The Sunday Times, and Labour MPs Khalid Mahmood and Mohammed Sarwar bring the North London Central Mosque the worst news possible.
A MUSLIM MP brought in to deradicalise the mosque used by Abu Hamza to recruit Al-Qaeda terrorists is to quit as a trustee after complaining his signature was forged on legal documents.
Khalid Mahmood has called for a Charity Commission investigation after the alleged forgery on papers prepared by the North London Central Mosque.
The signature of a second trustee, Mohammad Sarwar, the Labour MP for Glasgow Central, was also allegedly forged.
The North London Central Mosque, otherwise known as the Finsbury Park Mosque, was the former home of Al Qaeda aligned cleric, Abu Hamza. It had been linked to shoebomber Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui. When Abu Hamza was expelled, the mosque was gifted, with the assistance of David Blunkett, the Charity Commission and Bob Lambert’s Muslim Contact Unit, to a motley crew of trustees. Those appointed included a man who SNP Candidate and former Muslim Association of Britain activist, Osama Saeed, has described as a “Hamas supporter“. One of the trustees is Mohammed Sawalha who is prominent within Viva Palestina, who has been identified by BBC Panorama as one of the founders of Hamas, and who the Muslim Brotherhood’s own website identifies as the “Manager of the Political Committee of the Muslim Brotherhood in Britain“. Sarwar and Mahmood were added as well.
So, what does Mahmood say people have been up to?
Announcing his intention to resign, Mahmood, Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, said: “I don’t think I can work with these people. Some of the things that have been done have been completely out of order, including the forging of my signature.”
The MP, a member of the parliamentary committee on tackling terrorism, said his signature had been forged on the mosque’s trust declaration, which was sent to the Charity Commission in March 2008 to demonstrate that it was operating on a legal basis.
And what else?
The mosque has been embroiled in a so far unsuccessful libel action against Policy Exchange, a centre-right think tank, which named it in its 2007 report about extremist literature available in UK mosques. Last November the six trustees who had advanced the claim were ordered to pay the think tank’s legal costs. The High Court made a further order that £75,000 of those costs be paid by the mosque. The mosque is appealing.
In his complaint to the commission, Mahmood said neither he nor Sarwar had been consulted on the legal action. But a mosque spokesman said: “Mahmood’s been consulted and sent all the minutes. He’s invited to meetings but if he doesn’t come it’s his issue.”
Lambert’s policy of treating with Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood was premised on twin foundations.
First of all, Lambert expected an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood to act as a bulwark against Al Qaedaism. However the CagePrisoners and the Abdulmuttalab affairs, with their dual links to the Al Qaeda preacher Anwar Al Awlaki, have demonstrated that the dividing line between the jihadists and the ‘moderate Islamists’ is very thin indeed.
Secondly, the Muslim Brotherhood were supposed to be sensible, level headed, moral, trustworthy types. However, if Mahmood is correct, these guys are utter clowns, who bumble around as if they are acting out some sort of am dram production of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – The Musical!”.
How does Lambert feel now? Will he continue to drag up the Finsbury Park Mosque as one of his great “success stories”? Or does he not need to worry about peddling that line any more, now that he has an academic post at Exeter University, and a European Muslim Research Centre.
And who funds the European Muslim Research Centre? Why lookee here:
“the trustees of Islam Expo and the Cordoba Foundation … provided the funding to launch the European Muslim Research Centre”
Sawalha runs Islam Expo. Another Muslim Brotherhood activist, Anas Altikriti, runs the Cordoba Institute.
In their first report, Lambert disgracefully libels Sir Salman Rushdie as “the Islamophobic author”.
The advisory board of the University of Exeter’s EMRC contains many of the usual suspects. One of them is Bashir Nafi on the board. In the 1990s he was a senior operative of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group. He was deported from the United States in 1996 for visa fraud. In 2003, the US indicted him (pdf) in absentia for racketeering in the US on behalf of Islamic Jihad. The UK refused to extradite him.
In 2004 Nafi signed another Islamist declaration (pdf) alongside leading Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood figures. It termed British soldiers fighting in Iraq, among others, nothing less than “filth” to be “cleansed” by the “honourable resistance”:
Call upon our Arab and Islamic people alongside all religious authorities and the forces of liberation everywhere to resist the occupation and its savage crimes in Iraq and Palestine; this by offering all our moral and material support to the honourable resistance, its prisoners and their families; to be patient, strong and steadfast until Allah is victorious and the land of Islam cleansed from the filth of occupation. This, with the grace of Allah, is very soon to come.
Let’s have no more Lambertism.
