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Tuesday, 09 December 2008 12:19 |
Another ex-HT member joins the growing industry of these former armchair revolutionaries that have left off their armchairs to beat back the beast they spawned.
Rashad Ali writes in the Guardian's Comment is Free section on the report by Dr June Edmunds on campus radicalisation. 'I can assure Edmunds that Islamist radicalism remains a problem at these and other universities – partly thanks to my recruitment activities', Ali claims.
'In 2007 four Bradford university students were put on trial for terrorism offences. Although they were acquitted in 2008, their possession of vast libraries of pro-jihadist material was not disputed’, Ali writes.
Is Ali claiming that owning such literature is a crime in itself? If these four students from Bradford University had been tried on terrorism charges and acquitted, surely their ownership of such literature and any impact it may have had on their alleged radicalisation would have been explored in the trial? And if they were acquitted what point exactly is Ali trying to make - that owning books of a certain kind ought to be prohibited? If so, should one include the works of say Marx, Nietzsche or Carl Schmitt in the category of radical literature?
Ali continues: ‘[T]ake the London School of Economics. A regular speaker at LSE's ISOC is Hizb ut-Tahrir's Reza Pankhurst, previously convicted in Egypt of seeking to overthrow the government. Other speakers favoured by the LSE ISOC include Kemal Helbawy, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who is not allowed to enter the US. Radicalised alumni include Omar Sheikh who brutally killed reporter Daniel Pearl in 2001.'
Strange that Ali should use the example of Egypt – a country known to prosecute and imprison even the mildest of Islamists. Strange also that Ali uses the example of Helbawy’s being denied entry into the US to allude to the latter’s ‘radical’ credentials. The US has since 2001 denied entry to Tariq Ramadan and Yusuf Islam too. Does Ali infer, by logical extension, that Ramadan and Islam should similarly be regarded as 'radicals'? Maybe even Shahid Malik MP who was detained by the Department of Homeland Security in 2007 while entering the US?
Perhaps more worrying in the logic of arguments of this sort is the inference that alumni be taken to represent present and future trajectories of ISOCs around the UK. Are LSE students, Muslims or otherwise, responsible in some way for the radicalisation of Omar Sheikh? And is the Islamic Society to be overshadowed by the actions of this one individual who was a student at the School briefly in the early 90s?
‘Other universities overlooked by Dr Edmunds are Middlesex, Bristol and Nottingham Trent, where Hizb ut-Tahrir and other radical groups control ISOCs and seek to impose their agenda and ideologies not only on other Muslim students but on the entire student body. Other London universities such as Imperial, City, and Queen Mary regularly host extreme Wahhabite speakers’, writes Ali.
What Ali doesn’t mention in the article, and something that is considerably important in putting the whole piece in perspective is the actual student membership of HT. How many students at these universities are members of HT, or groups affiliated to HT on campus? And how many non members attend their lectures?
HT has been notorious over the years in grossly exaggerating their influence and appeal to Muslims in the UK. A ploy heightened by the excessive media attention the group has undeservedly attracted. It would seem the work of exaggerating the group’s appeal is as rigorously carried out by those in HT as it is by those that now fan the industry of ‘ex extremists’.
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