Why Are Britain's Universities Incubating Islamist Extremism?

Why Are Britain's Universities Incubating Islamist Extremism? is the title of a seminar held in London in 2006. It was attended by right-wing figures including Anthony Glees, the author of When Students Turn to Terror; the Scottish right-wing intellectual Tom Gallagher; and the right-wing Irish historian Ruth Dudley Edwards. The latter wrote an article on the conference in the Irish Independent. Starting with two anecdoates about how British students came home from university with more conservative religious views, Dudley Edwards continued:

Such undergraduates are typical of those who have been and are being turned into extremists on university campuses in Britain. In some cases, they have become murderers. These days they don't have to go to Pakistan to learn how to kill people: there are several training camps in England.

According to Dudley Edwards's, Tom Gallagher argued that a main cause of 'radicalisation' amongst young Muslims was not injustice but the fact that they are not intellectually capable of achieving in higher education:

Easy prey for extremists, said Gallagher, are British students whose talents suit them to be plumbers or carpenters, but whose parents are starry-eyed about their becoming professionals. With poor grades, they end up on a pointless course at a mediocre university and realise that they'll end up in some dead-end job. This makes them perfect recruiting material for those promising to give them a way of making sense of their lives. First, they are offered brotherhood and, through Islamic teaching, clear instructions on how to live each minute of your life. Then comes the indoctrination in the victim culture, the propaganda videos showing the suffering of brothers and sisters in Palestine and Chechnya and Iraq at the hands of Christians and Jews: obviously, no one points out that more Muslims are killed by Muslims than by anyone else. Nor are they told of how the West rescued Kuwait, or saved Muslims in the Balkans. The videoed sermons preaching the extermination of Jews and infidels come next.

The Economist reported similar views from both Glees and Gallagher in October 2006:

Tom Gallagher, who studies ethnic conflict at Bradford University, says that the government's drive to increase the proportion of young people at university to 50% by 2010 has led to poorly educated Muslim students pitching up at universities. Some, confused and struggling, become easy targets for demagogues who enable them to make sense of their lives.