Dave Rich reports:
In February 2007, the North London Central Mosque – better known as Finsbury Park Mosque – received a grant of £20,000 for a report “on combating extremism and terrorist propaganda in communities and institutions”. Two years later, one of the then trustees of the mosque, Mohammed Sawalha, would later go on to sign the Istanbul Declaration – as clear an example of “terrorist propaganda” as you are likely to find.
It is not sustainable to build a counter-terrorist strategy on partnerships with people whose opposition to terrorism is entirely contingent on time and place: they will always let you down.
This is a very major failure and a serious scandal.
Mohammed Sawalha was identified by the BBC in 2006 as a fugitive Hamas commander. This fact, and his trusteeship of the mosque, could have been determined by a simple google search. In other words, he is an extremist, a terrorist, and a member of a genocidal antisemitic organisation.
I would like to know how his organisation came to receive a large sum of public money – wouldn’t you?
