Mick Hartley

Much debate (see this post at Harry's Place) about the responsibility at UCL for the radicalisation of the Islamic Society that produced incompetent Detroit bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Should the UCL authorities, and in particular president and provost Malcolm Grant, have done more? John Sutherland in the Times thinks that university authorities are being put in an impossible position:

At what point must institutional tolerance give way to heavy-handed control? And if you ban the Islamic Society, do you also ban the Jewish Society, or the female students’ consciousness-raising groups? At what point does militancy — never in itself a bad thing in a young student — become signing up to terrorism?

Except the Jewish Society and the female students’ consciousness-raising groups aren't inciting murder.

It would have been clearer, if more awful (since he might have made a more efficient weapon) had Abdulmutallab designed his body-bomb in a UCL lab, rather than having it given to him in Yemen. As it is, his activities at UCL seem to have been within the bounds of normally tolerated hot-headedness. He was, one is told, a proclaimed radical and may have become more so, under the influence of outside contacts, during the years of his course. He was not, yet, a terrorist. That clearly happened in the period after he left England.

So, according to Sutherland, UCL bears no responsibility, and any vetting of university societies, though now perhaps inevitable, is to be much regretted. Yet in the same article we get this little tale:

A couple of years ago (when Abdulmutallab was around the place), UCL allowed the Islamic Society to put on a show of Islamic art. A friend of mine, an eminent scientist, strolled in to take a look. Was he a believer, asked an obviously Muslim student. No, replied my friend, he didn’t believe in any god, as it happened. “Then,” the young man confidently informed him, “we shall have to execute you.” He wasn’t joking; he was predicting. He wasn’t going to draw a scimitar that minute and lop off the godless one’s head, but he implied that at some future point such things would happen. My friend laughed it off after lodging a mild complaint. It could, of course, have been Abdulmutallab who made the threat.

It would be interesting to know how the "mild complaint" was dealt with. At the very least one would hope that such threats can no longer be laughed off.

[Sutherland presumably penned his piece with the Guardian in mind, where a brief anti-US slur to set the tone always goes down well:

Abdulmutallab, president of the Islamic society at UCL, 2006-07, expected that, by now, he would be a fêted martyr in paradise. He can instead look forward to an advanced course in waterboarding, or whatever interrogation techniques are nowadays thought to be permissibly humane in the US.

But one Times commenter isn't having it:

sorry to disappoint you but since he is being tried as a criminal instead of as an enemy combatant he is subject to the laws and constitution of the US, thus he has "lawyered up" and gone silence. He has been instructed to say nothing further to the police forces. this is how we now "fight" a war

now why don't you go and learn something about how the US prosecutes criminals instead of speaking off the top of your head]