The Centre For Social Cohesion

We reported a couple of weeks ago on Sheikh El-Faisal, soon to be released early from prison after his 2003 conviction for incitement.

Acres of newsprint today are given over to reporting and commenting about yesterday’s guilty verdict of five young British Muslims for conspiracy to make and explode a 600kg bomb somewhere in the Home Counties, either a Kent shopping centre or a London nightclub.

Much of this newspaper copy is devoted to delineating the links that only now can be made known publicly, but which were long known to MI5, between those convicted yesterday and two of the 7/7 London suicide bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer. Much editorial comment today debates how culpable MI5 may have been in deciding not to place Khan and Tanweer under 24-hour surveillance after their links to these suspects became known to it, and how far the whole matter should be made the subject of official enquiry.

Important though these issue undoubtedly are, I shall leave it to others to debate them. Hindsight always offers 20/20 vision.

Of far greater potential importance to me than the question of how culpable MI5 may have been for not acting on information it had about the links between Khan and Tanweer and those terror suspects convicted yesterday is a brief report in today’s Times about something else that also entered the public domain only yesterday.

Perhaps the most interesting response to the ‘Bluewater cell’ convictions is this piece in today's Telegraph, written by Ed Husain, a former London-based student who was also once a member of the radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT).

HT were one of the groups which Tony Blair promised to proscribe after 7/7, when he claimed that ‘the rules of the game have changed.’ But the rules did not change, and although David Cameron also recently calling for a ban on HT in Britain, they remain legal and extremely active - not least on UK campuses.

In its submission of written evidence to a House of Commons Select Committee on Global Security, so the Sunday Telegraph reports, the Church of England claims Britain’s recent foreign policy has been counterproductive in terms of fighting Islamist terror. Rather than helping to minimise the risks of suffering it, Britain’s role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq has only served to recruit British Muslims to the cause of jihad and increase the risk it faces of suffering terror attacks.

According to the newspaper report, the church in its submission called on Parliament to use Tony’s Blair’s departure from government as an opportunity to ‘recalibrate its foreign policy towards the USA, Europe and the Middle East’.

In a comment piece in today’s Times, David Aaronovitch takes the Church of England to task for suggesting the invasion of Iraq has boosted recruitment to the ranks of Islamist terror. He cites the radicalisation of Ed Husain in 1993-4, as well as that of other British Muslims who became radicalised well before 2003, as evidence that western foreign policy has been less instrumental in causing Islamic terrorism than ‘Muslims and Islam in general’.

I do not see how the fact that recruitment to Islamic terrorism began well before the 2003 invasion of Iraq shows that the invasion has not enormously increased recruitment to the ranks of Muslims waging jihad both here, there, and elsewhere. And I think it must be conceded that it has done. See the overwhelming evidence that it has done in the very illuminating recent article 'The Iraq Effect' by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank.

Nor do I see how the pre-existence of Islamic terrorism before Bush declared war on terror shows that its ultimate cause resides less in western foreign policy than it does in the very nature of Islam and its adherents.

All eight people terror supsects arrested in connection with last week’s attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow turn out to have been NHS employees. Five were qualified doctors, two trainee doctors, and one a hospital laboratory technician.

According to a report in today’s Daily Telegraph about the trial of three men who have pleaded guilty to charges of ‘cyber-terrorism’, as long as three years ago ‘the use of doctors for terrorist purposes was being discussed in jihadi terrorist circles’.

According to a report in today’s Times, the Public Accounts Committee has condemned the government for having ‘left itself “financially exposed” over the 2012 Olympic Games and at risk of letting costs spiral put of control’. The basis for its charge has been the government's having let the original Olympic budget treble to £9 billion.

There is, however, a far more grave charge concerning the 2012 Olympics to which the government stands open. This is that, by allowing the Games to go ahead in London in the present international climate, it has exposed Londoners to a far greater risk than they need otherwise have to face of suffering some Islamist terrorist attack, both while the Games are taking place and during the run up to them.

A demonstration reportedly took place yesterday outside the Old Bailey in protest at the six-year sentences handed down to four men convicted of inciting hatred and violence at a demonstation held in February last year in protest at the Danish cartoons of Mohammed.

Newspaper reports about yesterday's demonstration put me in mind of two jokes about lawyers.

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.

While Britain’s university lecturers and Vice Chancellors obdurately continue to refuse to offer any form of assistance in the fight against on-campus violent extremism, a trial currently underway in a Glasgow courtroom suggests that the problem towards which Britain's academics seem willing to turn a complacent blind eye could well extend much further than the University sector.