To our eternal shame, Britain STILL hub for Islamic terror

So here we go again. Another international Islamic terrorist plot - and yet another British connection.

The attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up an American plane was averted only by luck and courage.

The incident obviously raises alarming questions about gross lapses in security. In particular, how did Abdulmutallab obtain a U.S. visa when he had been on an American watch-list of people with known terrorist connections?

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab photographed during a school trip in England in 2002, seven years before he attempted to blow up an American aeroplane

But the deeper and more urgent issue for Britain concerns the key role this country has once again played in a Muslim's trajectory to radicalisation and terror. Abdulmutallab, who claims to have been working for Al Qaeda, was an engineering student at prestigious University College London for three years until 2008.

He was actually refused an entry visa to Britain earlier this year, but only because the institution at which he said he wanted to study turned out to be non-existent.

How, people might well ask, could such a radical have been educated in Britain without the authorities jumping on him?

Did MI5 know anything about him - especially since he was on a U.S. terrorism watch-list for two years? 

As yet, we still don't know much about this man's history.

It appears he became a religiously extreme Muslim at a school in Togo, but was further radicalised while studying in London before apparently going to Yemen and linking to Al Qaeda.

Who can be surprised? After all, this is ' Londonistan' - the contemptuous term coined by the French security service back in the Nineties as they watched Britain become the central hub of Islamic terrorism in Europe.

Radicals flocked to the UK, attracted by Britain's toxic combination of criminally lax immigration controls, generous health, education and welfare benefits and the ability to perpetuate their views through the British veneration of the principle of free speech.

Despite 9/11, the 2005 London Tube and bus attacks and the dozens of other Islamist plots uncovered in Britain, the astounding fact is that Islamic extremist networks are still allowed to flourish in Britain, largely through the obsession of its governing class with multiculturalism and 'human rights'.

As a result, Britain remains - to its eternal shame - the biggest hub of Islamic radicalisation outside the Arab and Muslim world.

Extremists are still slipping into the country. The courts are still refusing to deport terrorists in order to protect their 'human rights' abroad.

London boasts the shameful reputation of the world's premier money-laundry for terrorism, which shelters behind a label of 'charity' that the authorities choose not to challenge.

Not only is no action taken against extremist mosques and madrassas, but many British universities have been turned into terrorism recruitment centres.