The Centre For Social Cohesion

Five members of the ‘Bluewater cell’ have today been convicted and sentenced to minimums of 17 and a half and 20 years in prison at the Old Bailey.

The al-Qaeda cell had aimed to hit a string of targets around London, including the Bluewater shopping centre and the Ministry of Sound nightclub.

Once upon a time in a not so far-off kingdom, still somewhat anachronistically known as a united one, there lived two lads each named Ed, although neither was given that name at birth.

One had been originally named ‘Muhammed’ and so disenchanted with the kingdom in which he grew up did this Ed become that, as a young man, he joined a group of coreligionists bent upon turning it into a caliphate under Shariah law.

One of the ‘commitments’ expressed on the site of the ‘Enough’ coalition - due to march through the streets of London in a fortnight to oppose the ‘Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories’ - is that its members all ‘reject the use of violence in their single or joint actions and uphold the principle of non-violent campaigning.’

Not for the first time, we have reason to doubt whether the Enough coalition is telling the whole - or indeed any part of the - truth here.

Among the organisation signed up to the Enough coalition is the Muslim Association of Britain. MAB counts among its heads the Hamas supporter Azzam Tamimi.

A recent article in the International Herald Tribune provides its readers with some not entirely reassuring details about how young British Muslim students attending their country's burgeoning madrassas are being taught citizenship in them.

With the help of a £100K government-grant, a model citizenship curriculum is being drawn up, it reports, that is currently being pilotted by ten Muslim clerics teaching at six Bradford madrassas. Students receiving citizenship education according to this curriculum are reportedly being asked to to debate such tricky questions in civics as the following:

A group of Islamic extremists want to buy fertiliser that could be used to make a bomb. Should the shopkeeper sell it to them, even if he suspects it will be used for “holy war”?

Ahmed, whose jihadi friends want to attack a local supermarket in retaliation for the war in Iraq. Is it right for Ahmad to harm innocent Britons just because their government invaded a Muslim country?'

So far the country has been most fortunate not to have suffered any fatalities as a result of the latest wave of violent extremism that has descended upon it. We cannot yet know, however, whether all those involved in the violence have yet been rounded up.

Since the attempted attacks in London and Glasgow last week, representatives of many of the country’s largest Muslim organisations have called on British Muslims to help the police catch the perpetrators.

Even the Muslim Council of Britain – formerly reviled for its refusal to unambiguously denounce terrorism – has added its voice to the growing chorus.

Before joining Civitas, I spent over thirty years teaching philosophy and religious studies at two London so-called ‘new' universities. One was an erstwhile polytechnic in north London; the other an amalgam of ex-teachers’ training colleges in south London whose students were very similar in background to those whom I taught in the inner-city campus across the river.

A series of co-ordinated suicide attacks against a small town in northern Iraq by al-Qaeda has caused the highest death toll of any single attack since the conflict began.

Early report say that more than 200 people were killed when five explosive laden trucks were detonated in the town of Kahtaniya on Tuesday evening.

But this was no ordinary truck bombing for the victims were mainly Yazidis, members of an obscure pre-Christian religion.

Woolwich Crown Court, in South East London, learned today that MI5 agents had filmed a 'Muslim terrorist camp’ in the Lake District in August 2004.

Almost a year later, Muktar Ibrahim, who attended the “military-style” terror camp, failed to detonate his rucksack on a crowded London tube.

Al Qaeda is set to launch a Cyber-Jihad on the 11th of November, claims Debka.com. The Israeli news website claims to have seen Arabic intercepts announcing the launch of the ‘e-Jihad’ and calling on thousands of Islamist hackers to back them up.

The website said that al Qaeda’s electronic experts will start attacking Western, Jewish, Israeli, apostate Muslim and Shia Websites, expanding the fight day by day.

Samina Malik, the self-proclaimed 'lyrical terrorist' who posted poems supporting al-Qaeda on her website, has been given a nine-month suspended prison sentence under the 2000 Terrorism Act.

Malik, who worked at Heathrow Airport, once wrote on a social networking website that her favourite past-times included "watching videos by my Muslim brothers in Iraq, yep the beheading ones, watching video messages by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri and other videos which show massacres of the kaffirs."

The Radical Middle Way, a government-funded organisation set up to counter radical Islamic teachings in the UK, recently held two events in Birmingham (15/01/08) and London (17/01/08). The views expressed by some of the speakers on the topic ‘Why Europe needs Islam’, arguably call the aims and methods of the organisation into question. Mustafa Ceric, the grand mufti of Bosnia-Herzegovina, told the audience in Birmingham, pre-dominantly made up of young Muslims, that living under the Islamic caliphate was “one of the “principles of Islam”. He said:

“If, as Sheikh Qaradawi says, Islam is Aqidi, Shariah and Khalifah or Imamate, then we are missing one of the principles of Islam because we do not have global leadership."

Who is it that can keep London safe in the run-up to the Olympic Games?

If you have been tempted to answer either the ‘Metropolitan Police’ or the ‘Special Branch’, then you would have been wrong.

That is the view of the recently retired head of the Special Branch’s Muslim Contact Unit.

Today’s Times reports that 20,000 Muslim leaders have just issued a declaration condemning terrorism as un-Islamic. Their declaration was made at a conference held yesterday at the Dar Uloom madrassa in Deoband, northern India. It runs:

“Islam is a religion of mercy for all humanity. Islam sternly condemns all kinds of oppression, violence and terrorism.”

Senior Indian officals have warned have warned that Sikh militant groups in the UK may be planning and funding attacks on targets in India.

On 4 March, the BBC's File on Four programme quoted senior Indian police offiers as saying that money raised by Sikh groups in the UK is being used to "fund militant activities in the Punjab".

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) has written an open letter to the Guardian criticising their decision to cover the soon-to-be launched Quilliam Foundation, a thinktank dedicated to countering Islamic extremism in the UK.

The letter, written by Inayat Bunglwala, the MCB's assistant secretary-general, additionally queried the article's claim that UK Islamist groups have previously declared their moderate opponents "apostates" and attacked the Guardian writer's decision to quote Usama Hasan, one of the group's advisors, in the article. It also criticised the Quilliam Foundation's members for supporting government anti-terrorism measures.

Abu Qatada, a radical preacher described as Osama bin Laden’s “right hand man in Europe,” has successfully appealed a decision to deport him from the UK.

The Court of Appeal ruled in favour of Abu Qatada after deciding that evidence alleged to be obtained under torture may form part of a future trial in Jordan, the country where it was proposed he should be deported to. The government has said it will challenge the ruling, with Home Office minister Tony McNulty saying he believed the deportation would still go ahead.

The government has unveiled new plans to target radicalisation within the Muslim community.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith today announced that an extra 300 police jobs were being created with their mandate being to "dissuade that very small minority of people" who may be plotting acts of terrorism. Smith has also revealed that moderate Muslim clerics are to be imported from Pakistan in an attempt to combat extremism in British mosques.

The jury in the London suicide bombings case has been shown footage of Mohammad Siddique Khan saying his farewells to his baby daughter.

Siddique Khan, the ringleader of the July 7th 2005 terrorist attacks on London, tells his daughter that he "has to do this thing for our future". The video was shown as part of the trial against Waheed Ali, Sadeer Saleem and Mohammed Shakil, who deny involvement in the attacks.

A senior High Court judge has ruled that the Government does not have the legislative power to freeze terror suspects’ bank accounts. The government viewed these powers as being key in tackling domestic terrorism.

Commenting on the case, the judge described the freezing of terror suspects’ assets as “another example of an immediate reaction without it being thought through properly — which is rather the pattern with the anti-terrorism measures.” The Treasury has said it will appeal the ruling, and the suspects’ assets will remain frozen pending the outcome.

Andrew Ibrahim, 19, appeared in court yesterday on terrorism charges after police found bomb-making equipment inside his flat – including a peroxide-based explosive similar to that used in the July 7 London bombings.

Ibrahim faces charges of possessing explosive substances and articles for terrorist purposes as well as an intent to commit terrorism. He is currently being held without bail until another hearing at the City of Westminster Magistrates' Court, May 23.

The jury in the airline bomb plot have listened to recordings in which an alleged plotter is giving another lessons in how to present a suicide video.

The conversations allegedly took place in 2006, and were picked up by an undercover recording device placed in the east London flat which the prosecution claims the men used as a bomb factory.

Peace campaigner and former hostage in Iraq Norman Kember has said that he is helping to fund radical preacher’s Abu Qatada’s bail.

Abu Qatada, who won an appeal against deportation which the government is currently trying to overturn, had appealed for Kember’s release when he was captured by the militant Swords of Truth group in Iraq in 2005.