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Jihad amid the dreaming spires

Alex Lewis

Wednesday, 4th July 2007

Alex Lewis investigates claims that the Islamists are recruiting at Oxford University and talks to the exiled Omar Bakri who happily confirms his fears.

The chaos and fear wrought by Islamic extremism this week would, ordinarily, seem a thousand miles from what we call the ‘Oxford bubble’. Shocking, of course, most students would say, but emerging from this latest essay crisis is of greater immediate worry. And until this term, I’d think you crazy — and not a little paranoid — for suggesting that radicals would ever manage to infiltrate Oxford’s colleges, or turn nice middle-class girls and boys into Islamists.

But that was before the recent attacks showed that respectable-seeming professionals can be terrorists too, and before I came across Professor Anthony Glees, the director of the Brunel Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, and began properly to investigate the rumours that Britain’s univer-sity campuses have been and probably still are recruitment grounds for terrorists.

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