The Wall Street Journal has a disturbing article on the efforts of Islamic infiltration groups in British universities: Campus Jihad.

The ringleaders of the July 7 bombers, Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shahzad Tanweer, both former students at Leeds Metropolitan University, showed up on MI5’s radar on as many as nine occasions before the attacks. According to Whitehall sources, credible intelligence indicated that Mr. Khan had visited Pakistan between November 2003 and February 2004 and sought to contact al Qaeda. But MI5 discounted the significance of these visits at the time and only started taking them more seriously early this year. The London bombers’ connections to Pakistan were initially dismissed as harmless, requiring no further analysis. It was “obvious,” security sources explained in the aftermath of the attacks, that people of Pakistani descent would visit “their families” back home or take a “long holiday or gap year” there. The generally accepted theory was that the terrorists had simply used information from the Internet to build their organic peroxide bombs.

Senior military intelligence officers now dismiss this line as well, believing the bombers received crucial weapons training in Pakistan. They argue that if Britain is now al Qaeda’s primary target, it makes sense to look much more carefully at the Pakistan dimension and also at the links between virulent Islamic groups in Pakistan and the U.K. Many British Islamic colleges have ties to fundamentalist Pakistanis. Other links exist to extremist Kashmiri groups, in turn allegedly connected to al Qaeda or the Pakistani secret service.

MI5 has hugely upped its game, as recent arrests show. But MI5 also believes that the number of extremists is rising and not just because it now knows better where to look for them. MI5 keeps very close tabs on more than 1,000 extremists; 14,000 British Muslims are considered potential terrorist threats, security sources told me.

I believe a significant number get radicalized and recruited on university campuses. At least 13 convicted Islamist terrorists and four suicide bombers have been students at British universities. Radical Islamist student societies make full use of university resources. They operate Web sites, hosted by university servers, which direct visitors to organizations that glorify jihad and terror. These “religious” groups are given “prayer rooms” on campus, which are also used to disseminate extremist literature and DVDs. Muslim students concerned about these developments tell me that at many of these Islamic societies terrorism is portrayed as justified acts of “resistance.” A leading imam in Birmingham often preaches on British campuses that the London bombers have to be seen as “martyrs.”

Organizations like Hizb Ut Tahrir and Al Muhajiroun, which advocate a world caliphate, demand that Britain adopt the Shariah and express a violent hatred for the West and Jews, have repeatedly tried to gain student converts at the University of East Anglia. It is only thanks to a courageous campus imam that their infiltration attempts have been thwarted so far. His colleague at London Metropolitan University, Sheikh Musa Admani, repeatedly warns about Islamic radicalization at his and other London campuses. Just two months ago, the head of an Islamic student society and several fellow students at London Metropolitan were charged with planning to smuggle explosives on a plane bound for America. Yet university authorities usually consider these societies as “religious gatherings,” and thus off limits.

Government minister Ruth Kelly two weeks ago urged universities to monitor their students more carefully and report signs of extremism to the security services. But many British universities are reluctant to step up security. Universities U.K., an association of British universities, criticized Ms. Kelly’s proposals as “unreasonable,” saying “there are dangers in targeting one particular group within our diverse communities.” When I suggested last year similar measures the government now proposes, I was myself attacked by Universities U.K. The vice chancellor from the University of Sunderland asked my own vice chancellor to “shut me up.” I was threatened with legal action if the name of a particular university was mentioned in connection with terrorism. Unfortunately, my research showed that Islamic radicalization is a threat on campuses nation-wide.