Building a mosque next to the Olympic site could create a breeding ground for extremists, a senior Church of England official has warned. Dr Philip Lewis, an interfaith adviser to the Bishop of Bradford, said that the plans threaten to establish a ghetto of Muslims taught to embrace jihad.
In the first intervention by a Church figure over the controversial project, Dr Lewis raised fears that a 12,000-capacity mosque in London would lead to a segregated Muslim community. The mosque would be four times the size of Britain’s largest cathedral. “Tablighi Jamaat does not try to engage with wider society so there must be clear worries that such a mosque would lead to a ghetto,” he said. “The danger is that this becomes a self-contained world, which would be vulnerable to extremists.”
His comments follow a private meeting of Anglican and Roman Catholic clergy earlier this month who fear that the mosque could have a negative effect on east London, the proposed site for the building. Councillor Alan Craig, who leads the Christian People’s Alliance and organised the meeting, said that Dr Lewis’s contribution to the debate was a great boost to the campaign to block the mosque.
He said: “For someone of Philip Lewis’s stature and experience, who has good relations with Muslims, to make these comments is a great help to our campaign. It shows that this is a reasoned campaign against the mega-mosque and is not built on Islamaphobia, but on facts and evidence.”
Sunday Telegraph, 19 October 2008
Frankly, you’d have thought Philip Lewis would know better. It’s a matter of days since he was himself denounced for his connections to another Deobandi organisation, the Association of Muslim Scholars of Britain (JUB), which has been attacked in similar terms to Tablighi Jamaat.
Update: For Yusuf Smith’s comments, see Indigo Jo Blogs, 20 October 2008
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A new mosque has opened in Berlin – the first in former East Germany. Just blocks away, some 300 people demonstrated against what they called the “Islamisation of Europe.”
The British National Party in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne has claimed credit for the reversal of a scheme to build a mosque and a development dubbed “Asia Town’ in the west end of that city.
An internet trader who put racist stickers on packages has been fined after they were spotted by Muslim postal workers. The stickers, which had the statement “no more mosques” and a cartoon figure of a Muslim with a bomb exploding from his head, were found at the Royal Mail Centre, on Green Lane, Stockport.
The BBC supremo caused a storm last night by saying he would not allow jokes about Muslims.