The Crotch Bomber

In the name of multiculturalism we in the west invite our enemies in and stand by as they openly declare their intention to mass murder us. Does that not make us just as insane as the suicide bombers? Isn't our own behavior suicidal?

My Classmate, the Plane (Undie) Bomber
by Venetia Thompson - December 30, 2009 | 10:51pm



When former University College London mechanical engineering student Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to blow up a plane on Christmas Day, he became the fourth president of a student Islamic society to face terrorist charges in three years. Waheed Zaman, former president of the Islam Society at London Metropolitan University, is facing a retrial on charges that he was involved in the 2006 liquid-bomb plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners, and two others have been convicted of terrorist offenses since 2007. The government-funded Islam and Citizenship Education Project, which aims to encourage British citizenship to be taught in madrassahs, and even supplies teaching materials, clearly has a lot of work to do, as do British universities.

When I was in my final year at UCL, the “Christmas undie bomber” would have been in his first year, a “fresher.” We may even have crossed paths in the library or Students’ Union. Like all freshers, he would have attended the annual Freshers’ Fair and signed up to various clubs and societies, probably ignoring the Ultimate Frisbee Society and the Wilderness Medicine Society and making a bee-line for the Islamic Society, which he would then go on to lead. Whilst I was getting drunk and becoming increasingly convinced I was going to fail my finals, somewhere nearby he was beginning to be radicalized.

I had various encounters with the UCL Islamic Society, from the relatively innocent (constantly trying to get me to sign their anti-Israel or anti-Iraq war petitions, to wear one of their “Free Palestine” T-shirts, or to take one of their seemingly endless supply of leaflets promoting protests, sit-ins and lectures by extremists) to the slightly more sinister (the friends I made in first year whom I gradually saw less and less of, and who even began dressing more conservatively as they became more involved with the society, or the girl I knew who told me she was warned against adopting “their”—as in our “Western”—culture by an older student she’d met during Freshers’ Week).

One former UCL student even says he was told whilst enjoying a pint in the union that it was his “duty” as a Muslim to attend society meetings and that he was frequently invited to Islamic study groups. He jokes that he was “probably seen as a sitting duck—I was even studying ‘bomb-making,’ as we affectionately referred to the Department of Chemical Engineering.”

He goes on to say: “Everyone knows London universities are full of would-be nutters honing their engineering skills whilst simultaneously becoming increasingly religious. It’s one hell of a dangerous combo when you think about it. We all used to joke about it back then, but it’s not quite so funny anymore.”

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