Friday, March 16, 2007

Britain: Islamic extremists 'infiltrate Oxbridge'

Leading universities including Oxford and Cambridge have been targeted by Islamic extremists who remain widely active on campuses, a prominent academic is warning. Up to 48 British universities have been infiltrated by fundamentalists and the threat posed by radical groups must be "urgently addressed", according to Prof Anthony Glees. The claim calls into question the Government's attempted crackdown on Islamic extremism in universities and casts doubt on claims by Bill Rammell, the Higher Education Minister, that the problem is not widespread.

Prof Glees will warn the Association of University Chief Security Officers (Aucso) next month that the disbanded extremist group, al-Muhajiroun, claims to have infiltrated "the main campuses such as Cambridge, Oxford, the London School of Economics and Imperial College". His speech on "radicalism in universities" also states that at its peak before the July 7 bombings in 2005, al-Muhajiroun had a presence at "more than 48 universities and faculties", and that Omar Bakri Mohammed, the group's founder, claims it is "still operational" in several campuses.

Prof Glees, the director of Brunel University's Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, said: "We must accept this problem is widespread and underestimated. Unless clear and decisive action against campus extremism is taken, the security situation in the UK can only deteriorate." Following a report from Prof Glees showing that 31 universities and colleges had hard-line Islamic groups within their campuses, the Department for Education and Skills last year issued guidelines on dealing with any extremism.

Student Islamic societies have faced growing scrutiny after it emerged that one of 12 men charged in connection with the alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airliners was president of the Islamic Society at London Metropolitan University. Last year, Aucso launched a "counter-terrorism" group to tackle the spread of Islamic fundamentalism on campuses.

Prof Glees called on the Government to provide extra investment in campus security and urged university officials to interview undergraduates to ensure that they were bona fide students.

A spokesman for Oxford University said: "We always take any extremism seriously and work closely with the police on any form of extremism that might affect our students or staff." A Cambridge University spokesman said he was not aware of any current extremist activity but that the university "remained vigilant". The Government's controversial guidance asked university staff to "monitor" student Islamic societies and report any "Asian-looking" students they suspected of extremism to the security services. Student groups attacked the move as "bearing on the side of McCarthyism". Other critics suggest that the guidelines are widely ignored. Chris Pope, an associate fellow of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, said: "My understanding is that this problem is ongoing and expanding in some campuses."

A spokesman for Universities UK, the umbrella group for British vice-chancellors, said: "In the rare event of such problems, universities work very closely with the police and other authorities."

In a recent report from a London-based Arabic newspaper, Anjem Choudary, the former head of al-Muhajiroun in Britain, who joined the group as a student at the University of Surrey, confirmed that while the movement officially disbanded in 2005, "the students of Omar Bakri continue to preach on campuses".

Last year, Dhiren Barot, said to be al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's "UK general", was jailed for 40 years for planning terrorist attacks. Barot, 34, faked his identity in order to study at Brunel University. The London School of Ecomonics and Imperial College were unable to comment. Mr Rammell said: "Our assessment has not changed. Violent extremism in the name of Islam is a real, credible and sustained threat to the UK and there is evidence of a serious, but not widespread risk of violent extremism in the name of Islam on our university campuses."

Source




British university is accused of censoring lecture on Islamic anti-Semititism

The University of Leeds was accused of infringing free speech last night when it cancelled a lecture on "Islamic anti-Semitism" by a German academic. Matthias Koentzel arrived at the university yesterday morning to begin a three-day programme of lectures and seminars, but was told that it had been called off on "security grounds".

Dr Koentzel, a political scientist who has lectured around the world on the antiSemitic ideology of Islamist groups, told The Times there were concerns that he would be attacked. He said that he was "outraged" that his meetings had been cancelled and had yet to receive an explanation. The university, which acted after complaints from Muslim students, denied that it was interfering with the academic freedom of Dr Koentzel, and said that proper arrangements for stewarding the meeting had not been made. The lecture, entitled "Hitler's Legacy: Islamic antiSemitism in the Middle East", was organised by the university's German department and publicised three weeks ago. A large attendance had been expected.

Dr Koentzel, a former adviser to the German Green Party, said: "I have been told that it has had to be cancelled for security reasons. It seems there were concerns that there could be violence against my person. "I have lectured in lots of countries on this subject. I gave the same talk at Yale University recently, and this is the first time I have been invited to lecture in the UK. Nothing like this has ever happened before - this is censorship. "It is a controversial area but I am accustomed to debate. I value the integrity of academic debate and I feel that it really is in danger here. This is a very important subject and if you cannot address it on university property, then what is a university for?"

Dr Koentzel, a research associate at the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said that he had been shown two e-mails that had been received, which objected to his lecture. One, apparently written by a student, said: "As a Muslim and an Arab this has come to me as a great shock. The only intention that you have for doing this is to increase hatred as I clearly regard it as an open racist attack."

Ahmed Sawalem, president of the university's student Islamic Society, confirmed that he had contacted the office of Professor Michael Arthur, the Vice-Chancellor, to register an official complaint. "The title of the talk is provocative and I have searched the internet to read his writings and they are not very pleasant," Mr Sawalem said. "We are not opposed to freedom of expression. We just sent a complaint, we did not ask for the talk to be cancelled."

The university authorities contacted the German department on Tuesday and asked for a change in the title. The department agreed to relabel the talk as "The Nazi Legacy: the export of antiSemitism to the Middle East". Yesterday morning, the head of the German department, Professor Stuart Taberner, was called to a meeting with the Vice-Chancellor's staff and the head of security. After the meeting, Dr Koentzel's lecture and workshops were cancelled.

Annette Seidel Arpaci, an academic in the German department, said: "This is an academic talk by a scholar, it is not a political rally. The sudden cancellation is a sell-out of academic freedom, especially freedom of speech, at the University of Leeds." A spokes-woman for the university said that it valued freedom of speech and added that the cancellation of the meeting had been a bureaucratic issue. "The decision to cancel the meeting has nothing to do with academic freedom, freedom of speech, antiSemitism or Islam-ophobia, and those claiming that is the case are making mischief," she said.

What he wrote

" AntiSemitism based on the notion of a Jewish world conspiracy is not rooted in Islamic tradition but, rather, in European ideological models. The decisive transfer of this ideology to the Muslim world took place between 1937 and 1945 under the impact of Nazi propaganda . . . "Although Islamism is an independent, antiSemitic, antimodern mass movement, its main early promoters, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Mufti and the Qassamites in Palestine, were supported financially and ideologically by agencies of the German National Socialist Government."

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

BOOK REVIEW

Pros: Fast-paced spy-thriller to an unbelievable ending.

Cons: Everyone thought this couldn't happen, then it did.

Mr. Spirko discusses all the issues confronting the Middle East through the minds of both the Palestinians and Israelis. His understanding of the collective mindsets (those who are continually at war with each other) brings a new dimension of reality to the Palestinian question, which has now become the ever-persistent Israeli obstacle. How to achieve peace in the Middle East? If the Palestinian problem can be solved where both sides achieve peace, then world terrorism will go away. Mr. Spirko is more right than anybody knows. ...

CLEVELAND, Ohio – THE PALESTINE CONSPIRACY, a genre spy-thriller by Robert Spirko, was fourth on the best-seller list at Atlasbooks, Inc., a national book distributor.



Spirko, a financial and geo-political analyst who has given his advice to the National Security Council, turned his attention to the Middle East in 1987, after discovering several common elements related to the Middle East question. He wrote down his analysis, and when he was finished, he not only had a solution to the quagmire, he had a story to tell. THE PALESTINE CONSPIRACY foreshadowed the Persian Gulf War by three years, and the resultant Iraq War followed by the Sept. 11 attack.



Spirko states, "The chief threat in the region I see right now is the threat to Saudi Arabia by Al Qaeda. If Al Qaeda were to overthrow the present royal family in Saudi Arabia, cutting off the oil supply to western nations including Japan and China, it would bring down entire world economies. France and Germany would be begging us to go to war to retake those oil wells. It would be World War III."



“If such a scenario were to occur,” he reiterates, “France and the European economies would collapse in a matter of weeks.”



“Another looming concern is Iran which wants to develop nuclear weapons to couple with their Shahab 4, 5 & 6 missiles on the drawing boards which have a range to hit London, Israel, all of Europe, southern Russia and the United States. Also, the Iranian government has said it initially had 300 centrifuges to enrich uranium to weapons grade material. They have increased that to 3,000. They will soon increase that again to 10,000 centrifuges,” Spirko says. “They have the additional capacity to add another 20,000 centrifuges in mass production techniques that will enable them to produce at least seven nuclear bombs in about a year. Where did they get these centrifuges?”



Spirko answers that question by stating an Arab proverb, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”



“Simply put,” Spirko explains, “they probably got them from Saddam Hussein before the Iraq War started and were probably smuggled out of Iraq and into Iran just like he did his air force of 600 Soviet fighter planes. In other words, he gave them to his former enemy rather than let them be destroyed on the ground.”



“Why would he have done any differently with the 30,000 centrifuges he supposedly had on a decentralized basis inside Iraq before the war?” Spirko asks. “Isn’t it strange that Iran could come up with a nuclear weapons program in about six months to a year when it took the United States six years under the Manhattan Project with 5,000 of the world’s most brilliant scientists like Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr, Seaborg, Einstein, Fermi, and others working on it?”



Another point Spirko makes on the Mideast is that, “It is time for the Israelis and Palestinians to return to the Camp David Peace Talks or some other place, resume where they left off and "freeze in place" the already-agreed-upon negotiating points,” Spirko says.



"And, it's all related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict which I said back in 1987 was the crux of my book. It always has been, and always will be until it's settled,” Spirko says. “That linkage is exactly what Osama Bin Laden stated in a taped message aired the weekend before the election in November of 2004. Whether you believe him or not is beside the point. That's what's he told us, and we'd better take that into account."



The novel is a mass market paperback produced by Olive Grove Publishers, and can be purchased at area bookstores through Ingram Book Group, New Leaf Distribution, and Baker and Taylor, priced at $14.99, ISBN 0-9752508-0-9. THE PALESTINE CONSPIRACY can also be ordered on the web at www.atlasbooks.com, or email orders from: order@bookmasters.com, or from Barnes & Nobles, Border's, Dalton's, efollett.com & Follett bookstores at colleges and universities, WaldenBooks, Amazon.com, Walmart.com, Target.com and other popular retail bookstores. Or, readers and store managers can call 1-800-BOOKLOG, or 800-247-6553 direct, to order.