The people of Redbridge have suffered from an enormous amount of Islamification in recent years, some of it aided and abetted by councillors, council officers and others. There have been mosques imposed on areas that really don’t want them, community buildings being ‘stolen’ by Islamic groups and turned into mosques and Muslim groups being given retrospective planning permission by the Planning Inspectorate despite the Muslim groups using buildings illegally as a place of worship. Redbridge has also seen some pretty disturbing incidents of Muslims pushing Islam into the faces of locals, including a Shia Muslim public self-flagellation ceremony which has been held in Ilford town centre for two years now.
As can be expected, this Islamification is resented by a number of local non-Muslim communities, who have seen their quality of life drop rapidly, due to a rise in unpleasant, anti-social and sometimes aggressive Islamic behaviour. The areas that have already been afflicted by mosques have seen a rise in traffic and parking problems. There have been problems with antisocial behaviour and large amounts of noise associated with these unwanted mosques. The Islamification of Redbridge has also had a much greater and darker effect, a heightened fear of violence from Muslims. It has been alleged that some Jewish women fear to walk alone in parts of Redbridge now because the growing amount of followers of Islam has made the streets much more unsafe for Jews. That this should happen in an area that once had ‘more Jews than Tel Aviv’ is a damning indictment on the ideology of multiculturalism and Islam’s inclusion therein.
One of the mosques that Muslims and their supporters are trying to foist on unwilling local people is in Mulberry Way, South Woodford. This horrifically imposing excrescence would be three stories high, plus a basement and it is to replace an existing building that is being used as a mosque. This ugly unwanted building also contains flats for accommodation and will dominate the whole area. The almost inevitable traffic, parking and disruption problems that this mosque will cause has also worried local traders, who fear that customers will not be able to park because of the number of people going to the mosque.
Local people fought a long and hard legal and political battle against this mosque, eventually, and unusually I might add, in June 2015, this monstrosity was refused planning permission. Fast forward to 2016 and there has been a a change of political administration in Redbridge from Conservative to Labour. The mosque promoters, probably correctly, may be perceiving that Labour may be more Muslim-friendly than the Conservatives. They put this application for a mosque back into the council planning department.
This is a terrible blow for many local people, who know the sort of problems that a mosque would bring, and fought long and hard to stop it being extended, but this is often how these mosque-e-teers behave. They will continue to make attempt after attempt to impose a mosque on an unwilling area, hoping to wear down opposition and also in order to garner support from councillors and council officers. This appears to be what is happening with the Mulberry Way mosque plan.
The new application, submitted around April 2016, is for a similar size and intrusiveness of mosque as was in the previous applications. Non-Muslims in the area are again attempting to fight back against this mosque imposition but strange things appear to be happening surrounding the application. Firstly a public meeting to discuss the new mosque application was cancelled at a few hours, notice but local objectors to the mosque were only given 6 hours notice of the meeting cancellation.
Attempts by local anti-mosque activists to find out via the Freedom of Information Act system why the meeting was cancelled have been met with some stonewalling on the part of the council. They have refused to give any detail of negotiations between the organisation behind the mosque and the council about car parking on the grounds that they are ‘private’. They did however state that the application was withdrawn on the instruction of the local council’s senior planning supremo, the Strategic Head of Planning and Building Control. This very late cancellation by this council officer is not only unusual but also caused many problems for those who wished to attend the meeting but only got four hours notice. This officer should explain why they canceled the meeting like this and why local objectors and others were only given a very small amount of notice whereas some parties got 48 hrs notice? For whatever reasons the council are keeping their contacts and their negotiations with the mosque extremely secret indeed. This sort of unnecessary secrecy, especially in connection with such a controversial mosque development is unusual and worrying to say the least.
The council have also instituted a consultation with local residents and data from this consultation is very interesting indeed. There were over 1000 representations to the council about this mosque imposition, which broke down as 608 against the application and 434 in favour. This is, as anybody will notice, a clear majority against the mosque being imposed. A further examination of the figures shows that the bulk of the objections (550) are from those in the immediate vicinity of the proposed mosque with very few of those nearby to the mosque (110) being in favour. When it comes to those in favour of the mosque, the situation becomes a little more nuanced and interesting as they show that as we move further away from the planned mosque so the number of those in favour increases.
It’s plain to see from these figures and an examination that has been made of the geographical location of those for and against, that this mosque is not wanted by the bulk of the people of South Woodford. However it is wanted by people who don’t’ live in the area or may not even have any connection with it. I suspect that a large number of those calling for the mosque to be built even though they are out of the area are doing so as part of an organised pro-mosque campaign. Basically the local Muslims want a mosque imposed on South Woodford and they will do whatever they can, including using out of area respondents to the consultation, in order to do this. The question that needs to be asked at this point is will the local authority planners and councillors notice this potential evidence of an organised pro-mosque campaign by those out of the area, and disregard calls for the mosque to be built from those who will not be afflicted by it? Or, like too many other local authorities, will Redbridge ignore local objections and impose this mosque in order to benefit from the potentially valuable whipped mosque vote?
One aspect of the geographical discrepancy between those local to the proposed mosque who don’t want it and outsiders who do, shouldn’t be overlooked. The figures bear out local people’s fears that this unwanted mosque will not be used by many of the local Muslims but will instead be used substantially by outsiders who will bring increased congestion and disruption to the area.
Sources for this story have been looking carefully at the nature of the objections recorded by the public on the Council website (the planning reference is 1144/16). These include:
feeling intimidated by large groups congregating outside the building
– the reluctance of the trustees to specify opening times
– higher pollution due to an increase in the number of visitors and traffic
– antisocial behaviour by some attendees
– the fact that residential flats in a mosque are not normal (and questionable as they would only be appropriate for one social group)
– the possibility of flooding arising from construction of the basement.
– the view that the development may contravene building regulations.
Many of these objections are to my mind very reasonable ones. This mosque will cause extra traffic, pollution and will no doubt bring antisocial behaviour including noise to the area. The matter of the trustees of the mosque group being shifty when it comes to opening times is also a matter for concern. I would not be surprised if the mosque-e-teers are planning to open much longer hours than local people and planners may be assuming. The mosque’s current behaviour doesn’t exactly bode well for the future. I have been sent a log of incidents surrounding the existing building in Mulberry Way during Ramadan and there have been considerable number connected to the mosque. There have been considerable traffic problems, mosque attendees flouting Road Traffic Act rules and driving the wrong way up one way streets, and large and threatening gatherings of people in the streets surrounding the existing building in Mulberry Way. There have also been a large number of occasions when the building was open until gone 1 AM and on a few occasions the building was even open and being used up until 2:30AM. If the local people are having to deal with these sort of problems at a time when the mosque is trying to give the impression that it is behaving in a neighbourly way, then how much worse will things be if this mosque extension is granted planning permission?
The council, now dominated by what appears to be a very Islam-friendly Labour Party, which may well be intending to push this mosque imposition through ‘on the nod’ so to speak. Therefore it’s vital that Redbridge councillors are made aware of the very high number of objections to this mosque from the immediate E18 postcode area These councillors should also be made aware that others are also aware that there are a massive number of objections to this mosque, and of the fact that most of those in favour of it live well outside of the affected area. Many other individuals and organisations are watching Redbridge Council, to see how they deal with this troubling case.
Links
Former working mans club stolen by Muslim group and turned into a mosque’s
Problems with Islamification in Newbury Park
Redbridge becoming unsafe for Jewish women because of Islam
The locals thought this mosque imposition was busted
The Islamification of Redbridge part 1
The Islamification of Redbridge part 2
