If we're going to stop these attacks, we need to shut down the campus caliphate

Islamist indoctrination is out of control in Britain's universities.

So, another day, another attack.

Two men - one of them 76 years old - stabbed for the crime of being “visibly Jewish”.

The too-long list of recent antisemitic attacks got a bit longer.

The authorities were quick to stress that the terrorist was a “British national” (though born in Somalia). Sadly, the same was true of the Manchester synagogue murderer.

But if this is meant to calm people, I have to say that people being radicalised here is not reassuring in the slightest.

Kemi Badenoch recently announced a major review of how we can tackle:

Islamist extremism and how it feeds on separatism so we tackle both the ideology and the conditions that let it grow.

This is being led by Shadow Cabinet Ministers Chris Philp and Nick Timothy, and supported by former Prison Governor Ian Acheson.

Now, we should obviously stop the flow of migrants, ban all asylum claims from illegals, deport all foreign criminals and so on.

But we also have to stop the internal radicalisation too. There are lots of things we need to do like sorting out the Prevent programme.

But high on the to-do list must be sorting out our taxpayer-funded universities, which have become ground zero for radicalisation.

Campus takeover

Earlier this year the streets of Finchley were filled with scenes of jubilation. The Iranian community in London came together to celebrate the end of Ayatollah Khamenei, a man who just weeks earlier had ordered the massacre of 30,000 innocent Iranian citizens and whose regime presided over 20 potentially lethal plots targeting British citizens, residents, and journalists.

Meanwhile on British university campuses, organised student societies were mourning his death.

At the University of Manchester, for instance, students in the “Ahlul-Bayt Islamic Society” announced they would be holding a candlelight vigil “honouring the Ayatollah”, while students at the University of Portsmouth re-shared a post from a page called ‘AbSoc Mental Health’ which declared that “This is an unimaginable loss for the entire Ummah. This is not the end to resistance.”

In total, there have been reports of student-led societies at 27 different universities expressing their condolences for the death of the Ayatollah or celebrating his “martyrdom”.

I say this not to say that the war in Iran is a good thing or convince you either way on that point. But to mourn Khamenei is another thing entirely.

For some observers, the prevalence of these extreme views will come as no surprise. In recent months, a number of disturbing videos have emerged showing this kind of extremist preaching being delivered to students.

One, filmed at the University of Manchester’s Islamic Society, showed students being addressed by a preacher who declared that “talking to women takes you to hell” and that “Hamas jihadists are martyrs, like Muslims stabbed in London; they are all going to heaven equally.”

Another emerged days later, showing a preacher addressing the Islamic Society at Queen Mary University of London, declaring that it is God’s command to wage jihad and that “those who rule by any rule other than the law of Allah, they are heretics, they are oppressors.”

These examples are clearly only the tip of the iceberg. As the Community Security Trust recently set out in written evidence to Parliament, there are now coordinated and organised student movements who host influential figures with extremist views and are increasingly vocal in their support for the leaders of proscribed terror organisations.

The CST found that there are 45 Ahlul‑Bayt university societies, or AbSocs, across the country, coordinated by an organisation called the Muslim Student Council (MSC). The MSC’s national conference, which took place last month on the KCL campus, featured the sale of the Ayatollah’s autobiography alongside a book about a fighter in the IRGC.

At least 18 of these societies appeared to mourn or glorify Hassan Nasrallah, the former leader of Hezbollah, following his assassination in September 2024, with even more doing the same following the Ayatollah’s death in January. Shortly after Nasrallah’s death, it was reported that the Shia cleric Mohammed Khani, who had been among the mourners at Nasrallah’s funeral, attended a SOAS AbSoc event, and had previously joined Westminster AbSoc for a “hike for Lebanon” in November 2024.

Left unchecked, the rot of this extremism, along with the antisemitism that accompanies it, is beginning to spread throughout the student population.

A recent poll found that one in five university students in Britain would not want to live with a Jewish person.

I have italicised that because I think it is remarkable.

Sadly, it is also unsurprising, because the open expression of this hatred is also growing more common.

The 7th of October, for instance, now appears in some quarters to have become an annual moment for students to signal their implicit support for Hamas and their massacre of Jews. Last year, members of Glasgow University Justice for Palestine Society displayed a six-foot banner that read “Glory to our martyrs.”

Members of Cardiff Students for Palestine shared an image apparently depicting an armed militant standing on the head of another person, accompanied by the caption, “Lest we forget: occupation soldiers scattered beneath those blessed feet, trembling before the fearless.”

Meanwhile, Middlesex Palestine Solidarity Society re-shared a post depicting militant paragliders with the words: “We stand with those who continue to fight for justice from Gaza to Jerusalem, from the river to the sea.”

Some groups have now abandoned any pretence of hiding this radicalism. Last year, eighteen British student groups, including those affiliated with the LSE, University of Edinburgh, and UCL, publicly supported a legal bid to remove Hamas from the UK’s list of proscribed terrorist groups, claiming that this “creates an atmosphere where Palestine advocacy becomes a legal risk”.

Pushed around

What’s really happening is that these universities are being pushed around by militant staff and students.

For example, UCL’s branch of the University and College Union passed a motion calling for “intifada until victory” shortly after the Hamas attacks. UCL’s “Director of equality, inclusion, and culture”, Addeel Khan, is a trustee of Save One Life UK, a charity under investigation for links to Hamas.

What does this culture mean in the real world?

Zahra Farooque, who graduated from UCL in 2021, was charged with aggravated burglary, criminal damage, and violent disorder for targeting an arms factory. UCL neuroscience student Mohammed Nasser was arrested after allegedly assaulting a pro-Israel demonstrator in Brighton. Qesser Zuhrah, 20, was studying social sciences at UCL before being arrested over alleged offences linked to the activities of Palestine Action. These problems have been going on for a long time. In 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had run the Islamic Society at UCL, attempted to detonate explosives on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Nor is it confined to UCL. The Office for Students reported 70 cases of Islamist radicalisation cases in higher education institutions which were escalated to Prevent officers in the 2023-24 academic year. This represented a 75% increase on the previous year.

Conclusions

The list of examples of this sort goes on and on. My colleague Laura Trott MP has also been doing a fine job raising the alarm. But the government is asleep at the wheel, and I suspect since Gorton and Denton their appetite to do anything serious will have waned further.

Perhaps the most damning sign of how bad the situation has become came this January, when it was reported that the UAE, one of our closest Muslim allies in the Middle East, had begun restricting federal funding for citizens wishing to study at any British university, due to concerns about the extent of the influence of Islamic extremism on campuses.

The UAE knows better than most the dangers of radical Islamism, and what is required to prevent it gaining a grip on society. This starts with our universities, with the young and impressionable.

If we don’t want more and more terrorist attacks, perhaps it’s time we started listening?