Let locals decide on mosque plans

Editorial in Evening Standard, 27 September 2006

THE PROPOSAL for a new £100 million mosque in East London was always going to be controversial.

However, the details we report today about the process for approving the building will raise increasing concern.

The new mosque next to the Olympic village, planned by the radical Islamic sect Tablighi Jamaat, will be huge, accommodating 10,000 worshippers at first, with possible expansion later for a total of up to 70,000. Yet the plans, which will completely transform this part of East London, have had almost no public debate or scrutiny so far.

That makes it all the more worrying that the body that makes the decision on whether the mosque goes ahead is not Newham council, elected by local people, but the unelected quango, the London Thames Gateway Development Corporation.

This is perverse. Britain is not a Muslim country.

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Mad Melanie Phillips takes exception to the pretty obvious conclusion drawn by a leaked US intelligence report that the invasion of Iraq has increased the threat of terrorism:

“if [it] wasn’t Iraq something else would have acted as a recruiting sergeant for the jihad. Indeed, something else did: Afghanistan, and before that Bosnia, and always Israel. There is always a ‘something else’ – because these grievances are the outcome of the phenomenon we are up against, and not its cause. And that phenomenon is jihad, a concept that the west just cannot seem to get its head round at all. As it rolls on and on across the world, one cause follows another in a steady stream…. The bottom line is that this jihad against the west started long before even the first Iraq war. And any defence against it mounted by the free world is used to boost recruitment to the jihad. There is only one sure way for the west to prevent such recruitment: total surrender.”

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 25 September 2006

Writing in the New York Sun, Daniel Pipes examines six cases of Muslims attempting to “intimidate” the West, from the Rushdie affair to the Pope. He concludes:

“No conspiracy lies behind these six rounds of inflammation and aggression, but examined in retrospect, they coalesce and form a single, prolonged campaign of intimidation, with surely more to come. The basic message – ‘You Westerners no longer have the privilege to say what you will about Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur’an, Islamic law rules you too’ – will return again and again until Westerners either do submit or Muslims realize their effort has failed.”

“It will be called the London Markaz and it is intended to be a significant Islamic landmark whose prominence and stature will be enhanced by its proximity to the Olympic site.

“When television viewers around the world see aerial views of the stadium during the opening ceremony in six years’ time, the most prominent religious building in the camera shot will not be one of the city’s iconic churches that have shaped the nation’s history, such as St Paul’s Cathedral or Westminster Abbey, but the mega-mosque.

“Its arrival in London will be a significant coup for Islam and a major event for the country as a whole. It will also make Abu Izzadeen’s depiction of that part of east London as ‘a Muslim area’ seem remarkably prescient.”

Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph, 25 September 2006

Mad Mel applauds Johnston’s article: “As Johnston observes, when people look at the Olympic village, itself a showcase for Britain, the dominant image will be not a church but a mosque towering over it. It will be a symbol of Islamic domination of Britain and Britain’s cultural surrender to the jihad, and as such will inspire many more jihadists on the basis that Britain has given up the cultural ghost.”

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 25 September 2006