about. Equally, those 24 per cent of people who
were sympathetic to some degree with the bombers are a major cause for worry. The
existence of a large number of sympathisers provides extremists with a once in a lifetime
chance to recruit sizeable numbers of young people to their cause. Even if student radicals
grow up to be affluent supporters of the status quo, what counts, of course, is their potential
as young weapons in the fight against the west.

Though it is impossible to pinpoint precisely how, when and where, using open
sources as we do here, recruitment appears to take place through contact with a student
recruiter or an adult recruiter brought into the university. Recruitment, we stress, is a secret
activity, which puts Jihadist recruiters in the same category as officers of a hostile intelligence
service who wish to recruit British spies. It can also clearly occur when a university, obliged
to provide free speech, finds itself providing a platform for individuals who may have some
 23

sort of heroic or charismatic standing amongst particular student groups. This can happen
officially (through university ignorance about the individual invited to the campus) or sub
rosa (where the authorities might intervene were they to be told so are not). Student societies
can provide strong peer-group support for radical mindsets. Some of these may justify
violence and the use of terror for political ends and a potentially lethal group think culture is
born.

It is important that universities realise that they have the same duty of care to all their
students. There is evidence that a number of radical or fundamentalist student societies do not
permit certain students to join that society: some may be barred to those who are female,
others to those who do not share the same religion or political viewpoint. Universities seem
ready to turn a blind eye to what may, in fact, be illegal discrimination (in the same way that
the Government which has banned corporal punishment in the state and private sector permits
it to take place in certain religious establishments).18

The British security community believes firmly that many things need to happen
before a radical but peaceful individual turns into an extremist who is prepared to use terror
to achieve his or her political goals, not to mention become a suicide bomber who will kill
not just himself or herself but as many innocent people as possible at the same time.19
Security officials call this transformation the tipping point. It may be right to regard this point
as the intersection of a variety of discrete but linked circles. One circle may be a local
community, possibly religious. Another might be a leading figure or group of elders. One
might be the environment of a university.

In short, there is a real and serious problem in UK higher education establishments at

present. There is evidence that they have become recruiting grounds and training areas for
terrorists and that some of the knowledge and expertise that they pursue may be additional
bait for terrorist groups. Some may be Jihadists, some right or left wing extremists and some
supporters of animal rights. All share a belief that our democracy acts as a brake on the
achievement of their extremist goals and that terror and the threat of terror therefore becomes
a legitimate way of achieving them. We do not claim that higher education is the only tipping
point, nor that it is necessarily the most important one. But we do claim that the evidence
indicates that is a tipping point. We know that terrorists have had many other things in
common, attending particular Mosques, visiting Pakistan or Afghanistan and so on. It has
 24

been suggested that some of the London bombers worked out at the same gym, and Robert S
Mueller III, the Director of the FBI, has singled out prisons as sites of recruitment.20 But, we
must ask, from where do young people get the very idea of extremism and radicalism? The
idea always predates the act itself and universities have always been places where ideas
dominate the environment.

A major problem, one perhaps far greater prior to 7/7 and 21/7 was the fundamental
refusal of large sections of the British political class, the Judiciary and academe to accept that
a terrorist risk existed in Britain. For some time, the British intelligence community had used
the opportunities open to it (these include statements made to the parliamentary Intelligence
and Security Committee, closed seminars meeting under Chatham House rules and informal
briefings on a confidential basis) to try to get the word across that the terrorist threat to the
United Kingdom was real.

Although many political leaders and the Director General of the Security Service had
repeatedly warned of a terrorist attack, there was evidence to suggest that the threat was not
taken as seriously as it should have been. This in turn may have rebounded on the intelligence
and security community, making them too wary of crying wolf.

Speaking on the BBC’s Woman’s Hour on 28 February 2005, for example, Tony Blair
spelt out what he insisted was a major national problem. There were, he said, “dangerous
terrorists who threaten the fundamentals of our life”. The best way of addressing this threat
was, he said, through “surveillance and intelligence”. These were the “key to countering the
threat we face”. The Government’s suggestion was to use the intelligence that we had to
initiate a policy of detention orders, including house arrest for suspects (a modern version of
the old nostrum of internment). He also added that the use of intercept evidence in court cases
should be re-assessed, 21 something that is currently being considered again, in light of the
London bombings of July 2005.

Yet voices could be heard asking whether either the Prime Minister – or the evidence
he was using, if it was intelligence-based, could be trusted?22 Anti-terror laws, some
suggested, would simply “alienate” people and drive them into the hands of terrorists. What
was more, anti-terror legislation had not produced results since scarcely more than a dozen
people had been convicted under them. At the end of the day, it was said, secret intelligence
 25

had not correctly identified Iraqi WMD – then why should we believe it when it came up with
the idea of a “global war on terror”? The idea that the number of convictions (and indeed the
number of arrests) were not by themselves useful indicators of the effectiveness of the
legislation since the deterrent effect of laws meant that absence of evidence was not
necessarily evidence of absence.

Even more problematic was the view taken by the Law Lords when examining key
parts of the Government’s anti-terror legislation on 16 December 2004 Lord Hoffmann said
there was: “no ‘state of public emergency threatening the life of the nation’- the only basis on
which Britain would be entitled to exercise its opt-out from article five of the European
convention, the right to liberty”. Instead, Lord Hoffmann said it was the anti-terror laws
introduced by the Government which had posed such a threat. Hoffmann said: “The real
threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional
laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these” [our
emphasis]. On 26 July 2005, the Prime Minister himself criticised Hoffman, doubting that he
would say these things now that London had been hit twice.23 The British public were entitled
to be confused and British academics, trained to be sceptical in any case, were probably now
even more sceptical about the existence of a terrorist threat than ever before.

Speaking at various times to invited and discrete groups of industrialists, academics

and journalists, security and intelligence chiefs showed themselves to be clearly worried
about such attitudes. A very senior figure told one meeting that if they could not convince the
Law Lords about the need for a robust positive approach to security issues, they were hardly
going to convince the public and gain the public’s acceptance for the measures deemed
necessary.24 The only way forward, he argued, was to make the case as plain as possible in
order to “squeeze terror out of our system”.

He said that the span of activity had shown that Al Qaeda was still acting as a
vanguard for British terror groups but had now interlinked itself with other groups that had
grown in the UK independently of it. There was now even a third tier of even smaller
groupings, he said, who were seizing the agenda. They were “global” in their “intentions,
impact and reach” and were “murderous in intent”, ambitious, international and resourceful.
They were intent on researching how to make their bombs more sinister, as can be seen in the
images released of horrific nail bombs, to kill more people and strike fear into the public.
 26

The public, in turn, needed to be convinced that we had reached a new threshold of
terror he said, whose defining characteristic was to cause the mass murder of totally innocent
people. They had to believe that this was something that would be developing over many
years, and that they should agree to fighting it and investing in the battle. Eventually, we
might, he said, achieve “balanced normality” but only with renewed effort.

British terror groups, he asserted, had ongoing linkages to the Maghreb, the Islamic
diaspora and – increasingly – Iraq. Iraq, he argued, represented a “looming danger”, because
it could become the base for what had previously existed in Afghanistan. Despite the
Government’s refusal to admit a link between the London bombers and Iraq, the Security
Service’s own website notes of Al Qaeda that: “Countries that are participating in the
reconstruction efforts in Iraq have also been identified as targets.”25 Cells of terrorists were,
he suggested, able to act alone but were also probably supported by operatives from the
outside. Intelligence had shown that the new targets were likely to be crowded places, so as to
hit people at their most defenceless – early in the morning, for example, on their way to work.

The best the public could hope for, he insisted, was that in five years time we might
have reduced the terrorists’ strategic potential to cause murder or harm. As far as individuals
were concerned, our aims should be to marginalize them, to identify them, criminalise them
and cut them off from broader social support. We needed to depict them, he said, credibly for
what they were – mass murderers. For this to happen, community support was vital, for it was
ultimately communities who would defeat and contain terror. The intelligence and security
community could not do this by itself. Universities were, he insisted, an obvious target even
if they were also able to integrate minorities into British ways and habits.

Indeed, the Security Service has, since 1998-9, pursued an awareness programme with
universities. MI5 describes it as follows: “Staff visit universities as part of a series of pre-
programmed visits to brief them on the countries and the organisations of WMD concern. The
awareness visits also provide useful information for the Security Service which is reported
back to the Restricted Enforcement Unit and the Department of Trade and Industry”.26

It is also the case that MI5 appears to have prevented more than two hundred foreign
“scientists” from studying in the UK over the past four years following vetting of more than
 27

2000 of them who had applied for postgraduate or postdoctoral work in chemistry,
microbiology and biotechnology and 18 other disciplines.27 MI5 operates a voluntary vetting
scheme which it established in 1994 to address the WMD threat. This was, perhaps, in part a
product of the successful British intelligence operation against Abdul Qadir Khan who had
studied in Europe and then established a uranium enrichment facility, called the Khan
Research Laboratories, which had then passed technical information and hardware to various
Middle Eastern states, in particular Libya.28 In all, 2282 individuals were vetted, of whom
238 were rejected to May 2005. Security checks were conducted on individuals from ten
countries, including Pakistan, Syria, India and Egypt.

However, security sources state that this scheme was not merely a voluntary one but
one which had met with opposition from some universities: “Many academics believe the
scheme is flawed and several prominent universities refuse to cooperate in it. Because it is
voluntary, some view it as an unnecessary bureaucratic burden while others believe it is an
interference in their academic freedom.” Many universities do not refer students to the
authorities because they fear that if the students were to hear about the scheme, they might
lose them and will lose the revenue they generate.

One senior academic at a top university was quoted as saying “We are all in
competition for overseas students; they provide us with a lot of our income and speed of
processing applications is a key factor in ensuring a student will come. So any delay because
of a diversion to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is a big issue.” One strong university
recently concluded an agreement with an authoritarian Middle East state deeply hostile to
British policy in the area to train large numbers (18 initially but set to “increase substantially”
by 2009) of postgraduate students, concerned to gain an expertise in information systems and
computer science. None of these 18 has been security cleared.29 The state’s foreign policy
goals do not run parallel to those of the UK and to deliver leading edge IT teaching to its
students (of whom some will certainly have a connection to the state’s intelligence and
security agencies) may strike the ordinary citizen as a touch misguided. What could be the
national advantage to Britain in giving these students our best IT training?

The chair of the Association of University Administrators said rather bizarrely, given
his position, but accurately in the event that: “National security is too important to be left to
universities…the government is the appropriate body and it should be done at the visa offices
 28

when potential students first apply to study here. The way the scheme is implemented varies
widely from institution to institution. It is an unsatisfactory way to operate something as
important as national security.”

Events have, of course, shown who was right and who was wrong. The consequences
of this are far harder to judge. Certainly, our research shows that at the operational level, the
security community was very anxious (we would argue much too anxious) about any
measures which could be seen as overly pro-active and that it believed the best strategy was a
softly, softly one. Their reasons for this were operational, it should be stressed, and, on the
face of it, were not rooted in any way in what might be termed political correctness.30
Nevertheless, as the Prime Minister has said: things must be different now, and the security
forces must take account of this.

Prior to 7/7 and 21/7, officers involved in security work were certainly fully aware of
the security problems posed by universities -- but they were also mindful of the problems
which could be provoked by what might be seen by students and academics as over-intrusive
police or special branch investigation. Even a hint of a police presence could, they suggested,
cause difficulties. In addition, the academic management of universities was complex and
hard for outsiders to understand, or know how to approach. They also found it difficult to
know what the powers of various bodies in universities were – could a university simply
expel a student suspected of radical activity? Could a students’ union, they queried, expel a
club on suspicion of extremism? Even if they could, some of those in the security community
might conclude it was unwise to do so for there was experience to suggest that it could make
sense to encourage students to voice their opinions and protest. Students, it was thought,
would feel they were doing something and leave it there.

The security community believed it possessed a good understanding of extremism,

and had done so ever since the early 1970s and even before. Officers and others were well
aware, for example, that ever since the 1970s extremists from various quarters, including the
National Front, had got onto campuses and sought to recruit on them. But the judgement was
that it was very difficult for the police to know where to draw the line and whether they
should intervene – so deciding, in effect, that to do nothing was the best policy.
 29

The security community certainly observe groups like Al Muhajiroun. At present,

however, no one in the security community knows whether particular universities are hotbeds
of extremism or have any reliable means of finding out. Certainly, officers and others could
understand that university outsiders or travellers who might have personal experience of
operations against British or American troops in, say, Iraq would be a danger if they turned up
on campuses. It would be a major step forward, the police say, if they could find out about
such people. They also understand that today deliberate grooming to target problem students
can easily occur. Similarly, evidence of a group shifting into extremism is always worrying.

Yet officers and others involved in security believed that they had good contacts (that
is “sufficiently good contacts”) with “practically every university and higher education
college in their district”. But this contact, it was stressed, was reactive and confined to
campus security guards. It was contact with university security staff maintained simply in
order to be able to react as quickly as possible to a security problem that had already
occurred. There was absolutely no contact with academic or administrative staff established
with the aim of preventing a problem from happening in the first place.

Once an event had taken place, it followed, officers were confident they could get the
information they needed about any student, who they were, where they lived and so on.
Indeed, members of the security community pointed out that if one knew just the name of the
college a student had attended, the rest would follow easily. Nor was it necessary to “go in at
the top”. Generally speaking, officers believed that once one discovered an individual of note
was in higher education, it was easy to get at them.

Although there was some security interest in organisations on campus, the police and
security authorities insisted that they had had always found it easier to look for individuals.
As one put it: “it makes far more sense to go for the individual in the organisation, than for
the organisation in the individual”. Of course, it must be pointed out that any attempt to start
a policy of pro-active security would totally undermine this approach. After all, it is the
“organisation in the individual” that can spark terrorist activity unless we believe (against the
evidence, it has to be said) that terrorists are simply criminals and murders for whom politics
is a convenient and cynical smokescreen.
 30

Curiously, perhaps, security and police officers have also argued that the situation
today at British universities is very similar to that of Communism in the 1930s where
recruitment would frequently mean an individual was asked to leave the organisation, or
never to join it (“come and join the KGB but leave the Party first”). It might seem to follow
that membership or even attendance at an extremist event might automatically rule out an
individual becoming a terrorist. In fact, of course, we would argue that this would be a
reduction into the absurd, because in the case of Communists, the membership – the
significant feature – had preceded the activity. Even if the formal membership then lapsed,
the historical fact of membership was a significant pointer to possible future anti-democratic
activity. In the 1930s, the thing to have done would have been to focus on membership lists
(which met with real success) but then ask more pointed questions about what had happened
to individuals once they had apparently ceased to be members. Today, formal membership of
terrorist organisations may not exist but membership of groups or attendance at various
meetings, political or religious, where extremist ideas are discussed would constitute a
significant pointer. Police and security officers accept this and stress that they would certainly
seek lists of student who are members of radical organisations if they were instructed to do
so, and could see a certain logic in being asked to, but they had not been.

Officers were, however, very sceptical indeed about any pro-active security work
being undertaken on Britain’s campuses. The difficulty with pro-active strategies, they
suggested, was that it was hard to know whom to target. As one view had it: just because
someone looked liked a radical, it did not follow that he or she was a radical. In any case,
radicalisation could have already taken place, in sixth form colleges, for instance. What was
more, officers pointed out that students might well not like police on campus (“people in big
boots trampling around”) and plain clothes officers could easily be seen as “secret police”.
There was no doubt in the minds of the security and police community that opportunities for
being pro-active had become very limited indeed.

Police and security officials pointed out that individual profiling had also revealed
that some extremists had started off by simply being petty criminals. The authorities
underlined that there was also a difference in the ways people from different groups and
communities were sucked into extremism. Some groups might seek advice from a priest or a
Mullah. Mullahs were asked, for example, if people wished to change their identities. Yet
there was undoubtedly a tipping point which would take an individual over the threshold and
 31

into possible terrorism. This needed to be looked out for. Police and security officers
suggested that the Muslim Contact Unit in the Met was an important resource, for it would
hear of radicalisation and matters such as these.

Indeed, so successful has the Muslim Contact Unit been that it has been announced
that it is to be expanded out of London across the rest of the country. The move has been
welcomed by Muslim groups, with Azad Ali of the Muslim Safety Forum saying: “They’ve
done a lot of good work in reassuring communities.”31

The security community did accept that, since 1992 subversion was no longer a
permitted target for security activity. However, they insisted, counter-terrorism work was
essentially counter-subversion and since 9/11 the security community had been playing catch-
up. Terrorism, they felt, was simply the new word for subversion.

We, however, would argue that there is a real difference between the two. A terrorist is
someone who has already crossed the tipping point into action or a readiness for action.
Subversion has to do with preparing the ground to allow the tipping point to be reached. It is
subversion which primes an individual, creating the preconditions for terrorism or extremism.

The security community was also firmly opposed to the idea that covert work on
campuses might supply missing answers. Indeed, some officers took the view that covert
work might backfire by making it harder to detect when the tipping point had been reached. It
was also true the all officers knew they had to be more aware of violence. One stated that
everyone had today become much more violent – and that even quite young children were
now involved in extremely violent crime.

We would suggest, however, that today there is no alternative to targeted covert work
on campuses. This is a point to which we return at the end of our report. Suffice it to say here,
once again, that reactive security is not sufficient to meet the national need at present. Pro-
active work, without covert operations, would be endlessly time-consuming and could easily
be directed to the wrong places. Only covert work would supply the authorities with the
intelligence needed to pre-empt further terror attacks.
 32

Instead of covert activity, officials believe there should be full time police officers on
campus - community beat officers. Modern campuses, they point out, can include upwards of
14,000 people. It is unthinkable, they argue, that communities of that size should have no
interaction with the police. Campus officers, for example, would certainly get information if
anything untoward was happening. Security and police officers accepted that it would also be
useful if Immigration Officers were to have an immediate means of checking with a
university whether the place on the course really exists, and whether the qualifications are
really genuine.

Admissions policies are also an issue of security concern in the view of officials in the
field. The police do ask themselves: “Why are these people trying to get into that university?
Imperial College, for example, has the means to create WMD. They have their own nuclear
reactor and at Wye Agricultural College there is all the nitrate fertiliser you could want.” It is
true that bomb-making can be learned, like so much else, off the internet. But information is
usually not the same as knowledge, which has to be acquired and taught. Learning from a don
is a much better way of learning than working off a website. A dedicated terrorist will
understand this.

It is clear that the authorities face formidable problems, even if they confine
themselves to what is in essence reactive control. They are forced to work, with limited
resources, in a blizzard of information and are in essence incident or event led. But what is
essentially reactive security work has major drawbacks. Certain things follow as a matter of
course. They don’t know about people on campuses unless dangerous individuals have
already been identified. They don’t know about things that might happen but haven’t
happened yet. It also means that the group culture which might encourage terrorist activity is
not researched and not known about.

Whilst officers plainly have good links with security staff at universities, all this
facilitates in the discovery of individuals who have already been identified. Officers know
virtually nothing about the peer group culture or clubs and societies, nothing about any
recruitment that might be undertaken during Freshers’ Week. They seek to identify the
tipping-point or Group Shift where a specific gathering of individuals makes a commitment
move from mouthing extremism to becoming extremists but in fact they cannot do so if they
rely simply on their existing links to security staff within universities, or on individuals (who
 33

are by definition students) who might decide to inform on their comrades. Police “university
community officers” are one way forward but not a major one.

Whilst we can accept the dangers posed by travellers or outsiders reactive policing
means that, at best, it is only after a visit has taken place that officers would get to know
about it. It is also by no means clear that the university administration still less the academic
staff would get to know if travellers or outsiders have been on campus.

The whole problem in our view, must, of course, be set in the context of how the
Security Service and the other agencies have managed our security over the past twenty five
years. We believe they may have spent too much time looking over their shoulder at the
Government, at politicians and at powerful institutions such as the universities. They have
been too nervous of appearing to interfere in affairs that were none of their business. Indeed,
it is plain that all agencies, in particular MI5 since 1992, must now urgently change its policy
of not working on subversion. Terrorism is, indeed, not another term for subversion which is
properly defined – by MI5 – as “action intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary
democracy by political, industrial or violent means”. A subversive may not always be a
terrorist, but a terrorist, where the purpose of terror is political, is always a subversive.
Indeed, it is not far-fetched to argue that it is easier and better all round to catch a subversive
whilst that is still what they are, before he or she becomes a terrorist and proves it.

To point out that the best known terrorists in today’s world have attended universities
may simply be a reflection of the fact that many people attend universities. Yet whether or not
it is a question of chance, the fact is that terrorists have been students. At the very least, this
provided the authorities with an opportunity to identify, contain or re-educate them.

They could be influenced for the better as well as the worse, if one knew who they
were. One could identify actions likely to lead to terror. The UK has had a good record of
identifying people. Academics may say there is nothing to identify but do academics know
what their students are doing?
 34

Chapter One: The problem with British universities

Since the 1930s, there has been copious and incontestable evidence that the values of
democratic tolerance and freedom of speech, which have lain at the heart of UK university
life, have repeatedly been exploited by groupings and individuals who do not support these
values but work to exploit and undermine them.

For more than sixty years, radical groupings have used the fundamental liberties of
UK academe to agitate and in some cases plan for its extinction. Examples include:
Communist and Fascist groups in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s (including a recent revelation
that around 750 teachers were attempting to spread communist propaganda in British schools
in the wake of the Second World War32), revolutionary student organisations in the late 1960s
and 1970s, and Islamist, Far Right and Far Left groups today. British academe has always
been seen as a safe haven by the enemies of the open societies of the West.

The UK is not unique in this issue. Universities have always been hotbeds of radical
thought, some of it more extreme than others and as an example of this, it can be argued that
the modern Jihadist ideology was developed in the Egyptian universities of the 1970s.33

Indeed, hard evidence has emerged that in the past decade, universities have been
infiltrated by radical Islamist cells who exploit the conditions of campus life in order to
organise attacks on the liberal democracies of a number of Western states, including the UK,
France, Spain, Germany and the USA.

Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme, Baber Siddiqi from the Luqman Institute,
which works with young British Muslims, is adamant that there is a problem at universities
and that students are, potentially, at threat. He said: “When young Muslims go to university,
they have often feel a sense of insecurity and so the radical groups provide a social forum and
then develop personal relationships. They invite you to lectures and sermons and even follow
these up with indoctrination in your own homes and communities. In some cases, they have
even been known to appoint minders to look after you.”

He went on to say: “These groups won’t specifically advocate violence but they will
bring people to the edge and then create a pool of people that are susceptible for further
recruitment. They have links to groups in the Islam world who operate in conflict areas and
 35

who have similar ideologies and the transition from the first groups to the even more radical
groups and getting involved in violence is a quick one. We have engaged one or two people
who were on the fringe and who were prepared to engage in violence. But we have moved
them out of this mindset and they are at ease with their religion and do not have these
sentiments of violence and hatred.”

But it is not just the extremist Islamic elements that have used higher education for
their own, nefarious, aims. The Far Left terror groups of the 1970s and 1980s such as Action
Directe, had their groundings in universities.

On the other hand, the Far Right has not been slow to act and organisations such as
the British National Party (BNP), while of course not terrorists, have made great strides to
improve their standing in the community and are trying to attract a better-educated class of
member. While not illegal, the presence of BNP activists in some universities and even
schools can cause fear to many minority groups.

Intelligence organisations have also made great use of the British education system,
from the Stasi’s recruitment of individuals such as Robin Pearson, the communist youth
student who went on to lecture at Hull University to recent reports about Chinese spy rings
across Europe and in Australia.34 Some lecturers were also highly critical of reports that the
Central Intelligence Agency has a scheme to sponsor trainee spies through university
anthropology courses, something the British Association of Social Anthropologists called:
“ethically dangerous and divisive”.35 Perhaps the most famous example of intelligence
organisations using universities to recruit was the Cambridge spy ring of Philby, Burgess et
al.

So while it is clear to see that there is a precedent for universities being used by
groups with their own agendas, what makes British universities susceptible?

British universities, whether they are the historic centres such as Cambridge or
Oxford or the modern ex-polytechnics, are known for their upholding of free speech and
liberal values. While this is of course laudable, there is also evidence that universities justify
the presence on their campuses of radical student groupings in order to uphold the tradition of
free speech without paying close attention to whether these groups exist to further the
 36

university’s values of liberal democracy or knowing whether these groups operate internally
in ways consistent with democratic practice and university codes of practice.

A democratic culture of radical thought is thereby subverted into a dangerous culture

which easily allows it to become a base for the destruction of liberal democracy.

Furthermore, it is widely understood both within the EU and beyond that UK

universities are now wholly market and recruitment led, and that they put a premium on the
recruitment of students from outside the EU who pay much higher tuition fees than home or
EU students. International students may include those whose aim is not to study but to wage
war against democracy, to establish cells and networks in the UK, for use against UK targets,
using the status of student and the freedoms implicit in university life as a cover for their
activities.

It is also widely understood that weaker universities, in seeking to attract sufficient

students to pay academic salaries, will accept students though a process universities term
“clearing,” which provides admission to students, frequently without character references or
hard evidence of either academic achievement, identity or a permanent address.

Finally, it is known that British universities are some of the best equipped in the
world. In one recent terrorism case, a judge noted that sources of bomb-making equipment
can be found in colleges and universities. While this sort of equipment can, of course, be
found elsewhere, nuclear reactors, such as the one that is owned by Imperial College London,
cannot. Other universities will have access to dangerous chemicals or pathogens or have staff
well-versed in nuclear physics.

Despite the possibility that students may not be who they claim to be, it seems that
universities are somewhat unaware of the threat this poses to academe or the UK more
generally.

For these reasons, and because of recent events widely reported in the UK press but
now sub judice, there is prima facie evidence that the UK is at risk from radical student
groupings in British universities.
 37

Chapter Two: Target Britain

It is not just Britain’s universities that are well known for their permissiveness and liberal
attitudes. Despite popular misconceptions about the image of the UK, the nation has always
benefited and indeed embraced new cultures, one has only to look at the constantly-evolving
English language to see how true this is (as opposed to the French who have government
organisations dedicated to preserving the language unchanged and unspoilt). Yet, while the
vast majority of those who have come to this country do so in good faith, there will always be
others who will come here to take advantage of the freedom they can enjoy.

Of all the places that people from abroad come to in the UK, London is undoubtedly
the number one destination. What is more, London is the home of some 25 universities as
well as hundreds of colleges and schools and people from around the world come to study at
them, spreading views, both welcome and not.

In the late 1990s, the UK began to come under criticism from some of its allies for its
willingness to harbour certain individuals who were deemed subversives or terrorists in other
nations and the term Londonistan was used to describe how London was now the centre for
the radical Islamic movement. The Government finally woke to this problem and of the 21
organisations outlawed in Britain since February 2002, 16 are Muslim.36 In the past, these
groups have used London as a headquarters and have been scrupulous about not attacking
targets on British soil and thereby cutting off their support.

On 15 June 2002, at an Islamic community centre in Milan, Italy, a cleric with alleged
ties to Al Qaeda was overheard in conversation with an Arab from Germany, according to a
transcript of the wiretap later published in Italy. The Arab spoke of his 10-person cell in
Germany and the group’s interest in Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, Turkey, Egypt, Italy
and France. “But the nerve centre is still London,” he reported.37

However, this laissez faire attitude was cruelly exposed with the July attacks. One
French defence ministry official was quoted as saying: “It may not be the moment to say it,
but London is paying for its mistakes, for allowing all those radical organisations from Saudis
to Pakistanis to set up shop in London, put out newsletters, make recruits and gather funds to
finance their activities.”38
 38

As one former White House counter-terrorism official, Steven Simon, called it,
London became “the Star Wars bar scene” for Islamic radicals,39 attracting a polyglot group
of intellectuals, preachers, financiers, arms traders, technology specialists, forgers, travel
organisers and foot soldiers.40

French authorities claimed that London and Leicester were key recruiting grounds,
not just for the UK but for the whole of Europe, cities where spiritual indoctrination took
place before individuals were returned to their communities to either await orders, establish
their own cells or pursue largely independent activities.41 It is claimed that international
groups such as Islamic Jihad, al Gamaa al-Islaamiya, the Algerian Groupe Islamique Armée,
Hamas and Hizballah all have members operating in the UK.42

There has also been criticism from the USA about the situation in London. One
former senior US intelligence official said that there had been difficulties between the US and
UK in counter-terrorism procedures owing to British concerns over human rights, civil
liberties and the British justice code.

He was critical of what he saw as dangerous and unnecessary delays in arresting

radical clerics in London, such as Abu Qatada, a radical Palestinian preacher wanted on terror
charges in Jordan, and Abu Hamza al-Masri, an Egyptian who took UK citizenship and came
to London in the 1970s: “They have a really hard time understanding that people that like
Masri and Abu Qatada are real goddamn problems. It took a long, long time before they
began taking those threats seriously...There is a certain amount of reluctance on the British to
move quickly. What they never seem to realise is that by the time they know they have a
problem it is too late.”43

The culmination of all these factors was that a former British student earned the
unwelcome distinction of becoming Britain’s first suicide bomber when he blew up a bar in
Israel, while at least one of the September 11 hijackers studied in the UK. We have also seen
plots believed to be linked to British Islamic groups including the planned bombing of US
embassies in Albania and Italy and, of course, more recently the 7 July bombings.

In the early 1990s, radical Islamists made a concerted effort to infiltrate student
Islamic groups at British universities. Omar Sheikh, the murderer of reporter Daniel Pearl had
 39

been a student at the London School of Economics (LSE). In a 1994 Sunday Times interview,
he claimed that in November 1992, the Islamic society had shown a film called “The
destruction of a nation” which showed Bosnian Muslims being butchered by Serbs.

Once the then director of the LSE, John Ashworth, realised the influence of radical
Islamic student groups, he worked with the student union to try to rid the groups of external
and radical influences.44 Yet the LSE’s name still regularly crops up today in relation to
terrorist groups. It is not the only university to be named, Manchester and the School for
Oriental and African Studies are often mentioned, while Sussex was accused by the Union of
Jewish Students as being one of the three worst places for a Jewish student to attend
university due to anti-Semitism on campus. A recently leaked Government report specifically
pointed out Imperial and Brunel universities in London.

Indeed, many universities have continued to be used as recruiting centres with

leafleting at stalls for new students and on the streets. Despite the ban by the NUS on such
groups as Al Muhajiroun they, as has been admitted by their former leader Omar Bakri
Mohammed, responded by simply changing their names and using more innocuous titles for
their front groups.45

The Government is in no doubt about this. In the leaked Government paper, entitled
Project Contest,46 it is specifically stated that: “A number of extremist groups are actively
recruiting young British Muslims. Most do not advocate violence. But they can provide an
environment for some to gravitate to violence...They target middle class students and affluent
professionals through schools and college campuses.”47

The vast majority of Muslim students have nothing to do with or even oppose the
extremist elements, or indeed may have been victims. Yet the fact is, those elements still do
exist and they still exert some influence. Three such organisations continue to be banned by
the National Union of Students (NUS) from officially operating on campuses.

As well as the radical Muslim elements, there have also been increases in other forms
of extremist politics in universities. Whether it be protesting against globalisation or the war
in Iraq, student politics has taken on a more physical nature than in the past. Today’s activist
knows direct action achieves more media exposure and is therefore more likely to make an
 40

impact. While it would be fair to say that the student population as a whole is more apathetic
than that of the 1960s and 1970s, those that do get involved are more passionate than ever
before.

Turkish political writer Necati Alkan said: “Youth, especially the university youth,
becomes the most fertile hunting field for the terrorist organisations. In the past, although the
ideological yeast of many terrorist organisations came from abroad their dough has been
kneaded in the university canteens, dormitories and clubs.

“In spite of the fact that the principal leaders of these organisations remain in the
background, the active leaders have grown up within the universities. It is observed that the
leaders or the majority of the leader payroll of the terrorist organisations are the people who
left their university education.”

“Terrorist organisations perceive our universities as the places to collect their

personnel and train their staff. It is understood that a considerable number of personnel that
take part in the rows of the eminent terrorist organisations have been provided from the
universities.”48

But what makes young people in one of the world’s richest, most liberal nations
decide to take up arms or support terrorism? Charles Guthrie, former Chief of the Defence
Staff has asked, pertinently: “Why do some young Britons, with no obvious Islamic
background go to Afghanistan and embrace terrorism? Why do more Pakistanis join Al Qaeda
and the Taliban when India has far more Muslims and as far as it is known, none have joined
the Taliban.” 49

Abdul Haqq Baker, chairman of Brixton mosque, said many young British Muslims
were being failed by mainstream mosques serving the Pakistani, Bangladeshi and other
communities, and were instead being recruited by radical Islamist groups operating around
the fringes of the community.

In 2001, Mr Baker, whose mosque has close ties with the local community and police,
warned that London was a massive hub for extremists. “There are hundreds of disaffected
young Muslims who are tired of their parents’ understanding of Islam and how it is taught in
 41

the mosques. They’ve got these other people speaking to them in English and in Arabic, and
they are being won over. They are not strong individuals, they are impressionable. They like
the fiery rhetoric of jihad; they like to hear they are living among the infidel. Hence the
success of Abu Hamza.”50

An article in Jane’s Intelligence Review quoted a former member of a London mosque

that was attended for a while by a Guantanamo Bay captive. He described the activists as
being: “Predominantly young, passionate and articulate. They distribute their leaflets after
prayers and they pick up people who want some adventures.”

The member of the mosque also described the radical’s activities as akin to those of
Communist recruiters of the past, saying: “There are only a handful, but they have their
network, they know who to target and they are patient and well organised.”51

What seems apparent is that the modern young terrorist supporter or sympathiser is a
far cry from the uneducated, uncivilised image that is so often portrayed. The September 11
hijackers were the cream of the Al Qaeda movement, well-educated, highly motivated and
rigorously trained. Pierre Lacoste, a former head of the French Direction Générale de la
Securité Extèrieure – the British equivalent of MI6 – claimed: “These are terrorists of a new
generation: doctors, engineers, family men – and all able to draw on the best resources that
modern society can provide.”52 Indeed, the cell in Hamburg that was connected to the
September 11 attacks was composed of student visitors to Germany.

This thought is backed up in a study by Dr Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist,

who has found that the typical Al Qaeda recruit is better educated than his or her parents and
that the majority of recruits have gone to college. This, Sagemen claims, refutes the image of
the terrorists being relatively ignorant, naïve and unsophisticated in the ways of the world. On
the contrary, Sageman’s findings support the opposite argument that these new groups are
familiar with the West as well as the Middle East and can speak several languages.53

Sageman found that three quarters of the terrorists that he surveyed came from
professional or semi-skilled backgrounds, including architects, physicians, police and
students and that the vast majority were married, thereby doing away with the stereotype of
 42

the terrorist being a single man, lacking any attachment to society as a whole and not being
weighed down by their responsibilities or fears of reprisals on his family.54

Sageman also noted that the method of recruitment had changed resulting in members
joining rather than being recruited, the strategic importance of Western operatives and the
increasing use of female operatives.55 This was being achieved by what he terms passive
propaganda, which involved the use of websites to propagate Salafism as a means of
countering the ills afflicting Muslim communities worldwide.56

But why join up? The new wave of British recruits into Al Qaeda and its affiliates
tend to be second-generation immigrants whose parents came to the UK but who are now
faced with an identity crisis between, for example, being British and Pakistani or British and
Bengali. These youths may have a feeling of not being accepted in British society, which is
lacking in Muslim role models and which is experiencing a rise in racial tension in places like
the Midlands and Yorkshire, due to poor employment prospects and politicians whipping up
fear over immigration. Indeed, a survey conducted by the German market research firm GfK
Worldwide found that Muslims are being viewed with high levels of disapproval across
Europe. The report also noted that there had been an increase in anti-Semitism across the
Continent.57 Meanwhile, researchers from the British Psychological Society noted that
Islamophobia was well established among schoolchildren in regional towns and cities where
ethnic groups form only a tiny proportion of the population58

For some young people, the most logical step is to claim that one is Muslim, not
British, Pakistani or whatever, but Muslim. Of course, when an unscrupulous figure or group
then comes along, one who has perhaps fought with courage and distinction in Bosnia or Iraq,
they can use this to take advantage of the disillusioned but awestruck Muslim youth.

These young figures are, as has been seen, well-educated, often middle class and have
been radicalised in the West. They are devoted to Islam and are highly knowledgeable about
and sensitive to what is going on in the Middle East. However one researcher believes that
many young British Muslims know more about what is going on in Chechnya, Iraq or
Palestine than they do in say, their ancestral home of Pakistan59 perhaps indicating a desire to
get involved with global injustices rather than the more mundane and less glamorous aspects
of domestic politics.
 43

The war in Iraq has played a major part in aiding the recruitment of a fresh generation
of supporters. While the invasion of Afghanistan as a response to the events of September 11
was largely accepted by the global community, the invasion of Iraq was not and it drew
people from across the political and social spectrum together in condemnation of the war.
Indeed, the continuing failure to find weapons of mass destruction only seems to add weight
to the arguments of opponents of the war.

Iraq was also mooted as one of the major reasons why young French radicals, in
particular a number of boys from the Riquet district of Paris, had joined the Iraqi jihad. One
boy, known only as Salah, had left France to study in Syria, but is now suspected of providing
logistical support for fighters in Iraq. Another Riquet inhabitant, Thamer Bouchnak, was
arrested on the eve of a flight to Syria and he provided much of the intelligence on Salah.
Young French radicals are also said to have undertaken basic exercise and weapon
familiarisation lessons in the wooded Buttes-Chaumont Park.60
 44

Chapter Three: Islamists on UK campuses

Through information that is openly available in the media we have identified a number of
individuals and organisations that have attended or are using British higher education
institutions for non-democratic or even illegal activities. These individuals and organisations
include those associated with Islamism, the Far Right, and animal rights extremism. The
radical Islamic students and groups are those most closely associated with terrorism. Of
course, there are many individuals who have obtained degrees and then gone on to commit
criminal or even traitorous deeds, but before the 1990s Britain did not seem to suffer from
having young individuals who used higher education for terrorist aims.

Some of the individuals whom we have identified apparently already held their strong
views before they went to university, others become radicalised or changed in some other
way during their studies.

The presence in higher education of would-be Islamist terrorists gives credence to the
findings of Dr Sageman who found that the typical Al Qaeda recruit is upper middle class,
has been educated in the West and is from a professional background. Some, like Omar
Sheikh, were educated at fee-paying schools, before heading to Afghanistan, Bosnia and
Chechnya.61
 45

The London bombers and UK campuses

Over the past five years, a number of individuals, both British nationals and foreigners, have
studied at British universities and then have gone on to either commit or attempt to commit
terrorist atrocities or became involved with the global Jihadist movement. While terrorist
groups still manipulate the disenfranchised and the poor for their aims, there is evidence of a
concerted effort to recruit better educated individuals.

A number of these individuals describe their time at university as the time when they
evolved from being religiously devout to fully radicalised. At least one was captured in
Afghanistan, while another had connections to the shoe-bomber Richard Reid.

At the time of going to press, it has been revealed that a number of those individuals
involved in the 7 and 21 July bombings in London had close links with British academe. The
Metropolitan Police has confirmed that Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, Hasib Hussain, 18,
Shehzad Tanweer, 22, and Germaine Lindsay, 19, carried out the 7 July bombings. Hasib
Hussain killed 12 people in a bus explosion in Tavistock Square. He was a youthful tearaway
said to have been radicalised on a trip to Pakistan in 2003 and was arrested for shoplifting in
2004. Mohammad Sidique Khan killed six at Edgware Road. He was the oldest of group;
married with one daughter. Khan, who had studied at the University of Leeds, had been
employed as a teaching assistant at Hillside Primary School in Leeds since 2002. He knew
Hussain and Tanweer through the Muslim communities of West Yorkshire. Khan travelled to
Karachi with Tanweer in 2004. Unconfirmed reports link him to the infamous Finsbury Park
mosque.

Shahzad Tanweer killed seven people on a Circle Line train at Aldgate. A sports
science student from Leeds Metropolitan University, his family run a fish and chip shop in
the Beeston area and have said they were "shattered" by his involvement.

Tanweer had visited Pakistan in 2003 and 2004, where he met a member of the
banned Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Muhammad), which has operational links with al-
Qaeda. On his second visit, he was accompanied by Khan. There is also a suggestion that
Tanweer may have been recruited by Hizb ut-Tahrir.62
 46

Germaine Lindsay, 19, killed 25 with a bomb on the Piccadilly Line near King’s
Cross. A carpet fitter from Aylesbury, from a Jamaican background, he converted to Islam and
married a British woman, also a convert; she is pregnant with their second child. H met up
with the other bombers at Luton, but how he first became involved with them remains
unknown.

Khan, Hussain and Tanweer were all from the same area of Leeds and all three had
been banned from mosques in the Beeston region of the city. A lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan
Univesity, Razaq Raj, said that he did not know why they had been banned. “It could be for
all sorts of reasons,” said Raj, a member of the Leeds Islamic Centre. He said mosques in
Leeds were not homes to radical fundamentalism. Raj said he had strong links with the
Islamic societies at both of the city’s universities and had never heard of any fundamentalist
influence there.

He went on to say: “The last thing we want is radical groups in Leeds. I can tell you
categorically that at Leeds Metropolitan University and Leeds University there are no radical
groups there. If there was a problem, I would report it. I’ve never had to.”63 However,
Shehzad Tanweer, who detonated the bomb on the Circle Line studied sports science at Leeds
Metropolitan University but dropped out to concentrate on religious studies. According to a
relative, Tanweer, who was a keen sportsman, had argued with family and friends about the
need for violent retaliation over US abuse of Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.64

A Leeds-based chemistry student, Magdi al-Nashar, was apparently cleared of

involvement by the Egyptian Government after being arrested in Cairo at the request of
British officials.
 47

Saajid Badat
A good education, top-class schooling and a character described as likeable, mature and
committed, Saajid Badat seems an unlikely would-be terrorist. However, upon his arrest in
November 2003, Badat was found with plastic explosive, specially adapted shoes and a
length of detonating cord that had come from the same source as that of Richard Reid, the
other erstwhile shoe-bomber.

Badat had attended Gloucester’s elite Crypt grammar school taking four A-levels - in
physics, chemistry, biology and general studies - before being offered a place at City
University in London.65 It is believed that Badat, who while strictly religious when living in
Gloucester but otherwise not radicalised, began to change when he moved to London and
started attending the Finsbury Park mosque. It has been suggested that this was due to
arguments with his father, who did not want him to attend university. In 1998, Badat suddenly
quit his degree course and began a three-year world tour, visiting India, Saudi Arabia,
Pakistan and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Presumably at this point, Badat became fully
radicalised and received some kind of training to prepare him for his mission, which was, like
Reid’s, to create an explosion on an airliner flying from Amsterdam to the US. However
Badat suffered a change of heart and decided against the operation. He dropped out of sight
and then began a five-year degree at the moderate College of Islamic Knowledge and
Guidance in Blackburn, but left after two years.66

Nevertheless, he did not dispose of the explosives and these were found under his bed
upon his arrest in November 2003.67 Badat initially refuted the accusations, but when faced
with overwhelming evidence from the police, who visited some 15 different countries as part
of the investigation, he admitted guilt.68 Badat and Richard Reid were also linked to Nizar
Trabelsi, a Tunisian who is now in jail in Belgium for terrorism offences.

Badat’s guilty plea was hailed as a victory by Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter
Clarke, head of the Anti-Terrorist Branch: “Three years of intensive and painstaking
international investigation brought us to the point where Saajid Badat had no option but to
plead guilty to this horrendous offence. We must ask how a young British man was
transformed from an intelligent, articulate person who was well respected, into a person who
has pleaded guilty to one of the most serious crimes that you can think of.”69
48
 49

Babar Ahmad
Undoubtedly the most controversial figure in Britain in relation to Islamist terrorism, Babar
Ahmad was first arrested in December 2003. He was then released but was re-arrested in
August 2004. Babar Ahmad has been accused of running websites that support terrorism and
urging Muslims to rise up and fight a holy war.

Upon his arrest, Ahmad, who worked for Imperial College London, suffered
numerous injuries and accused the police of shouting at him “Where is your god now?”
However, all charges against the police were dropped.

Ahmad has been the subject of an extradition order by the US State Department which
was finally granted by a senior district judge in May 2005.

Several Muslim groups slammed this decision and had already reacted with fury over
the circumstances of his arrest. The Muslim Council of Britain said: “It is unacceptable that
under the Extradition Treaty 2003 there is no longer any need for the US Government to
prove to a UK court or even to the Home Secretary that there is a prima facie case against
British citizens.”70

John Hardy, appearing for the US State department, said two websites run by Ahmad
urged Muslims to use “every means at their disposal” to train for jihad. Hardy told the
hearing that one site, called azzam.com, which operated via service providers in the US from
1997 to 2003, included a posting reading: “Military training is an Islamic obligation, not an
option.” Hardy went on to say: “This case in terms of evidence concerns publications on
websites of the United States, which publications the Government said sought and incited and
solicited contributions to terrorist causes in Afghanistan and Chechnya...”“[These] websites
carried material inciting murder in both those countries and elsewhere and ... the Government
says, were established, operated and maintained by this defendant.”

The US also claims Mr Ahmad had plans for one of its Navy battle groups in the Gulf,
including comments on how ships were vulnerable to attack.71 The case has been sent to the
Home Secretary for final approval. Ahmad has the right to appeal and this would be decided
in the High Court.72
 50

Ahmad stood in the recent general elections as a candidate for the Peace and Progress
party in Brent North
 51

Omar Sheikh (Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh)

Sheikh, who was found guilty of murdering American journalist Daniel Pearl, had been a
student at the London School of Economics (LSE) in the 1990s. Before that, he had attended
to a private school in Snaresbrook, east London.

During his childhood Omar Sheikh became known as a troublemaker, drinking and
smoking heavily as well having an interest in older girls - all factors that made his
exasperated father relocate the family to Lahore, Pakistan. He returned to England to
complete his sixth form and then went on to win a place at the LSE.

In an interview, he described how he joined the LSE Islamic Society during his first
week at university. Between 1990 and 1993, the LSE has been described as being a breeding
ground for Islamic extremism 73 and in 2001, a Russian spokesman accused LSE of being a
centre for supporting and fundraising for Chechen groups.74

During his time at university, Sheikh is said to have attended a variety of mosques
around London and he was invited to join a Muslim charity, the Convoy of Mercy, which was
working in Bosnia at the height of the conflict. So inspired was Sheikh by the sacrifice of the
Muslim fighters that he joined the Harkat-al-Mujahideen, a Pakistani militant group fighting
in Kashmir. He was then invited to attend a training camp organised by al-Qaeda in Khalden,
Afghanistan.

After one month of training in hand-to-hand combat, small arms and explosives,
Sheikh was sent on his first mission to arrange the kidnapping of American and British
tourists in India. Posing as "Sharma", a British student of the LSE who had been left a village
in his father’s will, he talked his way in among a group of British travellers and invited three
of them, Myles Croston, Paul Rideout and Rhys Partridge to accompany him to the village.
When the party arrived they were greeted by armed terrorists. They spent the next few weeks
chained to a stake and tormented by Sheikh, until they were freed after an armed raid by
Indian police.75

Sheikh has also been linked to a drive-by shooting in Calcutta that killed five
policemen in 2002 and has also been named as one of the key financiers of Mohammed Atta,
the suspected hijack ringleader of the September 11 attacks. It has also been reported that he
 52

was a former member of Pakistan’s Inter Service Intelligence. However, neither of these
claims has been substantiated. He is currently incarcerated in Pakistan, awaiting execution for
the murder of Daniel Pearl.
 53

Zacarias Moussaoui
Moussaoui, who was arrested in Minnesota on 16 August 2001 after his flight instructor drew
police attention to his suspicious behaviour, received a master’s in international commerce
from South Bank University in London.

A spokesman for South Bank said there was no record of any difficulties or problems
encountered by the university in connection with Moussaoui during his studies and there has
been no further contact between him and the university since 1995. Colin Knapp,
Moussaoui’s course director, said: “He was reasonably hard working, reasonably committed
and quite quiet. At first, he had a problem with some of the language but there is nothing
which stood out.”76

Moussaoui was said to have been a fan of rock music, basketball and other Western
interests until he was radicalised, while studying in England. He had attended the Finsbury
Park mosque and according to his brother, suddenly became anti-white and racist and of the
opinion that no woman should drive or study.77

French authorities began monitoring Moussaoui in 1996, when they observed him
with Islamic extremists. In 1998, he attended the Khalden terrorist training camp in
Afghanistan,78 allegedly returning the next year as well. In September 2000, he visited
Malaysia and stayed in an apartment where two of the September 11 hijackers had lived in
January of that year. In October Riduan Ismauddin, the leader of Jemaah Islamiah (a militant
Islamic group dedicated to the formation of a fundamentalist Islamic nation in South East
Asia) sent cohort Yazid Sufaat to Malaysia to provide Moussaoui with $35,000 and travel
documents.79

Moussaoui is currently on trial in the US for his part in the September 11 attacks. On
Friday April 22 2005, in one of the court sessions at the end of the current trial phase,
Moussaoui surprised the whole audience by pleading guilty to all of the charges against him,
while at the same time denying having any intention of a massacre like September 11. He
said that it was not his conspiracy and that he intended to free blind sheikh Omar Abdel-
Rahman. According to him, his master plan was to hijack a Boeing 747-400, since the plane
is one of a few that could reach Afghanistan from the US without any intermediate stops.80
 54

Ramadan Shallah
A Palestinian terrorist leader who spent five years at Durham University, Shallah is said to
have been targeted for assassination by Mossad after he was blamed for ordering an attack in
Tel Aviv, which killed five people. Shallah was born in Gaza and studied for his first degree
at Egypt’s Zakazik University. He was funded by the Muslim Brotherhood during this time
and through them met future leaders of the Islamic movement. Ramadan Shallah studied for a
PhD at Durham between 1985 and 1990 and wrote a thesis on Islamic banking in Jordan. In
it, he called for a replacement of the western-style banking by one in accordance with Islamic
law.

A source from Durham University described him as “dour, reticent and serious
looking”. She added: “He was a quiet man - who dressed in western clothes - and kept
himself to himself.”

But Shallah’s thesis goes some way to portraying his extremist views. It calls for an
“Islamization” of financial institutions in Jordan, with a complete ban on paying or receiving
interest, prohibited by Islamic law. This would mean a replacement of all western-style
banking systems. “Islamization”, it goes on to say, should also go into the world of insurance,
re-insurance, underwriting, shareholding and direct investment.

His work dramatically starts with a quote from the Koran warning of a “war from
Allah and his apostle” to be waged against those who persist in charging interest. This is
alongside a quote from former US President Thomas Jefferson stating: “Banking
establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.”

Interest, Shallah claims, has a “dangerous effect in disrupting the moral and socio-
economic structure of society, through its destructive impact on both consumption and
production”. He states that all banks should have control boards to keep it in accordance with
Sharia (Islamic law) and that there should be co-ordination between these bodies to know
when to issue “fatwas” (religious decrees). He also recommends the mass media be “fully
exploited” to spread the message of Islamic finance- interestingly Shallah later became noted
for his work in propaganda.81
 55

Shallah went on to teach Middle Eastern Studies at the University of South Florida.
He was head of the World and Islam Studies Enterprise, a think tank affiliated to the
university before taking over as the head of Islamic Jihad, following the assassination of the
then leader Fathi Shiqaqi.82
 56

Zeeshan Siddique
A diary belonging to Zeeshan Siddique, from Hounslow, west London was found in
Peshawar, North West Pakistan, where he was arrested by Pakistani security officials in 2005.
Siddique is said to have gone to Pakistan to wage holy war and his diary is full of vitriol
against the west. He wondered how Muslims could live in London the "vital organ of the
minions of the devil", now that the "kufr", or unbelievers, have transformed the world into "a
battlefield for the Muslims".

At times, the diary refers to "the guys" and "the wagon" and "the relaxing place",
passages which Pakistani security officials have reportedly told The New York Times may
refer to other extremists and plans for terror attacks.

On March 11, for instance, the writer apparently visited friends and learned "bad
news". "The relaxing place was done over," he wrote, and "7-8 of the guys taken whilst
asleep."
"Told guys need 2 make a move soon," he added. "Cant stik round." [sic]
Then, just four days later, the diarist was told that "the situation is really bad" and that
he should "just sit tight & wait it out until things get a bit better". On 5 April, typing in block
capitals, he vows to undertake "an all out immense effort" to "rejoin my contingent".

According to The New York Times, Siddique is being held because of suspected
contact between him and an Al Qaeda member arrested for involvement in a failed terror plot
against London in 2004.

As a schoolboy growing up in west London, Siddique attended Cranford Community

College. In July 2005, it was reported that at Cranford he knew Asif Hanif, the 21-year-old
Londoner who became Britain’s first known suicide bomber when he blew himself up in a
bar in Tel Aviv in April 2003.

Officials in Hounslow say that Siddique was an ordinary, average student at Cranford
from 1992 to 1997. Their statement also confirms that he and Asif Hanif knew each other.83
 57

It is said that MI5 officers have flown to Pakistan to observe interrogations of

Siddique, who is claimed to be a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, by that country’s intelligence
agencies. 84
 58

Feroz Abbasi
Born in Uganda, Abbasi’s family moved to the UK in 1989 where they settled in Croydon,
south London. He sat his GCSEs at Edenham High School before moving on to John Ruskin
College in Croydon to sit his A-levels. According to reports, he was a conscientious and
friendly schoolboy, liking pop music and rollerblading.

After completing his A-Levels, he moved on to Nescot College in Epsom to study for
a two-year computing course which included topics such as industrial networking and
satellite communications. As opposed to his schooldays, apparently none of his Nescot
lecturers could remember Abbasi and after one year he dropped out of college to travel across
Europe.

It was at this point that Abbasi’s life dramatically changed. Prior to his travels, Abbasi
had not been an ardent Muslim and stopped attending the mosque when he was 12. However,
when he was in Switzerland, Abbasi was mugged and after receiving support from a
Kashmiri refugee, his interest in Islam was reawakened. He returned home, discovered that
his local mosque in Croydon was not to his tastes he began to attend the Finsbury Park
mosque. In 2000, he moved into the mosque and began to cut off links with his former life.

At some point after this, he left for Afghanistan. It is alleged that Abbasi attended four
separate Al Qaeda training courses from January to August 2001 at the al-Farouk training
camp, near Kandahar, and also at nearby camp, Ubaida. He was taught urban warfare,
assassination techniques, intelligence collection and surveillance. His critics allege that he
volunteered to participate in suicide operations and met Osama bin Laden three times. It is
said that he fought alongside Al Qaeda and the Taliban against US and coalition forces in
Afghanistan. When he was captured by the Northern Alliance at the fall of the last Taliban
stronghold of Kunduzm85 it was claimed he had hand grenades strapped to his legs and was
carrying a military radio.

Taken to Guantanamo Bay, Abbasi was released in January 2005. In a so-called

autobiography, Abbasi describes how a lack of self-esteem during childhood spurred him into
militancy and enrolling in courses in Afghanistan. He claims that he, along with other British
Muslims, received arms training and mountain and urban warfare courses. However, he also
denied Al Qaeda membership saying: “I have never wanted or ever pledged allegiance to
 59

Osama bin Laden.” But he did believe that it was his duty as a Muslim to volunteer for
jihad.86

Upon his return to the UK, Abbasi was freed by the police, as any confession obtained
in Guantanamo Bay would not be admissible in court in the UK.
 60

Other terrorists found on UK campuses

Suspected or confirmed terrorists who have studied in Britain in recent years include the
lecturers Dr Azahari Husin, 45, who went to Reading University, and Shamsul Bahri Hussein,
36, who read applied mechanics at Dundee. They are wanted in connection with the Bali
bombings in October 2002, when 202 people, including 26 Britons, died.

Afzal Munir, who was 25 and studied IT at the University of Luton and Aftab
Manzoor, also 25 and of Luton, both died fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan.87

Omar Khyam, a computer studies student from Sussex, was charged along with
Rahman Adam, Nabeel Hussain, Jawad Akbar, Waheed Mahmood and a youth who cannot be
named, along with Pakistani national, Salahuddin Amin, for conspiring to cause an explosion
with intent to endanger life.88 At the time of the initial arrests, police said they had seized
more than half a tonne of fertiliser that could be used to make bombs. Khyam, an excellent
schoolboy cricketer who used to dream of playing for England, was brought home by his
family after heading for Pakistan early in 2000.

While studying for his A-levels in Reigate, Surrey, Khyam, then 18, had told his
mother that he was going on a study trip to France. The next the family knew was when he
called them from Pakistan. By now "very anti-Western, anti-British and anti-American",
according to an aunt, he was brought back after family members serving with the Pakistani
intelligence service found him. He appeared to settle and began a computer course. Several of
the accused were regulars at a local internet café where police seized computer equipment in
the belief that it may have been used as communication point for coordinating a terror
attack.89 The Sunday Telegraph claims that MI5 are investigating a weak link between
Germaine Lindsay, the Jamaican-born bomber, and Khyam.90

Asif Mohammed Hanif, the suicide bomber who blew himself up in Mikes Place, a
seafront bar in Tel Aviv in April 2003, killing himself, three others and injuring 65, and his
accomplice and would-be bomber, Omar Khan Sharif, were both British and university
educated. Sharif’s explosives failed to detonate and he fled the scene. His body was found 12
days later in the sea. It is claimed that Britain’s security services knew years before the Israeli
suicide bombing that Sharif and Hanif had links to Al-Muhajiroun and Hizb ut-Tahrir but
“decided that they were not potential terrorists”.91
 61

Sharif’s wife, Tahira Tabassum was found not guilty of failing to alert authorities to a
terrorist in July 2004, but jurors failed to agree verdicts against his brother and sister, Zahid
and Parveen Sharif. Parveen denies a further charge of inciting a terrorist act.92 The case was
due to be reheard in November 2004, but has yet to happen.

Urslaan Khan, from Yarm near Middlesbrough, was picked up by a Kurdish security
police patrol in northern Iraq in November 2003. The Manchester University Arabic Studies
student was found travelling on his British passport. It was believed he travelled to Iraq to
join Ansar al-Islam, which is described by the United States as its main terrorist adversary in
post-war Iraq. Washington has accused the group of having ties to Osama Bin Laden’s terror
network. Khan was later released and claimed that he had merely visited Iraq as part of his
studies. He had been spending a year in Egypt, but decided to take a bus trip to Baghdad.
 62

Noteworthy Islamist groups on UK campuses

Despite facing opposition from student groups, moderate Islamic societies, Jews, Hindus,
Sikhs, feminists and the lesbian, gay and bisexual community, extremist Islamist groups still
manage to retain a small influence in British academe. The following groups – Hizb ut-Tahrir,
Al Muhajiroun and the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPACUK) are all officially
banned on British campuses though the two former organisations – Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al
Muhajiroun are accused of carrying on their work, under the mask of cover names and front
groups. As the Project Contest report argues, these groups - along with the less organised
ones who follow a particular extremist doctrine - are usually British based brands of
organisations that originated in the Middle East and Asian sub-continent.

Most of the organised groups will not advocate violence themselves nor does
membership or sympathy indicate someone is predisposed towards terrorism. However, it
may indicate that a few of an organisation’s members are more open to exposure to even
more extremist doctrine. Until the events of 7 July, there was a feeling that despite the claims
of the likes of French and Russian governments, these groups were vocal, yet able to achieve
little. Speaking shortly after the London bombings, Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf,
himself once the subject of a death threat from Islamic groups said: “There are extremist
organisations in the United Kingdom, Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al Muhajiroun, who operate with
full impunity. They had the audacity to pass an edict against my life…I know that they also
give sermons of hate, anger and violence.”

As Musharraf spoke, security forces raided the house of Hakeem Ehsan Jigranwi,
president of the Punjab chapter of the Pakistani wing of Hizb ut-Tahrir in the eastern city of
Lahore, detaining him and another man.93

It was announced on 5 August 2005 that the Government is to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir and
Al Muhajiroun, a decision that will no doubt please Musharraf and the several other
governments who have called on Britain to curtail their activities in the UK. Home Secretary
Charles Clarke also said: “A full database of individuals around the world who have
demonstrated the relevant behaviours will be developed, and will be available to entry
clearance and immigration officers through the current warnings index. It is important that we
come together to send a clear signal to people who seek to create division or promote
 63

terrorism that their activities will not be tolerated by our communities or by the
Government.”

The Project Contest report also backs up the claims of those who believe that the
extremist groups use cover names and front groups to access those areas where they are
banned. It says: “There is evidence of the presence of extremist organisations on campuses
and colleges (often when an organisation is named as a banned organisation on a campus, its
members will set up a society under another name – 1924 Society, Muslim Media Forum and
Muslim Cultural Society all have extremist tendencies)”. 94
 64

Hizb ut-Tahrir on UK campuses 95

Arabic for Party of Liberation, Hizb ut-Tahrir was founded in 1953 by Taqiuddin an-
Nabhani, a religious judge of Jerusalem, as a breakaway sect from the Muslim Brotherhood.
It claims to be dedicated to the re-establishment of the Khilafah state and the removal of
imperialistic non-Islamic control from Islamic societies. It is said that Hizb ut-Tahrir has
offshoots in 21 countries,96 in several of which it is banned. Each group is set up
independently of its cousins in other nations and as such, different groups often contain
different nationalities. For example, in the UK, Hizb ut-Tahrir is comprised predominantly of
Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, while in the Netherlands, there are many more Turks.97

According to the Community Security Trust, while the international Hizb ut-Tahrir
claims to operate at the political level, with its workings being transparent, in fact it is not.
And while its management is based in the UK, its leadership is in Lebanon.98 Its members
have been involved in assassination attempts, including the killing of President Anwar Sadat
of Egypt. The organisation denounces Israel’s occupation of Palestine and has issued a
number of anti-Semitic statements. Furthermore, it is anti-Hindu (because of the war in
Kashmir), anti-Sikh, homophobic, anti-feminist and resentful of the West’s influence on
Islam.99 It has organised a conference in 2003 on whether Muslims could be British - the
conclusion was that they couldn’t. It is estimated that some 10,000 people attended the
conference.100

Unsurprisingly, it is beliefs such as these that resulted in the NUS according Hizb ut-
Tahrir a no-platform policy, which in effect excludes the group from any kind of official
student support or from campaigning in universities.

But despite this ban, Hizb-ut-Tahrir has continued to rear its head in British campuses.
A 2003 edition of BBC’s Newsnight demonstrated the influence of the group at Kingston
University, where, unknown to the academic authorities, Hizb-ut-Tahrir was trying to recruit
young Muslims to its cause.101 The university’s Islamic Society came under fire for not
reporting the presence of Hizb ut-Tahrir on Kingston’s campus.

A former Islamic Society president defended his society’s toleration of Hizb-ut-Tahrir:

“What could we have done, tell me? You’re telling us to go to the kufr against a Muslim, is
that what you are saying we should have done?”102
 65

The group has always retained close links with universities. Hizb ut-Tahrir’s first UK-
based Internet site was hosted by Imperial College London, but following complaints to the
college authorities, the site was closed until a new host could be found.103

It is banned in most Middle-Eastern countries and banned and repressed in Central

Asia, Russia and Turkey. However, this is also partly due to the governments of those nations
not standing for any opposition to their rule. In 2003, Hizb ut-Tahrir was outlawed in
Germany on charges of anti-Jewish propaganda. It seeks the reincarnation of the Caliphate
and believes that Muslims can live only under Sharia law. Furthermore, this law should be
extended everywhere Muslims live, including Britain.

Hizb ut-Tahrir’s campaigning in the early 1990s was focussed on moderate Muslims.
In response to their activities on campuses, a policy document called “Combating religious
extremism” was published and sent to all vice-chancellors.

However, despite the actions taken by universities and the NUS, keeping Hizb-ut-
Tahrir off UK campuses is no easy task. It has been claimed that 50 years’ experience of
running covert operations in the Middle East against repressive regimes has given Hizb ut-
Tahrir the skills to run rings around British institutions. “British academia doesn’t have a
chance of stopping them.”104

According to one commentator, Hizb ut-Tahrir is able to get around its ban by use of
the Internet. Leaflets handed out at Leicester University in 1999 announcing a meeting on
“Occupied Palestine” gave a website of a previously unknown organisation, the Muslim
Student’s Website, but the address was the same as that on a student pack produced by
Birmingham University. It was subsequently found that the meetings at Birmingham were a
front for Hizb ut-Tahrir.105

More recently, Hizb ut-Tahrir has made headlines with its presence in Uzbekistan
being partially blamed for that government’s repression of dissidents. Activists from Hizb ut-
Tahrir also attacked the Uzbekistani Embassy in London in May 2005 in response to the
accusations of mass murder by government forces in Tashkent. The Uzbek Embassy was
 66

daubed with red paint and slogans and 37 protestors were arrested for causing criminal
damage.106

Central Asian diplomats have accused Hizb ut-Tahrir of raising funds and running
propaganda leaflets from homes and offices in the UK. They have apparently handed over
lists of addresses, leaflets and tape recordings to UK authorities of what they claim are
ringleaders stirring up hatred against their regimes.107

Their presence has also been felt during the recent election in the UK. Leaflets and
brochures advertising the Stand for Islam website were posted in north west London. This
Hizb ut-Tahrir website calls for Muslims to consider their place in the global community but
not to support any of the UK political parties, none of which apparently serve Islamic
interests.
“We believe that the longer the party political system occupies our time and energy
here, the longer we will be denied our full potential.”

For example, Labour’s War on Terror, Conservative immigration policies, Liberal

Democrat leniency on drugs legislation and Respect, which achieved Islamic support in some
quarters, comes under fire for its opposition to faith schools and support of homosexuals.
George Galloway’s friendship with Saddam Hussein and his previous support for the Soviet
Union receive particular ire from Hizb ut-Tahrir.108

Following the leaking of Project Contest to the media, a spokesman for Hizb ut-Tahrir
said: “The proximity between some individuals and organisations in the Muslim community
and the British Government has serious implications for the real interests of our community.
If sincere, these individuals and organisations must now ask themselves why the British
Government, which pursues a brutal colonialist foreign policy over the entire Muslim world,
is so keen to fund them, promote them and support them. Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain is launching
a nationwide awareness campaign to show the Muslims what the Government and her proxies
in the Muslim community are doing. The Muslims of Britain must study this document so
that they realise the reality of the plans that intend to subvert Islam at the hands of Muslims.
We will also be making strong representations to affiliates of the MCB to abandon the
organisation as its affiliation to government no longer accredits it the impartiality and
independence the Muslim community requires.”109
 67

In the aftermath of the London bombings, it was announced that the Government
would seek to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, due to comments on terrorism and its support for extremist
actions.

The organisation, naturally, spoke out against this, claiming that it was in fact a
peaceful group that promoted non-violent discussion and debate. They also said: “With
respect to the London bombings, we once again state in explicit terms that Islam forbids the
killing of innocent civilians - we again express our denunciation of the London bombings of
7 July 2005. Prior to that we have also expressed our denunciation of the attacks of
September 11 2001. We would also like to point out for the record that we have no
relationship whatsoever, by word or deed, with the organisation al-Muhajiroun”.110
 68

Al Muhajiroun on UK campuses
Formerly treated as something of a laughing-stock, Al Muhajiroun was thrust into the public
spotlight in the aftermath of the July bombings in London. The organisation’s leader, Omar
Bakri Mohammed, who had been a hate figure in some elements of the British press, left the
country in August for Lebanon and the Government promptly revoked the order allowing him
indefinite leave to remain in the UK. It was claimed that the Government was in the process
of pressing treason charges against Omar Bakri when he left the country. The Prime Minister
had already named Al Muhajiroun and its successors as one of those groups that would now
be given proscribed status.

About a week after the 7 July bombings, Omar Bakri announced that the reason that
the bombings happened was down to the actions of the UK: “I blame the British government,
the British public and Muslim community in the UK. The public did not make enough effort
to stop the government pursuing its policies in Afghanistan and Iraq. By re-electing Blair, it
shows it did not have any sense of responsibility”.111

It has also been suggested that at least one of the suspected 21 July bombers had been
reprimanded by more moderate Muslims at Finsbury Park mosque for handing out leaflets
supporting Al Muhajiroun.

While there is little evidence to suggest that Al Muhajiroun has actually committed a
terrorist act, it is known to support those that do and it is claimed that several individuals
have passed through Al Muhajiroun’s ranks before progressing on to more deadly activities.
Its comments and its policy of trying to recruit students to its cause have led it to being
banned by the NUS from British universities.

Al Muhajiroun was created by Omar Bakri, a former Hizb ut-Tahrir member, and
began operations in the UK in 1996. Through various statements and activities, the
organisation quickly achieved notoriety, in particular through its planned conference (which
was cancelled) “The Magnificent 19” which praised the September 11 perpetrators and
comments such as: “The fact that Americans were attacked was no surprise, what was
surprising is that they came under such a devastating attack in their own country. The attacks
were really a magnificent operation in every way. They were magnificent terrorists.”112
 69

Omar Bakri and Al Muhajiroun spokesman Anjem Choudary have always denied that
Al Muhajiroun engages in any military activity, claiming that it is a “purely ideological
organisation,”113 but like Hizb ut-Tahrir, it is banned from UK campuses and some its
followers have been implicated in terrorist acts.

This was a sensible decision according to some. M J Gohel of the Asia-Pacific

Institute said: “Al Muhajiroun is involved in the softening up process, preparing and
indoctrinating people so that they are susceptible when the Al-Qaeda recruiter comes
along”.114

Omar Bakri split from Hizb ut-Tahrir following disputes with the leaders of that
group. He specified the differences, saying: “Muhajiroun believes in twinning Da’wa (the call
to Islam) and Jihad, whereas Hizb ut-Tahrir does not believe that Jihad can be waged by
agents not affiliated to the Islamic state.”115

Omar Bakri came to the UK in 1986 and with support from friends still in Hizb ut-
Tahrir, built up the Al Muhajiroun movement in the UK, before it finally achieved true
independence in 1996.116

At one end of the spectrum, Al Muhajiroun promotes the Islamic way of life and seeks
to instruct on the central tenets of the religion. However, at its most extreme, the group seeks
to introduce fifth columns to help implement Islam fully into society and then to establish Al-
Khilafah (the caliphate) in order that Islam becomes the World order.117

Al Muhajiroun members have made the headlines for acts of violence and religious
intolerance. Sulayman Keeler was imprisoned for 28 days for assaulting a police officer at a
demonstration outside Downing Street. Meanwhile, Amer Mirza was sentenced for six
months for petrol bombing a Territorial Army base in West London.

The Sunday Times reported that an Al Muhajiroun safe house in Lahore, where Indian
people were described as subhuman and homosexuals and Jews were violently opposed, was
run by a Sajeel Shahid, also known as Abu Ibrahim, who holds a computer science degree
from Manchester.118
 70

Until recently, the Government did not consider Al Muhajiroun a terrorist

organisation, but there is clear evidence to suggest that for several years, Al Muhajiroun has
been acting as a terrorist organisation in terms of the definitions we employed earlier in this
report.

Al Muhajiroun is accused of serving as a radicalising agent in the process of turning

young British Muslims against Britain and into militants and serves as a portal through which
some of them have been encouraged to pass on their way to becoming terrorists.119 It does this
by exploiting feelings of disaffection with society or the Government and then using this for
its own ends.

They print skilful articles, such as “Free yourself from the matrix of love” which
advises students not to get into relationships with the opposite sex while at university and
which concludes: “We need to free our minds from the spider-web of deceit, impracticality
and decadence of western society which is plagued with the disease of freedom and
utilitarianism”.

Another article explores the dilemmas of a Muslim student when it comes to drinking
and partying with university friends.

Following its split from Hizb ut-Tahrir, Al Muhajiroun is said to have directed much
of its energies to university campuses. Articles such as “The seven deadly sins”, which
criticises “homosexuality, lesbianism and fornication” amongst other things, were never
likely to win support from student groups. Nevertheless, according to the Union of Jewish
Students, despite the NUS ban, Al Muhajiroun activists are still present at several
universities, notably Manchester, though they sometimes tend to use cover names.120

In 2000 Omar Bakri claimed that when one student union reinforced the ban against
Al Muhajiroun: “We use the names of societies, like the Pakistani Society, the Bangladeshi
Society, etc, to get in. When a college like the London School of Economics bans us, we set
up stalls outside the campus, where the students can reach us but the authorities can do
nothing.”121
 71

In 2001 it was reported that Al Muhajiroun was understood to be targeting

universities and colleges in London, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Coventry, Derby,
Leicester, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and Nottingham. In the past, the group has also
turned up at student events at Oxford and Cambridge universities. In September 2003, Al-
Muhajiroun was attacked for putting up inflammatory posters on university campuses. The
posters said: “The last hour will not come until the Muslims kill the Jews”.

They also handed out a leaflet entitled “The only place is the battlefield between the
Muslims and the Jews”.

In an article in 2002 in Jane’s Intelligence Review, it was said that Al Muhajiroun was
still active in recruiting Muslim students at British universities and that it had claimed to have
sent up to 700 Jihadists to fight in Islamic causes abroad.122

Some of these Jihadis have been implicated in a number of terror attacks. It is claimed
that Omar Khan Sharif, the would-be suicide bomber in Israel, was affiliated to Al
Muhajiroun. It was also claimed that in January 2001 a young British suicide bomber who
was associated with Al Muhajiroun blew up an Indian army barracks. He was identified as a
pupil studying for his A-levels at a sixth-form college.

It is also said that at least one of the 7 July bombers had associated with Al
Muhajiroun members in Britain and Pakistan.123

The group’s spokesman, Choudary appeared on the BBC World programme,

Hardtalk, in May 2003. He was grilled about his support for suicide bombers and he said that
he could not oppose such action if it was in line with Sharia law. He believed that the
interpretation of the law could be met in different ways, including laying down one’s life for
a martyrdom operation.

When asked why the Palestinian spokesman in London had claimed that Al
Muhajiroun’s presence in Palestinian affairs was not wanted, he claimed that Muslims had an
obligation to ignore any secular authority and he decried the Muslim Association of Britain as
being a secular organisation that would happily compromise its beliefs to appease the masses
and the British Government.
 72

Choudary also denied any link between Al Muhajiroun and any Jihadi or military
operations that would result in suicide bombings and announced that he would tell would-be
suicide bombers to remain in the UK. However, he refused to condemn the killing of innocent
civilians in Israel if it did not go against Sharia law.124

In October 2004, Choudary announced that Al Muhajiroun was to end activities and
that Muslims needed to stop being part of disparate groups and instead come together to fight
in a global crusade. However, the group has re-emerged under a cover-name, The Saviour
Sect, now The Saved Sect. Other former Al Muhajiroun members are involved with the Al-
Ghurabaa (The Strangers) organisation125. A spokesman for the Community Security Trust
suggested that the new group held a meeting at the Friends Meeting House in central London
early in 2005. The Times newspaper claimed that the meeting was led by the infamous Omar
Bakri and was attended by some 600 people. Videos were shown of the hijacked airliners
hitting the Twin Towers. Omar Bakri is reported as saying: “I declare we should ourselves
join the global Islamic camp against the global crusade camp”.

Another speaker said that Western Governments would face “a 9/11 day after day
after day”. He added: “Whether they be stones, whether they be sticks, whether they be
knives, whether they be bombs, whatever they may be, prepare as much as you can”.126

It is also claimed that Saviour Sect members were behind an attack in April 2005 on
Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) members who were discussing the forthcoming UK
general election. The demonstrators stormed into the Regent’s Park mosque, denounced the
MCB, described the Prime Minister as being a devil and decreed that Muslims who voted
were committing a crime against Islam. MCB leader Iqbal Sacranie was assaulted in the
demonstration.127

Al Muhajiroun activists have also been active in other parts of London, with followers
handing out leaflets and scuffling with police in Southall, north-west London. In August
2005, The Sunday Times published an expose of the group, which had been infiltrated by a
journalist masquerading as a recent graduate. The reporter described how Omar Bakri and his
followers promoted hatred of non-Muslims, encouraged their supporters into acts of violence,
including suicide bombings and described the 7 July bombers as “The Fantastic Four”.128
 73

In April 2004 Omar Bakri Mohammed said a group calling itself Al Qaeda Europe
was “very well organised” and predicted that a terrorist attack was “inevitable”.

In an interview with Portugal’s Publica news magazine, Bakri said: “It’s inevitable
because several (attacks) are being prepared by several groups.” He said a group calling itself
Al Qaeda Europe “has a great appeal for young Muslims . . . I know that they are ready to
launch a big operation”.

The Secret Organisation Group of Al Qaeda of Jihad Organisation in Europe made its
unverified claim about the London attacks on the Arabic website Al-Qalah (The Fortress)
about three hours after the last of four bombs exploded in central London. The statement said:
“Rejoice for it is time to take revenge against the British Zionist Crusader government in
retaliation for the massacres Britain is committing in Iraq and Afghanistan. The heroic
mujaheddin have carried out a blessed raid in London. Britain is now burning with fear, terror
and panic”.129
 74

MPACUK on UK campuses: Islamic or Islamists, pressure group or extremist

organisation?
MPACUK is quite unlike Hizb ut-Tahrir or Al Muhajiroun and its inclusion in this work is to
be attributed to the fact that it is banned by the NUS from operating on campuses. Though it
can be extreme, it is not, as far as we have been able to ascertain, a terrorist organisation nor
does it advocate violence against the state. However, according to the NUS, it is afforded a
no-platform policy due to incidents of homophobia130, anti-Hinduism and anti-Semitism.131

MPACUK’s raison d’être is to encourage the various facets of the Muslim community
to take a more active part in politics and to debate those issues that affect them. They believe
that if British Muslims get involved in the political process instead of merely criticising it,
their lot will be significantly improved.

Indeed this work is to be lauded and there is no doubt that MPACUK’s efforts to reach
across communities are playing a vital role in addressing the issues of disaffected young
Muslims. Much of the organisation’s ire is directed at those older members of the Muslim
community, whether they be religious or business leaders, who refuse to discuss topical
issues with the young. MPACUK is unhappy that Imams often don’t speak English or are
forbidden to so in mosques under the rulings of local committees. They also oppose the
concept that Muslims are forbidden to vote in a secular country. The argument against voting
states there are God’s laws and there are manmade laws and that the two are incompatible in
a secular country such as ours. Therefore Muslims should not be voting. Zulfi Bukhari, one of
the founding members of MPACUK said: “This law was dreamt up by an Arab, in a country
which has no concept of democracy, it is irrelevant to this nation.”

As for the mosques themselves, Bukhari said: “We need young Imams who speak
English and who can get involved in political, not partisan, politics. The leaders are failing to
address those issues which are most relevant to young people. When the Iraq war broke out,
my mosque was discussing the finer points of charity, when you could see people wanted to
talk about the war. The Muslim community needs to grow up.”

Bukhari also believes that if mosques were more able to address the needs of today’s
youth, it may have gone some way to averting the London bombings. He pointed out: “In the
case of the Leeds bombers, their local mosque banned the discussion of politics. How many
 75

times were there when someone could have sat down with one of those men and stopped the
tipping point? At the way things are going, if there was a suicide bomb in two years time, the
Muslim community would be equally unprepared. We need to address these things now.”

The average age of MPACUK members is 23 and as such, they can appear to get more
than a little agitated over certain issues. The organisation was highly active during the 2005
general election. It opposed Muslim leaders who were happy to kowtow to Government
wishes and it opposed those MPs who are pro-Israel or supported the war in Iraq. Prominent
targets included Foreign Minister Jack Straw, Lord Patel of Blackburn, a moderate Muslim
and friend of Jack Straw and MP Mike Gapes. Indeed, during the Channel 4 documentary
“Operation Muslim Vote”, MPACUK’s leader tussled with Patel and his supporters along
with the Imam and fellow worshippers at Bicknell Street mosque in Blackburn.

However, MPACUK became accused of anti-Semitism during the election campaign

when it - falsely - labelled Labour candidate Lorna Fitzsimons as being Jewish (implying
there was something dishonourable or underhand about this). They retracted the statement,
but not before they had come under fire for these unacceptable comments.132

MPACUK exhibits particular ire for Muslim figures that oppose it in any way. Ajmal
Masroor, who had been adopted as the Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for West
Ham in the 2005 general election, stood down because he put out a plea for support on the
MPACUK website. At that time MPACUK’s comments on Lorna Fitzsimons were being
investigated and as such, due to the supposed
anti-Semitic nature of the site, Masroor resigned as a candidate.

MPACUK reacted with fury, denouncing Masroor as a traitor, claiming that he had
undermined and destroyed MPACUK’s reputation, thereby hurting Palestinians and Muslims
in Britain. An article on the MPACUK site said: “If however we send a signal out to all
traitors and Muslim leaders within power, that ‘we will put your head on a pole before you
think of double crossing us’, do you really think those with tendencies to betray the
community will do it? Not with an active community ready and willing to hold them to
account they won’t. It’s a simple equation for traitors. Which one gives them more benefit
and which one do they really want to face the wrath of. In the case of Masroor, he felt that it
was easier to face the sleeping forgetful Muslims by betraying them, than the Zionists in the
 76

press and political parties. So when they threatened to expose his personal flaw he betrayed
us. Sadly for him, he chose to betray the wrong group. MPACUK do not forget and we are
definitely NOT asleep”.133 [Emphasis added]

The subject of Israel is one that drives many of MPACUK’s discussions and its
exuberance on the matter has got it into trouble on more than one occasion. When the
organisation was set up in 1998, discussion on Israel came quickly to the forefront. Bukhari
noted that Israel would never negotiate from a position of strength and therefore it needed the
West to moderate it. However, he believes that the peace process was dominated by Israel
and, as a result, it is doing the Palestinians no favours whatsoever.

MPACUK is accused of reproducing material by holocaust deniers David Irving and

Michael Hoffman. The Union of Jewish Students claims the MPACUK website has, in the
past, included anti-Semitic pictures, including one of a Star of David transposed over the
burning Twin Towers and others accusing Jews of presiding over a global conspiracy.

MPACUK was quick to condemn the events of 7 July 2005. It claimed that poor
teaching in mosques and the inability of student union leaders to provide help, served to
breed extremism and that only by getting more involved in the political process could
Muslims make things better.
“There is no evidence that any British born Muslim is linked to this attack. If however a link
is found, imagine the backlash from the public, and the British Government.
“Are we going to hope that no British born Muslim, angry and frustrated at an unjust
foreign policy will not take this action in the future?
“All of us will suffer if we leave this to chance. Only when we teach our young that
we can make a difference in the world wide peacefully, politically, through Britain’s
democratic system will our young finally leave any thoughts of violence and use the political
process to take on the people in power who choose to send Britain on unjust murderous
campaigns around the world.
We could have stopped this attack, if we had tried harder to make Britain’s foreign
policy more humane. Instead we were taught to sit in endless talks about Islamic trivia and
feel more pious for it. We are the victims of our own pacified state.”134
 77

This may seem laudable but MPACUK could not resist criticising Jewish groups for
their comments on the attacks, in an article entitled: “Zionist Fed Advises Community To
Hijack Tragedy To Help Israel.”135

MPACUK also runs Internet message boards and forums that, like any such outlets,
can get very fiery. The statements made by some on these forums are indisputably anti-
Semitic and conspiratorial. “Zionists” are often blamed for all the ills of the world; Bush is
described as a tool of the “Zionists”, an accolade he sometimes shares with Saddam Hussein.

However, Bukhari defends what is written claiming that the website administrators
allow anything on the website, whether it be by radical Muslims, Zionists or the Far Right, as
long as it does not include swearing. By doing so, he claims, proper debate can be instigated.
Bukhari said that he has received emails from those who are in total opposition to his and
MPACUK’s views thanking him for allowing them their statements to be posted unchanged.
He said: “We have however taken a principled stand on not censoring comments as if we
censor we cannot understand the mind set of the community. The plus side also extends to
having regular contributions from members of the Jewish and non-Muslim community who
feel free to comment and put counter arguments forward. This we believe also bridges the
gap between people within a constructive framework.”

Bukhari claims that MPACUK was totally surprised when the NUS ban was ordered.
He claims there are no anti-Hindu articles and that MPACUK has no position on
homosexuality and that the article that the NUS raised in relation to the issue was actually a
tongue-in-cheek piece laughing at the reaction of the Muslim community to gay people. As
for the anti-Semitism, Bukhari said that MPACUK had gone out of way to challenge anti-
Semitism in the Muslim community and at one event in a university in the west of the
country he was threatened when he challenged a guest imam who delivered an anti Semitic
sermon. He added: “On the other hand we advocated working with Jewish people who
opposed the illegal occupation of Palestinian land by Israel and came under a lot of flack by a
hard core group of Muslims and stood our ground. The NUS ban in our view was
orchestrated by the Jewish Society who take any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism and
these types of bans though unwelcome are to be expected. Most organisations or individuals
who believe in the rights of the Palestinian people are branded anti-Semites unfortunately.”
 78

MPACUK is clearly not a terrorist organisation and its effort to encourage Muslims to
engage in the political process is something one might wish to support. Its spokespeople are
involved in debates and appear in the media and the Government has made overtures towards
them in order understand the views of young people.

However, MPACUK is in a tricky position. It is an organisation comprised of young

people and as such they can be particularly vocal over certain issues, when perhaps a bit more
tact would be desirable. Despite Bukhari’s comments, there is no denying that questionable
comments do appear on the MPACUK website and while freedom of speech is to be lauded,
the presence of such comments harms MPACUK’s chances of entering into the mainstream.
On the other hand, if MPACUK began to recruit older members of Muslim society, it is
entirely possible their message could be diluted and their efforts to rouse the Muslim
community could be impeded. It may therefore fairly be regarded as being on the fringes of
Islamist activity whilst at present still Islamic.
 79

The campus situation abroad

Of course, it is not just the UK that has seen significant events involving young people,
students, universities and terrorism. As mentioned earlier, members of the Hamburg Cell
were studying at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg, while young French men
have been making efforts to go and fight in Iraq. France has long suffered from Algerian
terrorism, which saw disaffected young men joining the movement against the French
authorities.

Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, a Syrian, settled in Madrid, took a Spanish wife, who
then converted to Islam, was listed in the telephone directory and acted as any other Spanish
citizen. However, unlike his neighbours, Yarkas was recruiting young Muslims, including, it
is presumed, students, for training camps in Afghanistan and was raising funds through crime
to buy weapons and explosives. He also had links with Al Qaeda agents in other countries,
some of which were involved in the September 11 hijackings.136

The University of South Florida in the USA has been regularly linked with extremist
groups. In 2001, the university fired Sami Al-Arian, a professor of computer engineering, for
expressing controversial views in public speeches without noting that his views were personal
and not representative of the University, a violation of contract. Additionally, his associations
and extremist statements aroused concerns within the university worried for the safety of its
student body. “Victory to Islam. Death to Israel,” Al-Arian said in a speech while still
employed as a professor.

Al-Arian was charged with using a think tank, a mosque and a charity for Palestinian
children that he had set up, for funding terrorist organisations in Israel and the territories
under its control. In 1995, the university shut down the think tank, the World and Islam
Studies Enterprises, which was co-founded with another USF professor, Abdallah Shallah
who was later named a designated terrorist by the US.137

An Islamic scholar who exhorted his followers to join the Taliban and fight US troops
was convicted in the US for inciting others to levy war against the United States and inducing
others to use firearms in violation of federal law. Ali al-Timimi, who obtained a PhD from
George Mason University in 2004, apparently wielded enormous influence among a group of
young Muslim men in north Virginia who played paintball games in 2000 and 2001 as a
 80

means for training for holy war. Five days after September 11, al-Timimi addressed a small
group of followers and said that the aircraft attacks were a harbinger of a final apocalyptic
battle between Muslims and non-believers. He said that his followers were required, as
Muslims, to defend the Taliban from the looming US invasion. While none of his followers
joined the Taliban, four travelled to Pakistan in September 2001 and trained with a militant
group called Lashkar-e-Taiba. Three of them testified that their intention had been to use the
training to fight in Afghanistan and that it was al-Timimi’s speech that inspired them to do
so.138
 81

Chapter Four: The British National Party on UK campuses

With a few exceptions, the Far Right has traditionally received very little support in British
universities, which have tended to be more open towards left-leaning extremism than its
right-wing analogue. Nevertheless, the Right has always made efforts to attract students and
in recent years this effort has intensified. The targeting of students is being stepped up as so
to add validity to their cause and improve their image.

One former British National Party (BNP) member said:“The BNP are trying to attract
those at university. After all, who are you more likely to listen to, someone with a PhD or a
skinhead? It doesn’t matter what the doctorate is in, it still looks good.”139

How successful they have been is open to debate. It is hard to verify the figures that
these groups give for membership. Nevertheless, the youth section of the BNP has, in the
past, claimed a presence in 17 British universities. The BNP is, of course, a legitimate
political party but there is some evidence that some of the more extreme groups are taking an
interest in British universities.

Nevertheless, considering that the student base is ever-growing and ever-diversifying,

it comes as little surprise that the Far Right is beginning to make some inroads into higher
education. A spokesman for the Union of Jewish Students said: “In the past five years, we
have seen the Young BNP, the National Student Front and Combat 18 all operating on
campuses. They express Nazi and Aryan ideology and some believe that Jewish, Hindu, Sikh,
Muslim and international students don’t belong here”.140

This trend is upsetting some students, who fear the presence of the Far Right on
campuses, and there is some concern that the extensive efforts being made by the law
enforcement and security agencies to combat the threat of Islamist extremism, have diverted
their attention from Far Right groups. This downturn in Government attention, when
combined with the rise in fear of Islamic terrorism and fears over immigration, has meant that
support and membership for Far Right parties has steadily been increasing over the past five
years.
 82

During the recent elections, the BNP, which contested 119 seats, took 192,850 votes
in total, compared with 47,129 at the 2001 election. Its overall vote share rose by 0.55% and
its best result was in Barking, London, where it took 16.89% of the vote.141

The BNP was quick to point the finger after the events on 7 July. In a statement, its
leader Nick Griffin, said: “Stay calm. Give blood. Blame Blair not ordinary Muslims.” It
soon came under fire for using an image of the bombed bus from 7 July, on a leaflet sent to
voters ahead of an east London council by-election. The leaflet, sent to homes in Becontree
said: “Maybe now it’s time to start listening to the BNP.” It went on to say: “We warned that
extremist fundamentalists were coming to Britain in huge numbers and would wage war.
Prior to Thursday the media were accusing us of being racist scaremongers. I wonder what
the public is thinking now.”142 The leaflet was roundly criticised by politicians and the BNP
failed to win the seat.

Later, the BNP put out its recommendations to the Prime Minister on how to protect
the country from more attacks. This included obvious statements such as banning
immigration from Muslim countries, deporting illegal residents, stopping Muslim women
wearing the Burqa (“What is the point of having CCTV cameras if terrorists can disguise
themselves as the wives of Muslim fundamentalists and prowl our streets undetected behind
veils and hoods?”) and removing fundamentalist Muslims from sensitive positions.

One expert on the Far Right claimed that the Government and police were seriously
underestimating the problem of the BNP as an extremist organisation in this country. He also
said that the Far Right’s pressing of the anti-white racism issue needed to be discussed and
that the Government had not done so for fear of being accused of racism. He also noted that
there have been occasions where the Far Right and Islamic Fundamentalists have actually
met to discuss common interests, such as the hatred of Jews and how both are being targeted
by the media and the police.143

The Far Right receives significantly less public exposure than extremist Islamist
groups, who tend to deliver far more headlines. Nevertheless, a handful of figures have
managed to propel themselves into the public domain by their words or actions. The majority
are members of the BNP, which is of course a legal political party but several of them have
been or are in trouble with the authorities for their deeds. None are terrorists, in the
 83

commonly defined term of the word, but some have been accused or indeed convicted of race
hate crimes, such as the distribution of material aimed at inciting racial hatred.
 84

Tony Wentworth at Salford University

Wentworth studies politics at Salford University, where his open admission of being a
prominent figure in the BNP has caused considerable consternation among his fellow
students. In student elections, he gathered 20 votes, which, while a small number, is still
significant in that student elections have low turn-outs and most people would be shocked to
see 20 BNP supporters on a campus.

Chris Tavner, student and chairman of Salford University’s Anti-Nazi League,

defended the group’s stance against Mr Wentworth, enthusiastically claiming: “He is one of
the leading Nazis in the country and his job is to build membership among school and
university students in Salford. We won’t allow this at our university. We won’t go against
someone just because of their views, but he is promoting violence and racial hatred.”144
He went on to say: “Everyone here feels threatened by his presence.”145

A petition containing some 600 names was collected, calling for Wentworth’s
expulsion from the university, and the specially formed “Salford Students United against
Racism” called for politics students to avoid lectures with him and for academics to refuse to
teach him. The head of security at Salford claimed that there had been anti-Wentworth graffiti
on campus and some heckling.

Meanwhile, Wentworth said: “I do disapprove of multi-racial societies full stop.

However, I am at Salford University just to get an education. In this country we have a right
to freedom of speech and political opinions.”146

Wentworth became president of the BNP’s youth section in 2002. In June 2005,
Wentworth, along with his bodyguard, were found guilty of common assault and had to pay a
fine of £200 after a fight at the university.
 85

Mark Collett at Leeds University

Currently awaiting trial, along with BNP leader Nick Griffin (and originally with the now
deceased BNP founder John Tyndall), on eight charges of race hate offences. Collett is the
former leader of the Young BNP and a former student of Leeds University.

Collett rose to fame following the Channel 4 documentary Young, Nazi and Proud, as
a result of which he resigned as leader of the Young BNP. Collett told the programme maker,
David Modell that: “I honestly can’t understand how a man who’s seen the inner city hell of
Britain today can’t look back on that era (Hitler’s Germany) with a certain nostalgia and
think, yeah, those people marching through the streets and all those happy people out in the
streets, you know, saluting and everything, was a bad thing.”

He also said: “The Jews have been thrown out of every country, including England.
There’s not a single European country the Jews have not been thrown out of. And let’s face it,
when it happens so many times it’s not just persecution. There’s no smoke without fire.”147

This statement, of course, will be regarded as extremist by non-Jews but its implied
threat of violence against Jews, simply because they are Jews, will be seen by the latter as
evidence of terrorist ambitions, even if only threatened.
 86

Nick Griffin at Cambridge University

Leader of the BNP, Griffin is a former student at Downing College, Cambridge. He is also a
former leader of the National Front and was an activist during his student days.

Every so often, he is invited to a university to debate his party’s policies, multi-

culturalism or similar topics. More often than not, protests from groups at universities or the
NUS result in the debates being cancelled.

He currently faces charges of using words or behaviour intended or likely to stir up

racial hatred. In 1998, he was found guilty of distributing material likely to incite racial
hatred, for which he received a two-year suspended sentence. The offending material was a
booklet, Who are the Mind Benders? This publication proposed that a Jewish conspiracy
controlled the media and was busy brainwashing the British people.
 87

How the BNP operates on UK campuses

Since Nick Griffin took over leadership of the party, the BNP has publicly attempted to move
away from the violent image it attained during the Tyndall years, when it was generally
accepted to be racist and almost always thuggish, using the fear and the threat of physical
violence against political opponents to reinforce its reputation for seeking revolutionary
change in Britain. Today, it invokes apparent policy changes in order to present itself as a
more moderate, mainstream and respectable right-wing party.

Coupled with the desire to achieve respectability, comes the rise of the Young BNP
(YBNP). In a flyer handed out at an NUS anti-fees rally in 2004, the YBNP claimed to have a
presence at some 17 universities across the country. It also stated that its membership had
increased by 44%, but did not say exactly how many people that actually amounted to.

The Young BNP is said to be targeting Brunel, Cambridge, Greenwich, Sunderland

and York universities for recruitment. In 2002 it was revealed that a student at Greenwich, the
half-Turkish Lawrence Rustem, was the head of the BNP’s ethnic liaison committee and had
been recruiting disaffected Sikhs and Hindus to work with the BNP against Islamic
extremists.148 At Sussex Downs, the BNP has sent its local organiser on to college sites, trying
to infiltrate the local trade union studies course.

The Student Assembly Against Racism group takes this threat seriously and in a
leaflet produced in 2004, it claimed that the BNP was targeting students in an effort to win
over a new generation of members who believed in racism and violence.149

One expert on the BNP noted that modern communication methods have helped the
party in its recruitment drive. While in the past, BNP members would be quickly spotted if
they were handing out leaflets and flyers, the use of the Internet and mobile phones gives
access to chat rooms and instantaneous communications.

Typical methods of recruitment are simple yet effective. BNP members will attend a
debate and will ask a contentious question on, say immigration. The remaining members will
scan the audience for reactions and those that seem to agree with them will later be
approached and asked if they wish to join the cause.150
 88

During the 2004 NUS annual conference, the BNP was handing out leaflets in the
hotels where students were staying. Similarly, during a 2004 march against student fees, the
group was handing out leaflets. In September 2004, it was revealed that the BNP had
infiltrated several student groups in Manchester: disgusted at being repeatedly targeted by
journalists and as being unable to infiltrate the BBC, it decided to tackle a different target.
Diane Stoker and Joe Finnon, two students in Manchester, who declared their membership of
the BNP, had joined Manchester Unite Against Fascism, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)
and Respect and apparently only broke cover after the BNP documentary, Under the Skin of
the BNP. Stoker and Finnon fully integrated themselves into their target organisations,
achieving positions such as leadership of SWP work at Manchester Metropolitan University
and Manchester University, leadership of Respect in the north west and an important role in
organising Globalise Resistance recruitment at Marxism 2004. Diane Stoker even played a
role in trying to get Tony Wentworth excluded from Salford University. It is feared that the
pair could have passed over addresses and contact details to Far Right groups.151

Meanwhile, the Young BNP, which uses the German Odal rune as its symbol, has had
its website taken down, though its activities are often discussed in the BNP newspaper, Voice
of Freedom. For example, in its January 2005 issue, the paper talked about a YBNP outing to
the Peak District, where, amongst other things, there was a discussion on strategy for BNP
university students.152

The BNP’s manifesto calls for all youngsters to undertake National Service. Indeed,
they make it a pre-requisite of a place at university. They also seek to influence what is taught
in universities and colleges in line with BNPs thinking and to ensure that “the Left” are not in
a position to control higher education and through this, the rest of the nation.153

Activists such as Wentworth and Collett, are trying to attract support by concentrating
on anti-white racism, and in recent years, the BNP’s appeal has been felt in areas where
attacks by other races on whites is on the increase, such as Oldham, Burnley and Leeds. Its
appeal is also starting to be felt by those who are still at school. Many of those who attended
the YBNP’s Red, White and Blue festival for example were under sixteen. This year’s festival
also attracted twice as many people as attended last year. Evidence suggests that a number of
these were hoping to gain university places.
 89

Again, the main reason for this appears to be the BNP’s stance on alleged “anti-white
racism”, and particularly that carried out, they claim, by Asians on whites. This helps explain
not only why “the BNP launched a poster campaign offering cash prizes to any pupil who
could design the best poster on this issue”, but also, perhaps alarmingly, why one hundred
children took part in this competition.154

Their support, however, may be less substantial than the BNP would have us believe.
Last year, more than 80 primary and secondary schools were named on the party’s website as
having pupils who support its views. Closer scrutiny revealed that at least one of the six
schools listed in Kirklees, which borders Calderdale in Yorkshire, did not exist.

According to Wentworth, children of 13 are the youngest canvassed. “It is part of the
political process and necessary, given what we are working against," he says. “Young people
feel they might be punished or expelled for supporting us. In some cases, they don’t know
how the system works against them,”155 It has also been claimed that the BNP has been
approaching school children at events, taking their phone numbers and sending them texts
and images relevant to their cause.
 90

Chapter Five: The Animal Liberation Front on UK campuses

Those who believe that the only way to achieve their aims is to physically abuse or to
verbally threaten with violence or murder are, thankfully, in a minority. However, it does not
need many people to terrorise successfully. This truth can be demonstrated in the case of
those groups who have links to animal rights extremism.

While several universities are themselves the targets of attacks by animal extremists,
there is only circumstantial evidence to suggest that students are involved in the type of
intimidation that has seen bodysnatching and people’s lives being threatened. Even so, the
evidence shows clearly that universities are not able to protect their members from the
terrorist work of some Animal Liberation Front (ALF) supporters.

Before the ban on fox-hunting, it was not unusual to see hunt-saboteur societies at
universities but even this seems to have somewhat diminished. However, it is known that
some of the leaders of the extremist groups are graduates. Despite their relatively small
numbers, the likes of the Animal Liberation Front and SHAC have successes well out of
proportion to their size.

It has been reported that tough new tactics by the police against animal rights activists
have resulted in a decline in attacks. The police strategy of “beheading” movements by
arresting suspected leaders, and the actions taken in the civil courts, by solicitor Timothy
Lawson-Cruttenden, to fight back against ALF terrorists, has sometimes been claimed to
constitute a real change from the position which existed previously when some leading
members of the British pharmaceutical industry had publicly questioned whether research
work could carry on in Britain.156 Those respected journalists, like Nick Fielding of The
Sunday Times - who argued that “all was quiet in the animal lab” and who had, he said,
detected “signs that the well-organised animal rights movement is in crisis” - have clearly got
things badly wrong.

In May 2005, prior to the attack in Oxford in July 2005 and the forced closure of a
guinea pig breeding farm the following month, Oxford University announced that it was
ordering an investigation into how an animal rights group appeared to have secured access to
names and addresses of staff and even job applicants. The investigation was ordered after one
individual who applied for an administration post at the University in a department that was
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presumably targeted by an extremist group received a letter saying: “I am writing to you as I

suspect that you are an employee or student of Oxford University. I am sure that you are
aware of the university’s plans to build a large animal research laboratory in the centre of
Oxford. I am asking for information on contractors working on the new laboratory,
individuals involved with it, information on the locations and activities of any existing labs or
breeding facilities operation, and any information, no matter how sketchy, you have relating
to animal research.”

A spokesman for the University said it was unclear how the group had acquired
personal details adding: “A number of individuals have received letters claiming to be from
an organisation called the Oxford University information appeal. We take the protection of
personal data extremely seriously and it is a matter of concern that individuals have been
contacted at home. The matter is currently under investigation and we are unable to comment
further at this stage.”

Last year, home addresses and phone numbers of university staff were displayed on an
animal rights website. The service provider Yahoo later removed them.157

The situation at Oxford took another step in July 2005 with an arson attack on a
boathouse, causing some £500,000 worth of damage. The Animal Liberation Front’s Bite
Back website issued a statement claiming responsibility. Before deploying incendiary
devices, they padlocked the doors and glued all the locks to avoid the possibility of people
entering before the devices ignited. The purpose of the attack was to terrorise Oxford
University into halting all lawful experimentation on animals. The University was advised by
the arsonists that “nothing is off limits, nothing you own, rent or have dealings with…We will
not let you off the hook”. 158

Two US academics, Tom Regan (Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at North Carolina

State University) and Steven Best (Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the
University of Texas) recently spoke at the International Animal Rights Gathering 2005
(AR2005) in Kent. In his speech, Best said: “Now Communism is dead, we are the new
spectre in the world. We are named as the number one terrorist threat in the US and UK. Can
you believe it?”
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He added: “We are not terrorists, but we are a threat [our emphasis]. We are a threat
both economically and philosophically. Our power is not in the right to vote but the power to
stop production. We will break the law and destroy property until we win.”

He compared the animal rights struggle to the fight against slavery. “We are
abolitionists. We don’t want to reform them [vivisectionist companies], we want to wipe them
off the face of the earth. We will fight, and die if necessary, to free the slaves”.

The British Government announced, in late August, that Best would be banned from
speaking at a rally by animal extremists. The Home Office told Best his presence in the UK
would not be conducive to the public good.159 The AR2005 conference saw attendees taught
the finer points of unarmed combat, surveillance and counter-surveillance techniques, how to
infiltrate vivisection firms and computer security.160
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Chapter Six - The response from the university authorities

While several groups and individuals operating at universities have been identified over the
years as posing a real or potential threat to the security of this country, the response from the
universities themselves is at best muted and at worst, naïve and non-existent.

In the interests of maintaining what can seem ill-defined concepts of free speech (ill-
defined, because for many years speech has definitely not been free in Britain) and of
sustaining apparently liberal attitudes to political events on campuses, many universities are
plainly loath to interfere with what their students do out of the class room. Cynics might add:
they increasingly avoid interfering with what their students do in class room. Increasingly,
lists of non-attenders may, or may not be taken; students are given several attempts at passing
modules and, in some cases, may have failed modules condoned as if they were passes.
Students, as customers frequently demand to read job references written for them, or when
asked to leave one university, will demand references to admit them to another. Dons who
refuse to write them may find themselves subject to formal complaints.

It is perhaps not hard to see the dogged adherence to the idea of free speech as little
more than a convenient way of disguising a laissez-faire attitude towards higher education on
the grounds that it requires far less effort to do nothing than to do something. Most British
universities are already severely understaffed and under-resourced. Inevitably, things must be
given up.

The fact that most students spend only three or four years on campus adds to the
pressures on dons to ignore what they do wherever it seems plausible to do so. As such, many
student societies and groups are free to operate as they please and unless specific complaints
are made, it often seems that transgressions can go unpunished or at the most, are dealt with
by a slap of the wrist. However, it has been proved that people from British campuses have
gone on to commit terrorist actions, so why aren’t university authorities involving themselves
more with identifying potential problems

Despite the assumption that university security departments would play some part in
involving themselves in dealing with potential problems on campuses, the fact is that rather
than carrying out pro-active measures to identify troublespots, security departments can only
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react to incidents. From the information we gathered on groups and suspects, several
universities were identified as being likely or known centres of potential subversive action
and were asked whether they wanted to participate in this study. Few were willing to do so;
claiming that such discussions were too sensitive but some did respond and particular thanks
must go to George Blanchflower, who is chair of the Association of University Chief Security
Officers (AUCSO).

AUCSO was set up during the 1980s to consolidate the working practices and
standards of university security officers. Members meet for conferences to share information
and techniques and discuss relevant issues. There are also working groups to train security
staff. Otherwise, there is little official communications between security officials on a day-to-
day basis.

The primary role of university security departments is, of course, to ensure the safety
of staff and students and to help prevent crime on campus. This is no easy task and university
populations can reach into the tens of thousands, while grounds are often open to the public.
An official from one university said: “Most of the issues on campus are theft-related as
students are pretty poor at security and fail to close doors or lock windows. The majority of
incidents are relatively minor in that they involve alcohol or people fighting over, say a girl.
Furthermore at our university, there are little or no problems relating to politics, race or
religion. Even when someone may be, say racially abused, it’s usually the case where alcohol
is involved and we’ll try and talk to the accused person and deal with the incident quietly.”161

The head of security at another university agreed, saying that his main role was to
prevent crime and that his role was nothing glamorous and depended much upon simple
common sense.
The spokesman at the first university claims that groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir do
occasionally appear but according to him are “more vocal than actually doing anything.”162
He also said that Far Right groups were absent from the campus, though this comment has
been debated and a member of that student union claimed that at least one BNP poster had
been seen on campus.163

However, the fact is that one of these universities was the centre of a police
investigation and several students and a staff member were arrested on terrorism charges and
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the case is now sub judice. Here, the security department was involved in assisting the police
in its actions against the arrested individuals but the fact that the incident occurred makes a
mockery of the statement that there are no problems relating to politics, race or religion.

A close relationship with the police is key to the success of university security
departments and while one official admitted that it wasn’t close at every university, at his it
was. Indeed, a small building is presently under construction on the edge of the university
grounds that will be used by police officers to allow them access on to the grounds.
Furthermore, discussions are being conducted into whether the police can be integrated into
the university’s radio network.

At other universities, an officer from the local station is always allocated to the
campus and is the first point of contact in any incident.164

Nevertheless, officials warn that too many police on campus may create an
atmosphere of distrust and worry. Additionally, the concept of running more covert operations
on campuses against students is also discouraged due to the fear of such operations being
blown and resentment growing as a result.

Another important partnership for university security officials is to work closely with
the student unions, and here there appears to be some success. Both the security departments
and the unions want the same thing, namely the well-being of the students. As such, there has
been an increase in security cameras and lighting across many universities, with little or no
opposition. It is interesting to note that, only a decade ago, when students would very likely
have been against this increased surveillance.

There is no set manual for dealing with serious issues on campuses and if there is an
incident that warrants further investigation, the university will phone the police and get them
involved and then steps can be taken. But officials claim that it is not for the university to
conduct investigations, the security department does not have the skills and such an action
could be theoretically dangerous. Blanchflower was the only official to talk about being pro-
active, saying that his team were active during freshers’ weeks, concentrating especially on
foreign students. He said: “This can be useful if we have a particularly large ethnic group
coming to study at the university at any one point.” However, given the present climate in the
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UK, it must be asked whether security departments should not be doing more pro-active work
on their grounds?

Student demographics have changed significantly over the past ten years. As
universities are forced to be more financially independent, so they turn to a wider and more
diverse base to attract students from. One official noted that there had been a substantial rise
in the number of students coming from the People’s Republic of China.

This is particularly interesting in light of recent reports noting that Chinese students
are said to be running spy rings in European universities. The European Strategic Intelligence
and Security Centre quoted an unnamed European intelligence source as saying that an
economic spy network was being run from an educational institution in Belgium and had
been under surveillance for two years. The ring is said to use groups of students and
internship seekers as a front organisation with no obvious links to Chinese diplomats and
these agents are planted around northern Europe including Britain, France, Germany and the
Netherlands. Its main target, the report stated, were laboratories and universities.165

The university official in question reported that the Chinese students at his university,
which is noted for its scientific and engineering excellence, are very friendly and deferential
and they, along with the large numbers of other Asian students at the university, are happy to
work with the security department when needed.

Overseas students are not vetted by university security departments; instead, as long
as they are able to provide references from academic institutions in their own nation and
providing they have a suitable student visa, they are able to enter the UK to study.
Furthermore, there is no contact between the universities and immigration departments at
entry points into the UK unless there is a serious problem with a student’s credentials. And
even if there is, immigration departments deal with administration rather than security
departments.

Furthermore, security departments do not keep records of the ethnic demographics of

the students. The typical response when asked about this was: “Well, I’m sure some part of
administration will have some kind of records.”
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While administration departments do perhaps keep some records of ethnicity, one

organisation that certainly does so is the student union clubs and societies office. Typically,
students wishing to join a club or society have to fill out a form which indicates contact
details, their student number and their ethnicity, though there is an option for refusing this
information.

A spokesman for one student union said that while an individual’s privacy had of
course to be respected, he would have no trouble in offering up membership information to
the authorities if it were deemed necessary.166

It appears that university security departments have no knowledge of exactly who is

entering the university or of what they might be up to. All they can do, and there is no reason
to believe they do not do this well, is react to events once they have occurred. While the Data
Protection Act protects an individual’s privacy, it would seem logical to think that a security
department should know exactly who is studying at a university and that a list of names could
easily be cross-referenced with any other list provided by the relevant authorities.

Many security officers say that they believe students are less involved with politics
than they were during the radical days of the 1960s and 1970s. Whilst this may be true for the
majority of students, who have greater pressure on them to manage their own financial affairs
wisely, terrorism is not (thankfully) a majority activity. When it is noted, as one official did,
that today’s students are full of the work ethic, this generalisation about the many easily
conceals the facts about the few.

However, it is not at all clear that students are still less political, even if they were so a
few years ago. During the 2003 demonstrations against the war in Iraq, for example, students
were represented in immense numbers and when Jewish students resigned from the NUS over
its supposed failure to deal with racism, the story made headlines around the world, likewise
the case of the YBNP member who attends Salford University attracted much attention.

Similarly, Islamic Societies are claimed to be the largest and most active groups on
campuses today and are playing an ever more active part in student politics. This is
something, that according to at least one researcher, they are being resented for, which is
causing some disharmony on campuses.167
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The use of a club or society to mask one’s intentions is a useful cover in a university
as there tends to be little overseeing of a group’s actions. Setting up a society is a
straightforward process. The student has to be interviewed by the student union as to why he
or she wishes to start an organisation. But that is all. There is no monitoring of what a club or
society actually does. Where students are, perhaps, naïve enough to state precise aims, they
can meet with rejection. The spokesman of one student union recalled that in 2004 some
students had attempted to set up an official Al Qaeda society to “discuss topical events” but
the request was denied.

If the go-ahead is given, the student then typically has to collect x number of
signatures (and student ID numbers) from students who believe the organisation is a good
idea. A trial period then begins and by its completion, the club or society has to have agreed
upon a code of practice, recruited suitable numbers and appointed individuals to the key
roles. The club or society is then supported by the student union and a budget is agreed upon
which the organisation can use on advertising and promotional material.

Occasionally, students set up groups without going through the procedures laid down
by the student union. While, strictly speaking, not illegal, the use of the university name
could invoke the displeasure of the student union and as a result, any unofficial groups or
societies would have to operate without the support (or of course the scrutiny) of the union.

The NUS No Platform policy states that “racists and fascists should not be provided
with an opportunity to speak to an audience at any NUS event, and that no member of the
NEC will share a public platform with a racists or fascists”. This is, of course, not the same as
banning an official student club or society, still less does it tell us anything about unofficial
clubs and societies on campuses.

This No Platform policy is endorsed by the NUS in order to ensure that both the
national union and local student unions can provide a safe environment for their members.
The NUS believes that groups such as the BNP, Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al Muhajiroun seek to
incite violence and that by allowing them a platform there is the potential for members to be
hurt should violence ensue. No Platform policies not only prevent groups from attending
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union events but can also include banning them from even entering union buildings and
displaying their publicity on union property.

In reality, each student union is able to authorise the setting up of any group it likes. It
uses the NUS ruling, if it uses it at all, simply as a guideline. Whilst we believe that the No
Platform policy is usually adhered to, there is evidence that certain groups use considerable
skill to get around these bans. Sometimes, for example, they simply dream up a new name for
themselves.

Once set up, societies are compelled to follow the union’s rules and procedures and
this includes ensuring freedom of speech and abiding by the guidelines about who can be
invited to speak at the university. This latter point has been the subject of concern at many
universities where controversial figures are often invited to speak.

One university official noted that it tended to be not so much the speakers who were
the cause of concern at the university in question. Rather it was their entourage who caused
problems. However, the cases he cited had to do with pop music, and the playing of specific
songs and the resulting actions by students.

A spokesman for one student union also noted that the controversial MP George
Galloway had once been invited to speak at the university but opposition from groups on
campus resulted in his invitation being revoked. The university authorities did not intervene.

Of course, we cannot know (because we are not able to find out) precisely what goes
on in student clubs and societies, whether official or unofficial. When student union
authorities are asked, for example, whether non-Muslims or non-Jews can join Muslim or
Zionist clubs, there is usually no clear answer. Even if there were one, it is not obvious that
the answer would be accurate. The same applies to questions on gender.

It is, therefore, one thing to have a paper commitment to the liberal values of free
speech and gender, ethnic and religious equality in all student societies. It is quite another to
suppose these basic tenets of liberalism are enforced by the universities and colleges who
claim they lie at the heart of what they do.
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Chapter Seven: The Response from Government and Police

The July 2005 bombings in London will represent a significant change in how we view the
security threat in this country. Prior to the events of July, the Prime Minister and the former
and the present Metropolitan Police Commissioners have spoken of several hundred people in
Britain plotting attacks, though Home Secretary Charles Clarke said that there were only a
tiny number of people who represented a terrorist threat.

The figure of hundreds is said to relate to the number of Britons who are known to
have or suspected of having visited Al Qaeda-related training camps in Afghanistan,
Chechnya or Pakistan or who have returned from Iraq. According to one report, the actual
number of individuals willing to carry out an actual attack is about 40.168

It is also estimated that there are some 35-40 individuals in the UK who are willing to
carry out acts up to and including violence in the name of animal rights.169

In April this year, Commissioner Sir Ian Blair told BBC’s Breakfast with Frost that:
“There’s real clarity now that Al Qaeda affiliates are targeting Britain.” And he used this
argument to hammer home his belief in ID cards.170 In January 2005, there was a report in
Police Review magazine that the Metropolitan Police held fears of a Bali-style attack on a
London entertainment venue.171

Prior to 7 July, the Security Services were credited with foiling eight attacks in the
UK within the previous three years. Some of these were discredited and no one was charged,
such as the apparent plot to bomb Old Trafford football ground. However, in 2000, a man was
convicted for plotting an explosion against an unspecified target and it was also claimed that
terrorists were plotting a car bomb attack against nightclubs in Soho or in a car park beneath
a prestigious London hotel.
Unconfirmed reports have suggested Al Qaeda cells had considered flying hijacked
aircraft into skyscrapers in Canary Wharf in East London. One terror suspect was also
thought to have been planning to hijack a plane and fly it into London’s American embassy.172
Meanwhile, Mohammed Afroz Abdul Razzak was sentenced to seven years in jail in India for
planning to crash aircraft into landmarks such as the House of Commons and Tower Bridge.
Prosecutors said the 30-year-old, an educated Muslim from Mumbai, had spent considerable
sums of money training as a pilot, both in the United Kingdom and Australia.173
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Of course, prior to 7 July, MI5 had reduced its threat level to severe, though it did not
deny the threat was still serious. A spokesperson for the Security Service said that exact
numbers of operatives were unknown and while there were some people who were keen to
commit terrorism, the focus was primarily on Iraq and would-be terrorists were travelling to
the Middle East. Only weeks after announcing the reduction in the threat level, London faced
two terror attacks.

The police and security agencies have more than once identified universities as a key
area to help defeat terrorism. There has, however, been no real attempt to adopt a pro-active
approach to the problem. There are one or two exceptions, such as the establishment of
community liaison officers with certain campuses, Goldsmith’s College in London being an
example.174 Equally, leading police officers take the point that campuses may be a cause of
problems but could also be the source of answers. One former senior anti-terrorist squad
officer believes that while universities are vulnerable and pose an obvious target for
recruitment and even for an attack, they also provide an answer to the problem of integrating
minorities into the British way of life.

A spokeswoman from MI5 noted that since 2001, academics had been responding to
police requests to identify problems where they could and there has been at least one case
where a student has been denied entry into the UK, only for it later to be discovered that he
was a member of Al Qaeda. Furthermore, in the late 1990s, a special MI5 unit was set up to
investigate young British Muslims. Apparently, informants at universities were recruited and
students who were suspected of gathering information useful for their nation’s attempts at
building weapons of mass destruction were placed under close scrutiny.175 As far back as
1997, two MI5 officers were said to have asked members of the London Chamber of
Commerce: “If you know of any Iraqi students studying chemistry at a British university for
more than three years, that would be of great interest to us.”176

MI5 also believes that academics can help the authorities on those key subjects where
the police and security services are not knowledgeable. However, at the moment, any
schemes in monitoring students or providing assistance are entirely voluntary and the
spokesperson was worried about pushing universities too hard for fear of interfering with
academic freedoms.177
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Since these points were raised, it has been revealed that some 200 foreign scientists
have been barred from studying in the UK over the past four years amid fears that they could
pose a terrorist threat. The scientists were among 2,000 vetted after applying to post-doctoral
or post-graduate work.178

The scheme, whereby universities can request checks on scientists from 10 countries,
including Pakistan and Syria, is said to be under review and it has been claimed that several
prominent universities have refused participate in it, claiming it is an interference in their
academic freedom.

An FCO spokesman said that the system had been under review since well before the
July 2005 terrorist attacks. He said: “The major loophole with the scheme at the moment is
that it is voluntary. If a university doesn’t take part, it is theoretically possible for an Iranian
student to gain an education in nuclear physics in Britain and become part of Iran’s nuclear
weapons programme. It is possible and very undesirable. The review is to see whether there is
any way of preventing that. It could consider that the only way is to impose it by means of a
legislative bill.”179

Meanwhile, Special Branch has personnel who are dedicated to working with
universities. However, they limit their access to the security departments of universities even
if, on occasion, they have been known to monitor freshers’ fairs to see whether any students
are being unduly pressured. However, such policing is strictly reactive: it kicks in only if
there is evidence that an event has taken place.

Officers note that dealing with students and academics is difficult. Many people are
wary of dealing with the “secret police,” which is often the perceived notion of Special
Branch. On the other hand, academics, students and university staff are more willing to have
uniformed officers regularly visiting campuses.

Though it has occurred on at least one occasion, Special Branch is largely against
running covert operations on campuses for fear of the mission being compromised, thereby
putting their role into the spotlight and driving the suspect groups and individuals even
further underground.180
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Yet their argument that a friendly janitor or some other member of staff might tip
them off has its flaws. University staff are unlikely to be privy to the kinds of information
that may be relevant and the only way to know whether a traveller or outsider has visited, or
is about to visit, not something that can be discovered by overt means. Terrorists work in
secret and do not announce their plans.

One of the other great problems facing the authorities is the impact of the war on Iraq
on young Muslims. In the immediate aftermath of the 7 July bombings, the Government took
great pains to point out that the bombers would have struck, regardless of the British stance
on Iraq. While this can be and is being debated, what is a fact is that both the police and MI5
are concerned by the number of young Muslims travelling to the Middle East to join
insurgent operations. It is estimated that up to 100 Muslim men have left Britain to fight
against coalition troops in Iraq and at least three have been killed in combat.181 The
spokesperson for MI5 noted that an even greater fear was that if, or when, these insurgents
returned to the UK, they would have valuable skills they could pass on to other would-be
insurgents or terrorists.182

According to the media, MI5 has drawn up an extensive report on why young British
Muslims become radicalised. As well as monitoring human traffic between Britain and Iraq
they have been looking at the problem of young Muslims becoming indoctrinated in prison
and elsewhere. What they identified mirrors the findings of researchers like Marc Sageman,
that there are those that are young, British, middle-class and well-educated and secondly,
there are those from North Africa, who see Britain as an important target. It is estimated that
there are around 30 or 40 such people, who have both the capability and the will to carry out
attacks like those of 7 July. Some 200 have returned from training camps in Afghanistan,
Chechnya, or Bosnia, and perhaps 1,000 sympathise with the notion of a “global jihad”.183 It
was also claimed that the names of some 1,200 British citizens who had trained with Al
Qaeda, were found in a cave in Tora Bora in Afghanistan.184

The Home Office’s Project Contest made many recommendations on how the
Government could build better relations with young disaffected Muslims. These included
combating recruitment by terrorist groups, combating Islamophobia, improving dialogue with
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Muslims groups and strengthening the power of moderate Muslim student and youth
organisations such as FOSIS.

Yet, of course despite all these discussions of possible threats and Britons leaving for
Iraq, on the 7 July 2005, bombs ripped through London’s travel infrastructure. It does not
look like there was anything the law enforcement and security services could have done to
stop the attacks and accusations of there being too many police being drafted up to, or too
much attention being diverted to, the G8 conference in Scotland are spurious.

But while of course the attacks are, of course, shocking, it must come as no surprise if
one considers the events that have unfolded in the past decade. The Government has claimed
that several attacks have been thwarted and one has only to read further back in this paper to
see examples of British or British-based individuals engaging in terrorism. As we have seen,
their link to campus life in Britain is an established fact.

So what should be done?

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Conclusion: So what should be done?

There is no doubt that Britain faces a terrorist threat which is not new in a theoretical sense,
in so far as there have been numerous terrorist attacks in Britain over very many years. At
the same time, the current threat from extremists is also quite unlike anything that has been
seen before. No one who examines the evidence can be in any doubt that British higher
education and its institutions of higher education, its universities and colleges, are now
deeply, if unwittingly and unwillingly, ensnared in the extremist-terrorist nexus.

One of the major differences between previous terror attacks and those we face now is
that today’s international terrorists, unlike the Red Brigades of the 1970s, have a social base
and, in the case of Jihadists, an ethnic base from which to develop their plans, strategies and
operations – and a base into which they can vanish if the pressure on them becomes too
intense. Jihadist extremists do not speak for Muslims, whether British or otherwise. Indeed,
polls show that most Muslims despise those who carry out attacks, apparently in their name.
Yet the fact that Britain, like mainland Europe, has not achieved full integration of its multi-
cultural society, means that individuals are able to melt back into certain communities, almost
undetected.

Today’s modern, media-conscious terrorist will stop at nothing to achieve his or her
aims. The terrorists tend to be better educated, not just in a particular academic discipline but
in world affairs in general.

A hallmark of Al Qaeda and its affiliates’ attacks has been the targeting of transport
nodes. They know that such attacks will reap maximum publicity for relatively low expense.
The same can be said of animal rights extremists. There have been several incidents where
members of the Animal Liberation Front have made public accusations of paedophilia against
their targets, knowing full well that in today’s climate, the accused will be considered guilty
until proven innocent.

Combating such individuals is by no means easy and, while there have been
successes, there seems little to suggest that we are winning the war on terrorism, both
internationally and in the UK.
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Until 7 July, the Government has faced many problems convincing the public of the
threat level to this country. Earlier this year, a former senior anti-terrorist official pointed out
that if it was not possible to convince the Law Lords of the danger, the Government would
have real trouble convincing the public. He said: “It is import to marginalise operative’s
support, depict them as murderers, criminalise them, this will go a long way to helping our
cause. We shouldn’t go down the Guantanamo Bay route, but instead do it by using criminal
law. We can do lots to stop terrorist essentials in the UK, such as logistics. Each strand of the
chain can be impacted upon.”185

A serious problem is that those individuals who have been arrested under the
Terrorism Act 2000, or the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, have rarely been
charged with terrorism offences. Out of the hundreds of suspects arrested since the events of
September 2001, the majority of those that have actually been charged, and not simply
released, were done so for offences such as illegal immigration.

In 2001, Omar al-Bayoumi, a business studies student in Birmingham, was arrested

on suspicion of funding terrorists, yet was soon released. The collapse of the 2005 Ricin
trials, where eight of the nine defendants were acquitted, is a similar case. One lawyer was
reported in The Guardian as claiming that for some of those people who had downloaded
recipes for poison or explosives from the Internet as similar to young people downloading
pornography since it did not necessarily mean they were going to do anything, but they got a
thrill from talking about and looking at it.186

Prior to the July bombings, the Government had clearly failed in its task of
convincing the population that the terrorist threat was real. There is no reason to doubt this
scepticism was shared within Britain’s universities. The Government and the security and
intelligence community need to rethink how they present the problem. So do our universities.
This was a point made by Higher Education Minister Bill Rammell on 19 July 2005. He said:
“We’ve got a real challenge in higher education. The whole thrust has been about the
importance of free speech on campus. But we also have a responsibility to tackle extremism
on campus. That won’t be easy. I do think it’s a debate we need to be having.”187

It will, of course, take rather more than a debate to tackle extremism on Britain’s
campuses. The record of universities to date has been lamentable, partly as a result of one of
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the unforeseen consequences of expanding the higher education system to generate

exponential grown in student numbers without a consequent increase in staff. Higher
education in Britain today is, in most universities, not what it was even ten years ago. The
drive to increase student numbers ever higher, because cash depends on this, has produced
the most blatantly ignorant lapses in security thinking by Britain’s university chiefs.

In an open letter to The Financial Times on 5 July 2005, all 120 members of
Universities UK, the body that represents the heads of Britain’s universities, condemned
Government plans to abolish the right of appeal for international students who are refused
visas. Universities UK claim that overseas students contribute £1.2 billion per annum for
their tuition, spend a further £1.86 bn on their expenses in the UK, and that overall overseas
students earn some £4 bn each year for the British economy.188

They appear blissfully unaware of the fact that an unvetted or poorly vetted overseas
student admissions scheme could give potential terrorists access to state of the art techniques
not just in the field of WMD but also in information technology. At some universities, for
example Imperial College London, all the “tools of the trade” are available. Everything for
making weapons, from nuclear reactor technology to supplies of chemical fertiliser, is to be
found on site.

But more than teaching students about leading edge weapons, universities allow
milieus to be constructed in which recruitment to terrorism and extremism can very easily
take place, within British society but also conveniently hidden from it. Indeed, it is the
cultural haven that British campuses still offer which will be most attractive to prospective
terrorists. In their obsession with expansion, earning money and displaying their
entrepreneurial excellence to Government, university chiefs have forgotten that universities
are first and foremost designed to serve the needs of liberal democracies and their values.
Cash considerations must come second, if they come anywhere.

By failing to address the problem of security – a failure which has many sources, not
least a fear of being deemed illiberal or even Islamophobic, extremism has been allowed to
propagate itself. Yet the victims of the London bombers included Muslims, and the Islamic
community in Britain has clearly and definitively distanced itself from extremism. Even so,
British dons would sooner do anything than say to a student, “your attitudes are outrageous
 108

and they remove us from any obligation to teach you - unless you undertake citizenship and
democracy classes and prove you can live in a liberal democracy and abide by its rules”.

The Government wants to introduce a series of measures including banning Al

Muhajiroun and Hizb ut-Tahrir. To do so will require support from Parliament and the Law
Lords, something that is not a foregone conclusion. Furthermore seeing that there are a
number of opponents in academe to the Government’s anti-terror plans, even if the ban does
go ahead, there is no guarantee that the universities themselves could support such a ban,
even if they wished to, which is unclear.

The decision to ban the groups received a mixed reception from student leaders.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, but probably unwisely (as we suggest below), the Union of Jewish
Students supported it with campaigns manager Mitch Simmons saying: “We have been
calling for this ban for over a decade. We are pleased that it’s happened. We’re also wary that
just because you ban something they don’t exist anymore. The UJS will continue to be
looking at freshers fairs to see what groups are around and will continue to alert university
authorities”.

However, Wakkas Khan, the president of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies,
said: “Proscribing groups that are understood to be non-violent is certainly a step in the
wrong direction. Hizb ut-Tahrir is clearly understood to be a non-violent organisation with
strong and vocal opinions which the Muslim community may agree or disagree with. This
does not warrant a ban on this group as such actions will only be counterproductive.”

Jamal el-Shayyal, a member of the NUS’s national executive, said that the ban was
unlikely to make a difference. “How can you outlaw an ideology? You can’t outlaw an
ideology. As much as I disagree with them they are not inciteful to anything. It really won’t
make a difference”.189

And even if the universities do support the plans and wish to make more of an effort
to halt the spread of extremism, they have no systems or mechanisms for enacting them.
Groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir continually change their identities, methods and websites to avoid
detection by authorities who have little understanding as to what actually goes on in some
 109

student society meetings. Alternatively they set up stalls “outside the campus, where the
students can reach us but the authorities can do nothing”.190

Our research shows there are simply no control mechanisms in place in universities to
police a ban, other than the most rudimentary reactive ones. It is quite likely that within only
a few months, any bans will be only as effective as ones such as banning the use of mobile
phones in cars.

The Dutch Ministry of the Interior suggested, in a report published in December 2004,
that: “The tasks of the educational sector within the context of radicalisation problems are
quite comprehensive. We may identify two distinct directions. Firstly, schools might play a
role in the identification of radicalisation and informing the competent authorities. Secondly,
they can obviously transfer and encourage the internalisation of the Western democratic ideas
on legal order.”191

And as one former anti-terrorism official said: “Since September 11 there has been
work done with the academic community in a whole series of unexpected ways. However,
more needs to be done to establish conflict management as a discipline. They can also help us
overcome our serious failure to communicate with the public. It is even more serious to fail to
work together with marginalised groups and we need to focus on ways how we can prevent a
17-year-old becoming susceptible to the man who has just returned from Jihad in Iraq.”192

So everyone seems to agree that higher education has a role to play in combating
terror and stopping the evolution of new generations of extremists. But how exactly can this
be achieved?

What the above statements point to is a need to reflect, and act, on the twin functions
which universities possess in today’s Britain. On the one hand, they can all too easily
constitute safe havens and recruitment sites for extremism and terrorism – to an extent which
many in them find hard to fathom. On the other, with a mix of serious security measures,
including pro-active ones, and innovatory teaching and pastoral measures, it ought to be
possible to enable universities and colleges to divert young radicals from extremism and
terror into legal and acceptable modes of political expression. It is not a crime to oppose the
Government’s policy on Iraq (or on anything else). It is most certainly not a crime to seek to
 110

change that policy through the established processes and procedures of liberal democracy. It
is, however, a grave offence to try to make policy through terror, killing and maiming.
Democracies must fight back against all those who seek to do so. Universities have a decisive
role to play in that war.

Here we outline some of the broader measures that universities can take. First of all, it
should be understood that we believe the problem of terror and subversion is primarily, but
not simply, a criminal one. It contains an important political element. However, it is not, in
itself, about a religion or religious beliefs. It follows that Jihadists are more than simple
criminals, they believe in something and political ideas are clearly important to them. It is
true, nevertheless, that their religion also seems to matter to them. We still do not know where
the borders between faith and politics lie. We cannot tell whether preachers who preach
political violence are clerics – or actually politicians. However, whatever the answer should
prove to be, political dialogue and a clear statement of the political tenets of liberal
democracy should always be placed at the front of any attempts to divert young radicals from
extremism and terror.

We acknowledge that universities have become supermarkets, they are no longer

delicatessens, established to be communities of knowledge for the benefit of a small number
of the most talented in our society. However, the pendulum has swung too far in the direction
of profit. Even this would be acceptable if universities were run with a greater emphasis on
security. In fact, financial pressure (Government funding for universities has declined by one
third in real terms since 1989) means that most universities have no idea of who their students
are. There are now 2,247,440 students in the UK, of whom 210,510 are international, that is
non-EU students. The figures are even more startling in the case of post-graduate research
students. International students constitute a staggering 38 per cent of full time research
students. Even if we accept the universities’ proud trumpeting of the figure of £35 billion per
year earned by the university sector as a whole, to expand to this extent without any real
thought being given to security concerns within universities is surely a folly of the first order.
111
 112

Appendix: Policy recommendations:

 Institute proper screening to exclude dangerous students.

 Interview all students to test them for their commitment to higher education.
 Abolish “clearing”.
 Establish direct links between university registrars and immigration officers at
ports of entry.
 Deny a university place to any applicant, home or overseas, who cannot
provide proof of identity.
 Maintain a friendly community police presence on campuses. Communities
with populations measured in the tens of thousands need a regular police presence.
 Ensure that the ethnic composition of any single university reflects, broadly,
the ethnic mix of the UK as a whole.
 Give serious thought to the content of courses currently being taught on UK
campuses to test whether they are conducive to a culture of security in British
campuses; reviewing all courses which appear to extol or glorify violent revolution.
 Establish comprehensive lists of all student societies to check membership,
aims and objectives and provide monitoring of activities. Include dons on all student
society and club committees.
 Maintain accurate student records based on clear proof of identity.
 More actively promote liberal democratic aims and citizenship requirements
courses for all students.
 Teach students how to become part of an academic community, based on trust
and shared values, regardless of race, religion and gender, whilst stamping out
activities such as plagiarism which undermine the concept of a community of
scholars.
 113

The Authors

Professor Anthony Glees is Director of the Brunel Centre for Intelligence and Security
Studies (BCISS) at Brunel University. He is one of the founding figures of the academic
study of intelligence and security issues in the UK. His books on intelligence include: (with
Philip H. J. Davies & John N. L. Morrison) The Open Side of Secrecy: Ten Years of Britain’s
Intelligence and Security Committee (London: Social Affairs Unit, forthcoming); (with Philip
H. J. Davies) Spinning The Spies: Intelligence, Open Government and the Hutton Inquiry
(London: Social Affairs Unit, 2004); The Stasi Files: East Germany's Secret Operations
Against Britain (London: Free Press, 2003); and The Secrets of the Service: British
Intelligence and Communist Subversion 1939-51 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987). Professor
Glees’ current research is focussed on the study of intelligence and security matters on a
national and European level.

Chris Pope is a former journalist, spending eight years working in the aerospace and defence
sectors. He reported from Iraq during the 2003 war. He has recently completed a Masters
Degree in Intelligence and Security Studies at Brunel University. He is the newly appointed
editor of the Royal United Services Institute’s Monitor journal, which examines the areas of
security and resilience.
114
1 See, for example, the Report of the Intelligence and Security Committee for 1997-8, para 47, at
www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/publications/reports/intelligence/Intelligence.pdf
See Panorama BBC TV 21 August 2005 and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4681857.stm
2 Our report is based on open sources as well as on the record discussions, interviews and meetings with security and
intelligence officers, held under Chatham House rules.
3 The Times 14 and 18 July 2005
4 Ibid
5 The Guardian 21 July 2005
6 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4178166.stm
7 It was left to an interviewee of the BBC, Michael Fabricant MP, the Member of Parliament for the farmers, to describe
the ALF cell as ‘terrorists’ although the BBC did state that a judge trying some members of this cell had himself called them
“terrorists”.
8 Young Muslims and Extremism 2004, a paper prepared for the Prime Minister published in part in The Sunday Times 10
July 2005
9 See the report of the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee for 1989/90
www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/publications/reports/intelligence/Intelligence.pdf; meeting at Demos, Central London 20 June
2005
10 Interviewed in The Times 10 August 2005
11 See the annual reports of the Intelligence and Security Committee http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/intelligence/
12 e.g. in London on 22 February 2005
13 The comment was made by Patrick Mercer MP, an Opposition Front Bench spokesman
14 Shortened version published in The Times Higher Education Supplement 7 April 2005 and reported elsewhere.
15 At a meeting of Policy Exchange , London,14 March 2005
16 Anthony Glees Reinventing Germany Berg: Oxford 1996 pp 163-165; Stefan Aust The Baader-Meinhof Group, Bodley
Head: London 1987 provides the classic account of the gang
17 Published in The Daily Telegraph 23 July 2005
18 Confidential information from a London school teacher 25 July 2005
19 On the record but anonymous interview with officers from the Metropolitan Police and Special Branch, Central
London, 25 February 2005
20 See The Washington Post 20 August 2005
21 It was not, he said, about whether ‘intercept evidence’ was safe to use because the information identifying sources of
danger came from individuals not from phone taps (a point apparently contradicted by a former Director General of MI5,
Sir Stephen Lander, on the Today Programme who did appear to think that intercept evidence lay at the heart of the issue,
the use of which he now opposed).
David Bickford, a former legal adviser to MI5, the Security Service, and MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, believes the
ongoing objections to the use of such evidence ‘defy logic’ in the current climate. “The intelligence community abroad
looks aghast at our position restricting the use of phone intercepts as evidence. It can’t understand it. I find it difficult to find
any logical explanation. It just flows from an obsession in certain circles that we have to keep everything secret simply for
the sake of secrecy.”
22 e.g. Professor Connor Gairty’s arguments put before an invited audience at RUSI at a pilot BBC Radio Four programme
on 30 June 2005
23 Philip Webster: “9/11 wake-up call ignored, Blair says in swipe at obstructive judges” The Times 27 July 2005
24 Speaking in Central London 22 February 2005
25 www.mi5.gov.uk/output/Page26.html
26 Intelligence and Security Committee Report 1998-9, para 62.
27 The Guardian 19 July 2005
28 See The Butler Review into Weapons of Mass Destruction, 2004 pp 17-20. Interestingly, it has been suggested that the
AQ Khan network was identified as the result of careful investigation by MI5 who noticed a number of students from
Pakistan attending various universities where nuclear matters were taught. Whilst each individual student seemed to be
engaged on quite harmless studies, when the group was analysed as a whole, it was found to have significant understanding
of uranium enrichment techniques and weapons systems. Confidential information, June 2005.
29 Confidential information, July 2005. The University is situated in the London area.
30 On the record but non-attributable meeting, Central London 25 February 2005
31 Vikram Dodd: “Special Branch to track Muslims across the UK”. The Guardian 20 July 2005
32 “Communists ‘tried to infiltrate British school system’”, The Guardian 1 July 2005
33 Marc Sageman: Understanding terror networks. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. p 55
34 Anthony Glees: The Stasi Files. Simon & Schuster p 350
35 Fears over CIA ‘university spies.’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4603271.stm
36 Yael Shahar: Islamic radicals in the UK. www.ict.org.il/ The full list of banned proscribed terrorist groups in the UK
can be found on the Home Office website (www.homeoffice.gov.uk/terrorism/threat/groups/) and includes such
organisations as Al Qaeda, Groupe Islamique Armee and Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.
37 Steve Coll and Susan B Glasser: “In London, Islamic radicals found a haven.” Washington Post 10 July 2005
38 David Leppard and Nick Fielding: “The hate”. The Sunday Times 10 July 2005
39 This refers to the famous scene in the film Star Wars where the lead characters enter a bar to be confronted by a myriad
of different alien species, all with different skills, motives and services.
40 Coll and Glasser, Washington Post
41 Gordon Corera: “How militant Islam found a home in London”, Jane’s Intelligence Review, August 2002, p 16.
42 Shahar: Islamic radicals in the UK
43 Jimmy Burns and Stephen Fidler: “Different approach to tackling terrorism exposed.” The Financial Times, 12 July
2005
44 Ibid
45 Corera: Jane’s Intelligence Review, p 18
46 Project Contest was the Home Office report drawn up to examine the government’s relations with the Muslim
community, in particular the younger generation.
47 Home Office: Relations with the Muslim Communit: Summary p 2. 10 May 2005
48 Youth and terrorism. www.teror.gen.tr
49 Charles Guthrie: “Taming terrorism.” Policy Exchange, London 14 March 2005
50 Paul Kelso: “Young Muslims ‘fall prey to extremists” The Guardian 27 December 2001
51 Corera: Jane’s Intelligence Review, p 17
52 Ed Blanche, “Al Qaeda recruitment targets the intelligent, disciplined and devout”, Jane’s Intelligence Review, January
2002, p 28
53 Sageman: p 76
54 Sageman: p 78
55 Sageman: p 92
56 Sageman: p 160
57 Religion, a personal matter. GfK Worldwide www.gfk.com
58 www.monitoring-group.co.uk/this%20week/racism_simmering_in_british_schools.htm
59 Muslim political activism in higher education presentation at
LSE Department of Anthropology 1 June 2005
60 Sebastian Rotella: “Europe’s boys of Jihad.” LA Times, 2 April 2005
61 Nick Fielding: “Al Qaeda lures middle classes to join its ranks.” Sunday Times, 3 April 2005
62 “MI5: We did not receive a warning.” Daily Telegraph, 17 July 2005
63 Suicide bombers ordinary lives. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4678837.stm
64 Daniel McGrory and Zahid Hussain: “Cousin listened to boasts about suicide mission.”
The Times 22 July 2005
65 Explosion plot of ‘walking angel’. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/gloucestershire/4305161.stm
66 Alex Sholem: Terror plot. www.totallyjewish.com/news/stories/?disp_type=0&disp_story=wrXuia
67 Mark Honigsbaum and Vikram Dodd: “From Gloucester to Afghanistan: the making of a shoe bomber.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1430964,00.html
68 Mike McGrath: “S013 halts suicide bomb plan.” The Job, 11 March 2005
69 Terror suspect admits plane plot. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bristol/4304223.stm
70 British Muslims deplore decision to extradite Babar Ahmad to the US. www.mcb.org.uk/
71 British man ran terror websites. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4311795.stm
72 Terror suspect facing extradition. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4554829.stm
73 Rajeev Syal and Chris Hastings: “Al Qaeda terror trio linked to London School of ‘Extremists’”
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2002%2F01%2F27%2Fnlse27.xml
74 Corera: Jane’s Intelligence Review, p 15
75 Stephen McGinty: “The English Islamic terrorist”, The Scotsman http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?
tid=1204&id=763812002
76 Will Woodward: “Hijack suspect was South Bank student”, The Guardian
www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,1300,564459,00.html
77 Blanche: Jane’s Intelligence Review, p. 27
78 http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/moussaoui/usmouss71602spind.pdf
79 http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/us/0207/moussoui.timeline/frameset.exclude.html
80 Time magazine, 27 October 2003
81 Chris Lamb: “Former Durham student blamed for terrorist attack on Israelis.”Palatinate
http://palatinate.dsu.org.uk/News/328/
82 Uzi Mahnaimi and Christopher Lamb: “Ex-British student in hit squad threat.”
The Times, 6 March 2005
83 Sam Knight: “Diary of British jihadi unearthed in Pakistan” The Times 08 August 2005
84 “MI5: We did not receive a warning”. Daily Telegraph 17 July 2005
85 From student to terror suspect, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1773477.stm
86 Chris Johnston: “I did not pledge to bin Laden”, The Times 23 May 2005
87 Farhad Khosrokhavar: Suicide bombers, Allahs new martyrs, Pluto Press, 2005, p 192
88 http://news.scotsman.com/archive.cfm?id=172432005
89www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/04/01/nterr101.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/04/01/ixnewstop.html
90 “MI5: We did not receive a warning”, Daily Telegraph 17 July 2005
91 “MI5 admits: We let terrorists slip through nets.” Daily Telegraph 29 July 2004
92 Suicide bomber wife cleared, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3876759.stm
93 Musharraf targets hate preachers as arrests mount http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?
type=worldNews&storyID=2005-07-21T175405Z_01_SCH164382_RTRUKOC_0_SECURITY-PAKISTAN.xml
94 Home Office: Young Muslims and extremism, p 10, 10 May 2005
95 www.hizb-ut-tahrir.org/english/english.html
96 Khosrokhavar: Suicide bombers, p 173.
97 The Netherlands General Intelligence and Security Service annual report 2004.
98 Interview with Community Security Trust, March 2005
99 Khosrokhavar: Suicide bombers, p 198.
100 Home Office: Young Muslims and extremism. p 27 10 May 2005
101 Hizb ut-Tahrir: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/3182271.stm
102 Ibid.
103 Michael Whine: Islamist organisations on the Internet. Taken from Terrorism and political violence Frank Cass,
Spring 1999, p 127
104 Interview with Community Security Trust. March 2005.
105 Whine: Terrorism and Political Violence, p 129.
106 Uzbek embassy demonstrators held. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4555847.stm
107 Daniel McGrory: “Britain ‘is haven for terrorists’” The Times 21 May 2005.
108 www.standforislam.org.
109 Leaked British government dossier exposes plan to subvert Islam. www.1924.org/opinion/index.php?
id=2002_0_34_0_M
110 www.hizb.org.uk/press/index.php?id=2130_0_45_0_M
111 Nick Craven, Beth Hale and James Chapman: “Cleric: bombs are your fault.”
Daily Mail 20 July 2005
112 Al Muhajiroun in the UK: an interview with Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, 23 March 2004
www.jamestown.org/news_details.php?news_id=38
113 Interview with Anjem Choudary, BBC Hardtalk 5 May 2003.
114 Nick Fielding: “Terror links of the Tottenham Ayatollah.” Sunday Times. 24 July 2005.
115 Al Muhajiroun in the UK: an interview with Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed.
116 Ibid
117 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Muhajiroun
118 Fielding: Sunday Times 24 July 2005
119 Mike Whine: Al Muhajiroun: The portal for Britain’s suicide terrorists. http://www.ict.org.il/articles/articledet.cfm?
articleid=484
120 Interview with Union of Jewish Students. April 2005
121 Abul Taher: Higher call to arms, www.hvk.org/articles/0500/38.html Taken from The Guardian 16/05/00
122 Corera: Jane’s Intelligence Review, p 18
Lee Elliot Major: “Muslim student group linked to terror attacks” The Guardian
http://education.guardian.co.uk/students/story/0,9860,554652,00.html
123 Fielding: Sunday Times 24 July 2005
124 Anjem Choudary. BBC Hardtalk 5 May 2003
125 www.al-ghurabaa.co.uk/
126 Sean O’Neill and Richard Ford: “Extremist cleric staged Al Qaeda recruiting rally,”
The Times, 19 January 2005
127. From election launch to PR panic http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/frontpage/4461695.stm
128 “Inside the sect that loves terror.” Sunday Times. 07 August 2005.
129 Abul Taher and Dipesh Gadher: “Radical cleric warned of a ‘big operation’.”
The Times 11 July 2005 www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1688184,00.html
130 http://forum.MPACUKuk.org/showthread.php?p=27774#post27774
131 www.nusonline.co.uk/news/270231.aspx
132 Operation Muslim Vote. Channel 4 16 May 2005.
133 Why Masroor must pay heavily: http://www.MPACUKuk.org/content/view/4/762/103/
134 Mosques to blame for rise of terror groups? www.MPACUKuk.org/content/view/4/777/103/
135 www.MPACUKuk.org/content/view/4/783/103/
136 Blanche, Jane’s Intelligence Review, p 27.
137 Sarah Greenberg, Former USF professor stands trial for funding terrorism. www.ict.org.il/spotlight/det.cfm?id=1053
138 Matthew Barakat: Muslim man convicted of urging holy war. Associated Press
139 Interview with former BNP member, 28 June 2005.
140 Interview with UJS April 2005.
141 BNP sees increase in total votes. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/frontpage/4519347.stm
142 Paul Waugh and Chris Millar: “Clarke blasts ‘cynical’ BNP bus bomb leaflet”,
Evening Standard 12 July 2005
143 Confidential interview 23 July 2005
144 BNP youth chief at centre of university row. www.salfordadvertiser.co.uk/news/index/articles/article_id=1989.html
145 Campus uproar over BNP student
www.manchesteronline.co.uk/news/s/53/53217_campus_uproar_over_bnp_student.html
146 ibid
147 “Young, Nazi and Stupid!”, Searchlight Magazine www.searchlightmagazine.com/index.php?
link=template&story=41
148 Abul Taher: “Call to expel BNP student recruiter.” The Observer 10 February 2002.
149 Stop the facist BNP www.naar.org.uk/saar/bnp%20briefing.pdf#search='Nick%20Griffin%20and%20universities'
150 Confidential interview 23 July 2005
151 Drive out the fascist infiltrators www.workerspower.com/index.php?id=26%2C101%2C1%2C0%2C1%2C0
152 www.bnp.org.uk/freedom/Vof57-15.pdf
153 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/BNP_uk_manifesto.pdf
154 http://historical-studies.ncl.ac.uk/postgrad_forum/edition_three/edition_three_AliA.htm
155 “Lessons in hatred.” The Independent 6 May 2004
156 Nick Fielding: “All quiet in the animal lab.” Sunday Times 29 May 2005
157 “Activists access university staff details.” Oxford Times 20 May 2005
158 www.directaction.info/news_july06_05.htm
159 “Clarke bars US animal activist.” Sunday Times 28 August 2005
160 Timetable - www.ar2005.info/index.php?module=htmlpages&func=display&pid=5
161 Interview with managing director resources and operations at a UK university
162 Ibid
163 Interview with Michael Wainwright, Brunel Socialist Society.
164 Interview with head of security at a UK university.
165 AFP The Peninsula Qatar 12 may 2005.
166 Interview with Brian Cumming, vice president: clubs and societies, Brunel University. 16 may 2005
167 Shaid Nabi. PhD student, Manchester University. “Muslim political activism in higher education.” presentation at
LSE Department of Anthropology 1 June 2005.
168 Duncan Campbell, Richard Norton-Taylor and Vikram Dodd: “Words of warning backed by little clear evidence.”
The Guardian 23 April 2005.
169 Mark Stollery: The threat of single issue groups to the UK. RUSI – 22 June 2005.
170 Police chief urges terror rethink: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/4451831.stm
171 Metropolitan Police press enquiry desk. 26 January 2005.
172 “Foiled UK plots – from sarin gas to hijackings.” The Times www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1697259,00.html
173 India jails ‘plane crash plotter’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4708615.stm
174 Confidential information 30 August 2005
175 Nick Fielding: Defending the realm – inside MI5 and the war on terror. 2004 p 12
176 Fielding: Defending the realm. p 313
177 Demos speech. June 2005
178 Ian Sample, Matthew Taylor and Polly Curtis: “Foreign scientists barred amid terror fears.”
The Guardian 19 July 2005
179 Phil Baty and Paul Hill: “Crackdown on campus.”
Times Higher Educational Supplement 22 July 2005
180 Interview with Special Branch. February 2005
181 Daniel McGrory: “Promise of martyrdom and fame lures Western recruits.” The Times 25 June 2005
182 Demos speech July 2005
183 Richard Norton-Taylor and Duncan Campbell: “Intelligence officials were braced for an offensive – but lowered
threat levels.” The Guardian 8 July 2005
184 Shahar: Islamic radicals in the UK and www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/01/26/1043533954503.html?oneclick=true
185 Sir David Veness 22 February 2005
186 Campbell, Norton-Taylor and Dodd: The Guardian 23 April 2005.
187 Polly Curtis: “Minister urges action on campus extremists.” The Guardian. 20 July 2005
188 www.universitiesuk.ac.uk
189 Polly Curtis: “Blair’s ban provokes mixed reaction on campus.” The Guardian 8 August 2005.
190 Abu Taher: “A Call To Arms” The Guardian , 16 May 2005
191 From dawa to jihad. The various threats from radical Islam to the democratic legal order. Ministry of the Iinterior
and Kingdom Relations p 51.
192 Sir David Veness, 22 February 2005.