The botched bombing demonstrates low standards at UK universities. A more intelligent bomber would have detonated the bomb earlier over water and in the toilet away from the eyes of other passengers.

http://militantlibertarian.org/2010/01/02/billions-in-recent-yememi-investments-and-the-underwear-bomber%E2%80%99s-daddy-it%E2%80%99s-a-small-world-ain%E2%80%99t-it/

maybe he didn’t want to kill himself for money

It is a fact that Abdulmutallab was a student at UCL. It is a fact that he’s the fourth President of a London-based ISoc to be arrested on terrorism-related charges in three years. Provost Grant’s response has to be side-line this, and instead focus on the weakest part (that non-citizen should be President of a student soc) of one article (in the Telegraph).

Then, to top that, claim he’s pursuing a line of intellectual honesty???

>> What induced this behaviour remains a mystery. He has not emerged from a background of deprivation and poverty. He came from one of Nigeria’s wealthiest families. He was privately educated, and to a high level. He gained admission to University College London,

So, the lower classes and non-degree educated are to be considered more likely to be violent sociopaths. UCL students just wouldn’t be that declasse.

It is a fact that he’s the fourth President of a London-based ISoc to be arrested on terrorism-related charges in three years

Yeah, so. Are now advocating that any Muslim who heads up an ISoc should be arrested for terrorism related reasons?

==> Are now advocating that any Muslim who heads up an ISoc should be arrested for terrorism related reasons?

Quite risible, Sunny. Just the ones who attempted to blow-up airliners with their underpants or liquid bombs, or smuggle in qassam blueprints to the UK.

This post adds nothing to the debate. It’s simply a repost of Provost Grant’s comments which, in turn, concentrates on the most ridiculous claim (that non-citizens should not head student socs) in one online article.

(Just as you have bypassed the point about his expecting the violent sociopaths to be plebs.)

He, at least, is attempting to save his skin and institution funding. What’s your excuse?

”Yeah, so. Are now advocating that any Muslim who heads up an ISoc should be arrested for terrorism related reasons?”

No, but Rashad Ali in the Observer today seems to suggest that universities haven’t got a clue what’s going on inside their campuses.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/03/christmas-bombers-uk-links

Whether they should have control over student societies is another question. (Probably not).

I thought Howard Jacobson had the best view of it though.
These lads need more outlets in their social lives.
More sex being the most obvious one.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/howard-jacobson/howard-jacobson-twentytwo-male-and-introspective-ndash-of-course-he-should-have-been-on-a-nofly-list-1855412.html

Damon, unfortunately sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll didn’t keep Andy Choudry normal.

What induced this behaviour remains a mystery. He has not emerged from a background of deprivation and poverty. He came from one of Nigeria’s wealthiest families. He was privately educated, and to a high level.

If Malcolm Grant spoke to some of his colleagues in UCL who actually study terrorism he would realise that much research suggests terrorists tend to come from more affluent backgrounds so the Abdulmutallab case is not abnormal.

Yeah, so. Are now advocating that any Muslim who heads up an ISoc should be arrested for terrorism related reasons?

Course not, but those numbers suggest more monitoring of the Islam Society wouldn’t be a bad idea!

what induced the behavior is only a mystery if you ignore the fact that western countries have military bases across the middle east contrary to the wishes of the locals, and are killing so many in Iraq and Afghanistan that we dont even have reliable bodycounts. The war on terror turns out to be an asymmetric war that can not be won.

>> what induced the behavior is only a mystery if you ignore the fact that western countries have military bases across the middle east contrary to the wishes of the locals,

This is only a devastating observation if: a) you have the debating skills of Men Behaving Badly; b) haven’t heard of the Kashmir connexion which was drawing in angry young men years before thousands of civilians were murdered in New York; c) think that hundreds of Kenyan workers *three* years before B were part of the problem.

>> and are killing so many in Iraq and Afghanistan that we dont even have reliable bodycounts.

We do. It’s just they are usually about 10% of the figure you would prefer to have died.

Honestly, we’re in the Twenty-tens… anyone would think it was still the mid two-thousands with this level of debate.

Just the ones who attempted to blow-up airliners with their underpants or liquid bombs, or smuggle in qassam blueprints to the UK.

That’s fine by me. I have no problems rounding up people who advocate terrorism.

You think this adds nothing to the debate because you already think he should be spying on all his Muslim students so that the ones that say anything vaguely radical can be imprisoned or chucked out. Have I got that right?

Course not, but those numbers suggest more monitoring of the Islam Society wouldn’t be a bad idea!

You don’t think if they really want to escape notice they’ll set up something else like the Pakistani society or the Asian society or other name. Or perhaps not even organise an overt uni society?

Is this form of extensive university monitoring – meant to deal with the problem?

Alec, i would prefer the body count to be zero. I fail to see the connection between this Nigerian and Kashmir. Do enlighten me.

In recent years, UK universities have changed the way that they work in response to helicopter parents. Student induction and registration procedures, for example, have been modified so that academics and support staff work with students directly. Parents are discreetly shuffled off to a presentation by the VC while the real work goes on.

At the same time, universities do not wish to act in loco parentis. Tutors and welfare officers provide support and advice. When students are failing their studies, advisors try to help them to resolve problems for themselves. When students are intent on harming themselves with drugs or alcohol, advisors act in the same way as Samaritans or other support agencies. 95%+ of first year university students are over the age of 18; they are young people who may require advice, but university staff don’t offer it until it is required by circumstances or by request. With exceptions for the under 18 year olds.

For comparison, let’s assume that 18 year old Bob gets a job at the Royal Mail rather than going to university. Bob likes his beer too much and pulls a few sickies owing to his hangover, but otherwise he is a good employee. So he gets a warning and the welfare team gently intervene. Which is just what a university would do.

Universities are not policing or parenting substitutes. They provide support to students and staff, as would any responsible organisation of their size, but members have autonomy as long as they conduct themselves reasonably. If they act unreasonably, they are asked to leave.

A couple of years ago, there was a proposal that university staff “keep an eye out” for students who might be straying towards Islamic extremism. Unions very sensibly rejected this request and it was quietly dropped. Staff have to maintain relationships with students and colleagues, and those relationships have to be based on trust and respect.

If a student or colleague is behaving in a manner that raises genuine concern, then there is a moral obligation for staff to act. Even if it means reporting somebody to the police. That obligation, however, is no different to that on a property landlord who observes that a tenant has a suspiciously large collection of TVs and DVD players.

Do universities have an obligation to monitor student societies? Yes, but only to the extent that they would keep an eye on reports of rowdy student behaviour in town. Universities respond to reports from others; they are not investigative agencies.

@6 Damon: “No, but Rashad Ali in the Observer today seems to suggest that universities haven’t got a clue what’s going on inside their campuses.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/03/christmas-bombers-uk-links”

Good link, Damon, but as Rashad Ali states, those Islamic Societies were manipulated by a professional cadre who concealed their intent. There is no wonder that university administrations were unaware. It is the responsibility of the police and security services to monitor extremists; university security teams are incapable of catching bicycle thieves.

Ali over emphasises the university connection of the terrorists that he met. Those individuals were also members of Hizb ut-Tahrir and related groups. If they hadn’t met at university, they’d have found one another some other way.

“quite disturbing Islamophobia, anti-immigration rants and even postings calling for the bombing of UCL itself.”

Alas such hysteria, referred to here, is not restricted to the pages of a right leaning paper. Perhaps it is symptomatic of a greater desire to find a simplistic all encompassing cause of society’s ills, now that the Soviets have left our national consciousness.

what induced the behavior is only a mystery if you ignore the fact that western countries have military bases across the middle east contrary to the wishes of the locals,

So this Nigerian posho was a local to the Middle East?

and are killing so many in Iraq and Afghanistan that we dont even have reliable bodycounts. The war on terror turns out to be an asymmetric war that can not be won.

The majority of killing in Iraq and Afghanistan is at the hands of Islamists.

SUNNY H ==> That’s fine by me. I have no problems rounding up people who advocate terrorism.

In which case, you agree with me that the four individuals I referred to belong in the clink.

==> You think this adds nothing to the debate because you already think he should be spying on all his Muslim students so that the ones that say anything vaguely radical can be imprisoned or chucked out. Have I got that right?

As wrong as any Hugh Jackman film, and I think you know it. At least Provost Grant was seizing upon one dubious but actual statement… you’re making it up.

Said four individuals were not “vaguely radical” [I think you mean summat else - radical is good]: they were activitively involved with the prosecution and execution of terrorist acts.

You’re the one who has read my criticism of four individuals who are Muslim as a blanket opposition to all Muslims.

So this Nigerian posho was a local to the Middle East?

The majority of killings in those places are is indeed these days by Islamists. But only if you ignore the impact of bombs earlier, as well the impact of massive disruption to their infrastructure.

But more importantly, the point is that these conflicts are used as a way to run the ‘them vs us’ narrative that terrorist recruiters exploit. Even the intelligence services accept that.

Now, I’m all for staying in Afghanistan. But if we want to win over terrorism then we have to win the confidence of British Muslims, who will feel like equal citizens and thus stand up for their country by reporting any extremists. This has already been happening.

But if you start spying on them and start singling them out, it works in favour of the terrorists. You end up helping them. Over the longer term – this approach of trying to slam down harder on Muslims won’t work.

In which case, you agree with me that the four individuals I referred to belong in the clink.

If there is evidence against them then I’d like the intelligence services to be monitoring them. But I’m not clear as to what evidence you’ve demonstrated.

CHARLIEMAN ==> Do universities have an obligation to monitor student societies? Yes, but only to the extent that they would keep an eye on reports of rowdy student behaviour in town. Universities respond to reports from others; they are not investigative agencies.

Yet they’re happy to accept state aid and/or funding, and trumpet their status as oases of independent thought.

ALISTAIR OF COURSE ==> Alec, i would prefer the body count to be zero.

Then you can be safely ignored on this subject. There was killing a’ plenty before our country’s forces arrived. If you mean “as low as possible” you could try focusing on the verifiable and accurate reports offered by men such as Joe Sloboba, hardly a supporter of the invasion.

==> I fail to see the connection between this Nigerian and Kashmir. Do enlighten me.

Given the you were under the impression that a rich kid from Nigeria was common man from the Middle East or Hindu Kush, you certainly can link him to the organizations such as Hizb ut Tahrir, which he’d have been in direct contact with.

D’you have any knowledge of the genesis of Mullah Omar’s Taleban aback the border-conflict between India and Pakistan?

==> If there is evidence against them then I’d like the intelligence services to be monitoring them. But I’m not clear as to what evidence you’ve demonstrated.

Put some effort into it, man! One of them (Yassin Nassir) gloried in the charges, and Abdulmutallab has been photograph’d trying to blow his willy to kingdom come!

Sunny

18-> But if you start spying on them and start singling them out, it works in favour of the terrorists.

What does that mean in practise?
Do you suggest I wonder that our intelligence gathering organisations should _not_ be applying closer scrutiny to university Islamic organisations, than to Welsh societies or Japanese ones?

As Khalid Mahmood is quoted this week ‘the fact is that the majority of people who carry out these terror attacks do happen to be Muslim’

…you could try focusing on the verifiable and accurate reports offered by men such as Joe Sloboba…

Joe? /pedantry

Touché!

@20 Alec” “Yet they’re [universities] happy to accept state aid and/or funding, and trumpet their status as oases of independent thought.”

UK universities receive money from government to pay for the tuition of “home” undergraduate students. The money is payed per head, and for expensive courses it may not actually meet the cost to the university.

Government also pays for some taught postgrad courses, probably more so for a couple of years to massage graduate unemployment figures.

Most UK research post grads are on institutional grants, which may be from government bodies and quangos. Post doctoral research is funded from similar sources.

But all of that money is “at arms length” so that universities can claim independence with some credibility. Most is provided through intermediaries (research councils, charities) and when money comes straight from the government (eg Home Office funding of crime and social science research), there is an expectation that the two parties may disagree with the findings.

This scenario is in no way perfect, but works most of the time.

I wonder how much it would cost for universities to monitor student/academic activity. And who would pay?

@20 Alec” “Yet they’re [universities] happy to accept state aid and/or funding, and trumpet their status as oases of independent thought.”

yes – that’s the whole point. Independent of people like yourself dictating what they should or should not be teaching / hosting.

Put some effort into it, man! One of them (Yassin Nassir) gloried in the charges, and Abdulmutallab has been photograph’d trying to blow his willy to kingdom come!

I’m not talking about the obvious people here. We’re talking about potentials.

You think the UCL is making excuses – but you people don’t have a shred of evidence he was radicalised at UCL, and nor that ISoc are hotbeds of extremism.

I’m assuming you’d also be up for surveillance of white extremists on the same account?

Charlieman, ever careful, I said “and/or”… although plans have been floated to abandon charitable status

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=310210&sectioncode=26

universities (including UCL) remain registered charities, hence the aid part. Plus, they have a bit of a captive market for British students wishing to obtain a degree.

Then there’s wot I said about presenting themselves as oases of independent thought.

Seriously, Sunny, dude, what are you talking about?

==> I’m assuming you’d also be up for surveillance of white extremists on the same account?

Yes, what makes you think otherwise?

(To add to my pedantry, Sloboda himself states that the IBC have “always said [their] work is an undercount“, and their “best estimate is that [they]‘ve got about half the deaths that are out there“. While it might be a fairly accurate record of reported deaths, then, it’s not an accurate record of deaths. Still, I’m not getting too into this topic again: for someone with next to no statistical knowledge, it’s essentially a game of pin the allegiance on the estimate.)

Ben, that’s not pedantry, but a completely fair point. Sloboba was scrupulously dispassionate, and required verifiable evidence before logging a death… he also gave the margin of error (although, it always going to be plus rather than minus).

I can’t recall precisely what figure he gave, but say it was 100,000… I could have imagined an unreported toll of tens of percentages, maybe even pushing 100%, but the tally which was required by John Pilger (who was directly implicated in the online stalking of Sloboba) of six fold or above was beyond credibility.

*sloboda, of course.

Alec, aid/charitable point noted, but I don’t think that it affects how traditionally funded universities operate. I would certainly be concerned if some of the current managers took universities over on a private basis, but that would be based on their managerialist approach.

I’m unclear what you are getting at re “oases of independent thought”.

Charlieman, it was a paraphrase of Grant’s own words. As for the status of major universities like UCL, surely we can agree that it’s more priviledged that, say, a language school in Nowhere Street, Nothington [1]?

I agree that universities shouldn’t be expected to monitor student behaviour [2], but this is different from being without a single scooby of what’s going on in amongst their politically active Socs… whilst claiming the credit for providing a safe environment [for Abdulmutallab et al. to with-draw safe environments for others to do things like live; or for Jewish students, say].

Grant is not saying, whoops, that was a major booboo on our part, but let’s tighten up… he’s saying, who, moi? If he thinks this is a free speech issue, I suggest UCL students start calling him a fool to his face, and maybe put superglue in his door-lock.

[1] Not that this would be an easy route for undesirables to enter.

[2] Although it would have been nice if the UCU had spend more time representing the professional concerns of its membership-base rather than encouraging courses of action which its own legal counsel has labelled illegal, involving itself in a foreign regional conflict and inviting foreign nationals (unrelated to academia) who advocate making life hell for a significant bloc of students and staff.

Alec -

…that’s not pedantry, but a completely fair point.

Thank you. I actually meant “in addition to my pedantry…” but if it left me looking humble…

I can’t recall precisely what figure he gave, but say it was 100,000… I could have imagined an unreported toll of tens of percentages, maybe even pushing 100%, but the tally which was required by John Pilger (who was directly implicated in the online stalking of Sloboba) of six fold or above was beyond credibility.

As I said, I don’t want to get too into this. For one thing, I don’t have the knowledge, and past attempts to latch onto a figure have, thus, been hopelessly illogical. However, while the Lancet/the ORB may have erred terribly (and some leading epidemiologists certainly seem to think so*), personal incredulity seems an insufficient reason to dismiss it.

[*] http://dissident93.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/leading-researchers-disagree-with-project-censored/

Hi, Ben… I’m normally one to object to meanwhiling and whatabouteries, diverting the topic to the preturnatural source of all the world’s ills, past present and ariston – Iraq. But, as I think I’ve discussed the topic in hand, and I know you’re capable of doing the same, I’m happy to continue with this one thread.

The matter of Sloboda’s own qualification is one which those goons who perversely wish for one million plus deaths latch onto, and then shut out any dissent in contrast to Sloboda’s own humility and awareness of his own shortcomings.

He [Sloboda] never denied that the tally from IBC only ever was based on two (?) independently verified death reports. Outside the main urban centres, these may have been harder to obtain, but a principle source of bias in the John Hopkins report was that it took the clusters of violent deaths – from urban centres, or main-roads – and extrapolated it across the country; including the Kurdish north where, baring individual spectaculars like Yazidi-on-Yazidi violence, was quiet.

My view is that there was intent, as one of the authors was subsequently linked to anti-Bush polemics (I prefer not to call it “political activism”, as this implies summat a bit more taxing that getting up on a podium or going for a jaunt down a Western street). Furthermore, the oft-ascribed label of “peer reviewed” simply means the original research method was reproducable… had it been, with awareness of the sources of bias and limitations as well as full access to the raw data, a different conclusion may well have been reached.

It’s credible that the death toll could be significantly [1] higher than that reported on IBC, but for it to be as high as I suspect Alistair would prefer, it would require all Iraq to have suffered a comparable death toll as during the carpet bombing of the Second World War; and for some 9/10 of required deaths not having been reported or even mentioned in newspapers.

Not impossible, but highly unlikely.

[1] I mean significantly, not fold or orders of magnitude.

Just to get back on track, all this balls about the underpants bomber being the UKs fault – wasn’t the US warned already about his Islamist tendancies? And hadn’t Blighty already put him on the no-fly list (hence why his flight didn’t come from Britain, not that you’d know it reading the news) ? Or am I missing something highly relevant here..?

Smells like old-fashioned lefty-bashing to me, under the guise of anti-terrorism/extremism. It does amuse me that the Right are all in favour of freedom of speech unless you disagree with them.

Alec,

I don’t have a strong view on the total number of deaths – we know that it is way too many in any case. But I would make the following points –

Peer review means a bit more than the original research being reproducable – it means that someone properly qualified has looked at the methodology and declared it to be basically sound. That doesn’t mean the numbers produced by the study must be right but it deos mean that the study can’t just be dismissed out of hand. Nor does the fact that one of the authors has strong political opinions (and let’s face it dislike of Bush is neither rare nor unreasonable) mean we should do so either.

As for the “main street bias” see here for a refutation of this (see also his other posts on the subject). I’m not qualified to judge who is correct but Tim Lambert is someone I would take seriously.