Universities "turning a blind eye" to campus jihadists, endangering national security

Islamic fundamentalism is being allowed to flourish at universities, endangering national security, MPs and peers said yesterday.

Academics are turning a blind eye to radicals because they do not want to spy on students, a report claimed.

Despite "damning evidence" of a serious problem, little progress had been made in tackling the unsustainable situation, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Homeland Security said.

They urged the Government to tackle the issue on campuses with "utmost urgency".

Such extremism "endangers our security at home and has international implications that are serious enough to threaten our alliance relationships", said the group, which includes the former home secretary Lord Reid.

Secret files obtained by The Daily Telegraph and WikiLeaks disclosed this week that at least 35 terrorists held at Guantánamo Bay were indoctrinated by extremists in Britain.

The leaked documents, written by senior US military commanders, illustrated how Britain effectively became a crucible of terrorism over the course of two decades.

The parliamentary group was set up two years ago to carry out research into homeland security issues.

Its inaugural report comes after a separate inquiry by the umbrella organisation for universities earlier this year said animal rights extremists posed a greater problem than Islamist radicals.

Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, said it could do very little about extremism on campus. Instead it issued new guidance on the importance of freedom of speech. Their report followed the attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a former student at University College London, to blow himself up using a bomb in his underpants as a flight came in to land at Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009.

Abdulmutallab, an engineering student, was the Islamic Society president from 2006 to 2007.

The parliamentarians' report said Britain's homeland security strategy failed to address in sufficient detail how to tackle the threat of extremism at universities, how to strengthen businesses' ability to deal with a terrorist attack and how to ensure security over the internet.

The report said some universities and colleges had become sites where extremist religion and radicalism could flourish "beyond the sight of academics".

They also noted that there was a "reluctance to co-operate with the police on the part of some universities that did not want to be seen to be 'spying' on their students"....