Category Archives: Terrorism

Last week, Nicola Dandridge the chief executive of the Universities, dismissed the claims that Universities campuses are centres of radicalization in a report in the Daily Telegraph:

She said that universities had no more of a problem than the rest of society and that students had to be left to monitor visiting speakers themselves.
“You cannot draw the conclusion that because wild things are said at university that automatically equates to radicalisation,” Ms Dandridge said. “We have to be really careful about what we are saying about cause and effect.”

Needless to say this ridiculous evasion was welcomed by “non-violent” extremists and their well-wishers.

It is highly unlikely Nicola Dandridge looked very hard for examples of extremist radicalisation on campus. Either that or she suffers from that peculiar white liberal afflication of being unable or unwilling to discern between people who observe conservative Islamic values and extremist Islamist ideology, often because to do so might risk being labelled a “racist” or, at the very least, “Islamophobic”.

Pakistani journalist Saleem Shahzad exposes the infiltration of Pakistan Navy by Al-Qaeda and how the arrest of these jihadis led to the attack on PNS Mehran in a recent article in the Asia Times. It is the first article in a two-part report.

ISLAMABAD – Al-Qaeda carried out the brazen attack on PNS Mehran naval air station in Karachi on May 22 after talks failed between the navy and al-Qaeda over the release of naval officials arrested on suspicion of al-Qaeda links, an Asia Times Online investigation reveals.

Pakistani security forces battled for 15 hours to clear the naval base after it had been stormed by a handful of well-armed militants.

At least 10 people were killed and two United States-made P3-C Orion surveillance and anti-submarine aircraft worth US$36 million each were destroyed before some of the attackers escaped through a cordon of thousands of armed forces.

Was Pakistan being dishonest about withholding intelligence on the whereabouts of OBL? Azeem Ibrahim argues that because of the the inter-institutional dynamics between the Pakistani military, the ISI and the government it’s highly unlikely that information about Bin Laden would not have been shared or even bubbled up to the top. And even if it had, it is unlikely that Pakistan would have taken any short term action to spare themselves the long term embarrassment:

Unlike any given government, the military and the ISI were guaranteed to survive the transition from democracy to dictatorship, or vice versa. This has allowed the army and the ISI to become culturally and organizationally distinct from the government, and from government oversight.