Following news that a former student at a London university tried to blow up an airplane on Christmas Day, British universities announced today that they were setting up a working group to look at preventing violent extremism on campuses while protecting academic freedom. Universities in Britain have wrestled with the problems of potentially extremist students since 2005, after several bombings in London’s transportation system were carried out by Muslims born and educated in Britain. There has been much debate since then on how serious the threat actually is, and what universities can do about it.
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One Response to British Universities Will Study Violent Extremism on Campuses
raymond_j_ritchie - January 7, 2010 at 10:56 pm
Misguided cultural sensitivity has resulted in universities are not transmitting liberal western values to many of their students. The experience of Islamist extremism reveals some disturbing facts that many academics have difficulty coping with. Too many try to interprete it from an inappropriate Marxist perspective – in other words they try to argue that it is poverty, poor education and opportunities which drive the phenomenon. Islamic terrorism is a consequence of the civil war that has been going on in the Islamic world ever since Napoleon invaded Egypt. Israel is an irrelevant but politically useful distractant. It centres around the continued inability of Islam to cope with the culturally and technologically superior secular West. The typical Islamic suicide bomber is not a deprived, improverished, despairing Palestinian but someone from a wealthy or comfortable middle class background with a high level of education, often a professional education in Engineering and even Medicine. These people are growing up in the west or getting a western education but are not picking up the liberal western values that allow you to function in a western society. The incompatibility of their religion with their environment drives them mad and vulnerable to manipulation. To blow yourself up for a God that probably does not exist is taking a rather foolish risk. God is not great!