I was surprised a while back when a friend told me she had been celebrating Eid at Kelsey Kerridge Sports Hall. The reason is very simple – the current Cambridge Mosque is housed in a fairly small building on Mawson Road and cannot accommodate everyone who wants to worship there. So a new mosque has been planned on nearby Mill Road.
I saw today in the local paper that the EDL plans to march in protest against the new mosque on 9 July. They explain:
“We are against the building of this mosque which will be the biggest in East Anglia and we have had a lot of people in Cambridge contacting us who are worried about it. We are against the building of all mosques because they preach homophobia and anti-Semitism which we should not tolerate in this country.”
This blog has featured many posts on homophobic and antisemitic groups and preachers. I am fully in favour of exposing such activities. But there is a big difference between criticising specific instances of bigotry and protesting against plans for a replacement mosque in a city which contains countless churches of all denominations, two synagogues and a Hindu Temple.
This is a typical ‘worried’ response, which was posted on the Cambridge News website.
I live very close to Mill Rd and most of my neighbours are fed up with the muslimisation of Mill rd, I have been walked into by muslim men, spat on as I cycled down mill road and so on . The muslims near to me say they want to take over Mill rd and that once their mosque is built it will happen. We are selling our home as we dont want to be near a mosque and suprisingly ONLY muslims have viewed our property so far.
I’ve lived in this area for ten years – a few minutes away from both the new and the old mosque sites – and this is completely absurd. I’ve never had any concerns about the ‘muslimisation’ of Mill Road – though I am a bit concerned at the prospect of a visit from the EDL.
