Why Are Britain's Universities Incubating Islamist Extremism?

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Why Are Britain's Universities Incubating Islamist Extremism? was the title of a seminar held at the neoconservative orientated think-tank Policy Exchange on 21 August 2006. [1]

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 news website The First Post posted an article on the day of the seminar promoting the event written by Tom Gallagher. In that article, and at the seminar itself, Gallagher argued that a main cause of 'radicalisation' amongst young Muslims was not injustice, but the fact that Muslim students are not intellectually capable of achieving in higher education. He wrote:

[The] Government strategy to increase student numbers while diluting the quality of degrees, especially in the humanities and social sciences ... means many Muslim graduates will fail to establish themselves in the labour market. The word will spread that university is only a prelude to casual or low-paid jobs, which aids extremists grooming a young generation to reject Britain and embrace an international identity championing Islamic revolution. [2]

Ruth Dudley Edwards wrote an article on the conference in the Irish Sunday 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. Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag

Notes

  1. Tom Gallagher, 'Wrong Muslim voices on campus', The First Post, 21 August 2006. [PDF created 25 February 2010]
  2. Tom Gallagher, 'Wrong Muslim voices on campus', The First Post, 21 August 2006. [PDF created 25 February 2010]