The debate raging on the extent of radicalisation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab while he was a student at UCL is well underway. The Sunday Telegraph published a piece today which publishes evidence that “has only become apparent in the past 48 hours”:
Al-Awlaki, who is also thought to have influenced Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the US soldier who killed 13 people at a military base in Texas in November, has been accused by the US Department of Homeland Security of using his video lectures to “encourage terrorist attacks”.
The 38-year-old’s extremist ideology is laid bare in his pamphlet ‘44 Ways to Support Jihad’ in which he declares: “The hatred of kuffar [non-Muslims] is a central element of our military creed” and “arms training is an essential part of preparation for Jihad”.
His role in influencing Abdulmutallab, who is suspected of attempting to blow up a flight to Detroit on Christmas Day, has only become apparent in the past 48 hours.
Abdulmutallab, who moved to the Yemen in August 2009 after completing an engineering degree at University College London, has told the FBI he made contact with al-Qaeda through a preacher he met over the internet. This man is now thought to be al-Awlaki, who himself moved to the Yemen after leaving Britain in 2004.
Yemen’s deputy prime minister for defence and security affairs, Rashad Mohammed al-Alimi, said on Friday that investigators now believe Abdulmutallab met al-Qaeda operatives in a house built by al-Awlaki to hold theological sessions and where he had previously met Abdulmutallab.
It had been thought the extremist cleric had been killed in a Christmas Eve air strike on the house, in the southeastern Yemen province of Shabwa, but Mr al-Alimi said he is believed to be still alive.
Al-Awlaki’s influence on Abdulmutallab is understood to have begun during the bomber’s time as a student in London between September 2005 and the end of 2008. He is thought to have attended at least one of a number of video-link lectures given by al-Awlaki at the East London Mosque’s London Muslim Centre (LMC), in Whitechapel, during this period.Despite the LMC receiving at least £60,000 in funding from the Government’s Preventing Violent Extremism Fund (PVEF) in the past two years, al-Awlaki has during that period been allowed to address at least two gatherings at the venue via video-link, including one on New Year’s Day last year called The End of Time and advertised with a poster showing the destruction of New York.
His appearances at the LMC were just part of an extensive ‘video tour’ by al-Awlaki of venues around the country.
[My emphases]
How much longer will the British Left continue to insinuate all radicalised Muslims activists operate under the behest of the greater Muslim community and that to criticise them would be an attack of the ‘brown-skinned Muslim community’? Turning this into a race issue which corrals all Muslims into the radical camp is the most dangerous and irresponsible example of anti-Muslim bigotry that is operating today. Sunny Hundal of Pickled Politics is often guilty of passing off this kind of insidious and ignorant propaganda for informed comment. Radical extremists don’t give a flying fig about his confused liberal-lefty values, but thank him for the protection his dubious race-politics affords them.
But then Hundal is simply reflecting a commonly held set of attitudes in the Left and all he is doing is following consensus. Blindness to radicalisation or being fooled into appeasing Islamists because criticising them might be inflame racism against “brown people” is a widespread misconception that is part of this consensus. This isn’t exclusive to Pickled Politics.
When will Muslims call bullshit on this liberal appeasement of Islamic extremism and say to these fools: “This consensus is causing us more harm than good and enough is enough”?
John Cameron, a commenter on this Times piece, could not be more correct:
If the various universities in London allowed their right-wing student societies to invite neo-Nazi speakers to address white teenagers all hell would break loose. If Christian churches allowed disciples of Adolf Hitler to preach the inferiority of women and to sanctify the murder of Jews and homosexuals, the British public would go ape. Yet when Islamic extremists do exactly the same our government and public servants go weak at the knees. According to police sources, 25 British-born Muslims are currently in Yemen being trained in the art of bombing planes. Yet most of these terrorists did not acquire their crazed beliefs out in the badlands of the Islamic world. They were indoctrinated here in the UK.
One Comment
Sunny Hundal and Pickled Politics is of the same school as Bob Pitt and IslamophobiaWatch. Hundal is UK Islamism’s useful idiot. His evidence-free, snide and smearing posts are ripped apart all the time by his own commenters. And still he never gets it.