At the end of May of this year, delegates to the annual congress of UCU, the trade union of Britain's academics, unanimously rejected what that union described as being the government’s plan to require them to report those of their students whom they suspected of being involved in or of supporting violent extremism.
I wonder how many of these delegates, if any, choked over their cornflakes this morning when they read in their newspapers of the conviction at the Old Bailey yesterday on terror-related charges of four first-year Bradford University undergraduates, plus a run-away school-boy from London who had been recruited by the Bradford terror-ring over the internet.
One of the Bradford undergraduates had used a computer in his university library to plan a trip to a jihadi training-camp in Pakistan’s North-West frontier. And when police raided the homes of the students, they found on their computers copious quantities of terror-related material, including al-Qaeda manuals.
Prior to their arrest, the extremist outlook of these undergraduates was not unknown to their fellow students. They had been expelled from their University’s Islamic Society after a meeting of it, in February 2006, at which one of them had called on his fellow Muslim students to kill anyone who dared re-publish the infamous Danish cartoons of Mohammed.
Apart from expelling the group, the Islamic Society took no further action against them. This is an omission with which their university seemingly remains satisfied. A spokesman for it has reportedly stated:
‘Both the [Islamic] society’s president and the Students’ Union took swift action on the matter, and we are satisfied with how it was handled at the time.
‘The university offers an environment for open and free debate, particularly through the societies, and we are keen to preserve this.
‘We do not tolerate behaviour that is illegal and are always ready to work with the relevant authorities to help prosecute it.’
Incitement to murder, it seems, remains one form of criminality that Bradford University appears willing to tolerate in the interests of freedom of expression on campus.
Clearly, it is going to require from their students an act of criminality on campus of an altogether different order of magnitude before those who run and teach at Britain's universities will be shaken out of their current complacency in the face of the very real threat that is posed by the presence at them of students who preach or worse still practise violent extremism.
Comments (1)
I think that the government needs to make it a crime to know about terrorist activity but not report it. Then, university authorities would have no option but to report terrorists. It is irresponsible of universities to adopt such a tolerent attitude towards murderers of free people.
Posted by Senior | July 26, 2007 6:40 PM
Posted on July 26, 2007 18:40