Terror link group to build London’s biggest mosque
By Andrew Gilligan
Evening Standard, 17 July 2006
PLANS for a giant “Islamic village” next to the London Olympic site, including Europe’s largest mosque, have moved a major step closer after Ken Livingstone’s London Development Agency and Newham council said they were “very much in favour” of the scheme.
The group behind the massive project is the Tablighi Jamaat movement, which has been accused by the FBI of being a recruiting ground for al Qaeda. Two of the London bombers are believed to have attended another mosque run by the organisation. Tablighi Jamaat itself says it is apolitical.
According to the website of the architects, Mangera Yvars, the Abbey Mills Islamic Centre will occupy 50,000 square metres of the lower Lea Valley at West Ham.
The first phase of the mosque alone will accommodate 10,000 worshippers, with further expansion later, said Abdul Kalik, project director for Tablighi Jamaat. “The original plan was for 40,000, but we need to be realistic,” he said. “If the requirement increases, we’ll increase the figure.”
Ultimately, it is envisaged that the mosque and surrounding buildings could accommodate as many as 70,000 visitors, only 10,000 fewer than the capacity of the Olympic stadium next door. The total project cost is put at £100 million, which will be funded by donations.
The mosque, intended as a new “Islamic landmark” in Britain, will be prominently visible from the Olympic site and to many travellers arriving in London by air. It will not be a traditional structure with domes and minarets, but a long, undulating building borrowing ideas from “nomadic structures and tented cities”. It will be illuminated at night by millions of translucent tiles and surrounded by an “Islamic garden, transposed on to modern-day London”, according to the architects.
Parents expressed outrage last night over a school’s plans to serve pupils a Muslim Christmas dinner.
Brett Lock of OutRage! applauds the fact that “… the governments of the US and the UK haven’t been hoodwinked by those pushing the ‘Israel is a Terrorist State’ bullshit. Hezbollah attacked Israel, Israel responded. The Lebanese government admits it’s impotent to deal with Hezbollah, so Israel is. It’s really as simple as that. Those peddling the meme of the day ‘collective punishment’ are only able to do so because they have long internalised their own infantilising of Middle Eastern Muslims.”
“Islam. When you hear that word, what immediately comes to your mind? A masked terrorist? Osama bin Laden? Fanatical young men with explosives strapped round their waists? These are certainly the images that leap from the newspapers and the television screens. The notion that Islam had a high culture when Britain was living in dark times seems to be off our radar screens. Islam is a religion with great richness at its heart. Terrorists and suicide bombers have hogged the headlines, but they no more represent Islam than football ‘casuals’ represent the clubs they claim to support. Yet in today’s global media village, Islam is almost exclusively associated in the western public mind with lethal fanaticism.”
A number of radical Muslim groups are to be proscribed despite concern that this will drive them underground where they cannot be monitored. As part of the Prime Minister’s 12-point plan to tackle terrorism, announced after the London bombings on 7 July last year, the government is to unveil a list of organisations it wants to ban under the Terrorism Act 2006. The list is expected to include Hizb ut-Tahrir.