A while back there was a press report that this blog commented on regarding the Finsbury Park Mosque. It turned out that one of their senior governors is a member and a supporter of the genocidal Islamic group Hamas. Mohammed Sawalha, one of the Trustees of Finsbury Park mosque was revealed in the press last month to be not just a supporter of Hamas but also has represented the murderous organisation at a meeting in Moscow with Russian government officials.
When caught out having a representative of a genocidal group on their management team the mosque blustered and blowed and tried to deflect attention away from their organisation. They whined loudly about how they were now a moderate mosque and had put the bad old days, when the mosque was run by some seriously dangerous Islamic headcases, behind them. Yeah right, pull the other one it’s got bells on.
However, nearly a month passes and the Finsbury Park Mosque has still done nothing about the Hamasnik in their organisation. They have let this issue slide, possibly in the hope that the rest of us forget that this high profile mosque has someone who works for and with a genocidal group on their board? An interesting article. dated 30th of November 2017, has turned up in the Islington Gazette the newspaper that covers the Finsbury Park area which states that the mosque hasn’t yet ‘decided’ on the fate of Mohammed Sawalha. Does anybody else apart from me smell the distinct miasma of bullshit here? If this mosque was really really serious about being seen as ‘moderate’ they would have dumped Sawalha like a hot potato. The mosque admits to the Islington Gazette that they didn’t check out this man’s references or background. Sawalha is dodgy,very dodgy, yet the Finsbury Park Mosque is still pussyfooting around about him. If this was a non Muslim organisation and the entity took on someone based on scant checking and then discovered that they were supporters of a foreign terror organisation or was involved in violent extremism, how long do you think it would be before the person was out of the door? The answer is very quickly and a lot less than 3 weeks.
Here’s the Islington Gazette report into the shenanigans going on at the Finsbury Park mosque. As is usual policy for this blog the original text is in italics whereas this blog’s comments are in plain text.
The Islington Gazette said:
The fate of a Finsbury Park Mosque trustee is still up in the air – three weeks after it was alleged that he is a member of a terrorist organisation.
Earlier this month, The Times newspaper reported Mohammad Sawalha had been appointed to the political wing of militant Islamist group Hamas.
This is labelled a terrorist group by the UK government and European Union. Hamas rejects the right of Israel to exist and backs “armed struggle” against it.
Hamas goes beyond mere ‘armed struggle’ Hamas want to exterminate Jews.
It’s a far cry from the spirit of multi-faith community cohesion promoted by the St Thomas’s Road mosque since the days of Abu Hamza.
Look at the use of buzzwords that say nothing ‘multi faith’ and ‘community cohesion’. A genuinely peaceful and integrated faith organisation would have driven the likes of Sawalha out years ago.
Mr Sawalha was appointed as a trustee in 2005 – the same year as the mosque’s regime change when hate cleric Hamza was driven out.
His appointment was authorised by the Charity Commission, a government department which regulates charities across the UK.
There’s been plenty of time for the mosque to find out about Sawalha’s background but they either didn’t bother or possibly knew about it and approved of Sawalha’s connections and views. Either way the mosque looks bad over this. This story puts the mosque in the position where they can seen to be either monstrously incompetent or actively malevolent. The position of the Charity Commission in all this is especially worrying. Although the Charity Commission has for many years been dominated by those with a leftist mindset, surely the Commission should have had enough people with common sense working for them to have done more digging into Sawalha’s background and contacts? Did anybody at the Commission think of running some of the names involved in the alleged ‘community take back’ of the mosque past the eyes of the police or the Security Service? This might have helped highlight some of Sawalha’s troubling connections. It comes to something doesn’t it when a supporter or alleged supporter of a murderous terrorist organisation with the stated aim of exterminating Jews is given the nod by entities like the Charity Commission to help run a high profile mosque. Our quangocrats seem t be too stupid to sit the right way round on a toilet let alone make judgements on who should serve as mosque governors.
The information about Sawalha should have come out earlier and the mosque in particular has a lot of questions to answer about why this did not happen.
But mosque chair Mohammed Kozbar told the Gazette on Monday the situation still hadn’t been resolved – as, he said, Mr Sawalha hadn’t been in the country since the reports emerged.
Convenient that isn’t it?
He said: “We are still in touch with the Charity Commission and haven’t been able to meet him officially since the media reports, as he is still abroad.
Sounds like they are trying to stall the Charity Commission.
“When that meeting takes place, we will make a decision. Hopefully it will be very soon.”
In a statement, the mosque said it had no reason to suspect Mr Sawalha.
No of course they didn’t, after all support or alleged support for genocidal groups is normal for Islam. Do you smell the miasma of bullshit coming up from Mohammed Kozbar’s statements, I know I do?
“Mr Sawalha and other trustees played an instrumental role in preparing for and implementing the removal of Abu Hamza’s supporters, and restoring the mosque to the community.
Yes I do smell bullshit!
“It would be remiss to ignore that Mr Sawalha, along with his colleagues, has been at the very heart of this collective achievement and has served the board of trustees, the mosque and its local community diligently and exceptionally throughout the past 12 years.
The smell of bullshit is getting even stronger now. For someone who has been exposed and accused in the national press as being someone with highly dodgy political and religious views, Sawalha is getting a lot of the soft soap treatment from Kozbar.
“Finsbury Park Mosque is a British institution with absolutely no connections with any foreign entities whether religious, political or otherwise.
‘British’ do me a favour. The Finsbury Park mosque doesn’t spring from the British culture created by native Britons and the settled peaceful and integrated migrants that have chosen to live here, this mosque is an alien excrescence dedicated to a violent backward foreign death cult. I’m completely unsurprised therefore to find not only people accused of involvement with dangerous extremist groups at the Finsbury Park mosque, but also to find that it contains those who will soft soap such individuals.
“As an individual of impeccable character who served the institution and was appointed to the board of trustees with police support, the mosque has never felt the need to research Mr Sawalha’s personal life nor to investigate his political views or standpoints.”
This is a big fail on the part of the mosque. They should have looked into this person’s background and that fact that they did not says a lot about the mosque, its ethos, its management and the characters of those who are associated with running it. As I said earlier it looks either as if we are dealing with either incompetence or malevolence here.
I cannot help but suspect that the mosque and some of those associated with it may well be hoping that this issue will somehow ‘go away’. Maybe there is the hope that eventually the public and the press will forget about Sawalha and move onto something else and some other story, after which Sawalha can be quietly brought back into the UK and back into the mosque fold again. This is something that should not be allowed to happen.
A truly Anglicised and genuinely peaceful religious organisation would not have equivocated like the Finsbury Park mosque has done. Such an entity would have kicked Sawalha out and whether he was currently in the UK or not in the UK, would be immaterial. That the Finsbury Park mosque has not taken such swift and effective action tells us all we need to know about the nature of this particular mosque and its management. There should be no excuse for having a supporter of a genocidal organisation like Hamas on the board of a religious organisation, absolutely none, yet the Finsbury Park mosque seem determined to make excuses for this guy and not take the correct step of removing him. Because of that we should doubt the honesty and seriousness of the Finsbury Park mosque when they say that they are a moderate organisation. A truly moderate organisation would have acted and not stalled as this mosque has done.
The Finsbury Park mosque has been a problematical organisation for decades and this latest scandal shows that it should still be categorised as problematical. Maybe trying to rebuild this religious organisation was the wrong tactic as the Islamist worms may well have just crawled back into it again. It might have been better to have closed this entity down completely as little really seems to have changed within it.
