Why Fishing for Potential Jihadis Should Not be Made an Olympic Event

Civitas, 27 November 2006

Forget their constantly escalating estimated cost and the security nightmare of hosting them in the capital, a far more profound and compelling reason why London should not host the 2012 Olympics is that doing so seems likely to provide the perfect pretext for the construction of a giant mosque there able to hold 70,000 worshippers that those with some claim to who know about these matter claim will prove fertile breeding-ground for incipient jihadis.
It is not raving Islamopbobes who are making this allegation about the mosque, but local Muslim residents of the London Borough of Newham, where, if planning permission is granted, the mosque is to be built. So concerned are they that 2500 of them have in the last ten days signed a petition objecting to it addressed to London mayor Ken Livingstone.

Their concern arises not so much because of the size of the mosque as because its sponsors are Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim grouping whom the petitioners accuse of being an ‘extremist group … that preach unbarred hate.’
The signatories claim the mosque ‘will be run by the minority and fundamentalist sect of Tableeghis only because they have authority within the Muslim Council of Britain which is an undemocratic organisation and does not represent us Muslims’. They go on to explain that they ‘oppose the construction of this mosque if it is to serve the purpose [of] allow[ing] the deobandis/tableeghis to … brainwash the youth of our community as they have [done] and continue to do so [un]til today… [E]ach year they send hundreds of young British Muslims to fundamentalist religious schools around the world and are the current cause of problems within our community including the prevention of women to attend mosques.’
These local Muslim opponents of the proposed mega-mosque appear not alone in their concerns about Tablighi Jamaat. In its report about the matter in today’s issue, the Times refers to: ‘a leaked FBI memo, obtained by the US news media in 2005, [that] raised fears that al-Qaeda was using membership of Tablighi Jamaat as “cover … to network with other extremists”.’
What is not reported in today’s Times is that, as early as July 2003, the then deputy chief of the section of the FBI dealing with international terrorism was reported by the New York Times as having said that al Qaeda had used Tablighi Jamaat … “for recruiting, now and in the past”.
Today’s Times reports that Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber, and two of the 7 July bombers, Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, all had links with the large Tablighi Jamaat mosque in Dewsbury. It does not mention that John Lind Walker, the young American Muslim convert captured by the US forces in Afghanistan fighting for the Taleban, was reportedly recruited to the Taleban whilst attending a Pakistani madrassa at which he had been enrolled by a visiting Tabligh preacher whom he had met in California.
No one is suggesting, certainly not I, that Tablighi Jamaat is a terrorist organisation that should be proscribed. However, as a Professor of Islamic law at UCLA is reported to have said in explanation of why US law enforcement officials and other moderate Muslim scholars like he were worried about this Muslim organisation:
‘You teach people to exclude themselves, that they don’t fit in, that the modern world is an aberration, an offence, some form of blasphemy. By preparing people in this fashion, you are preparing them to be in a state of warfare against this world…. But I think that militants exploit the alienated and withdrawn social attitude created by the Tablighis fishing in the Tablighi pond’.
Does Britain really need to introduce fishing for potential jihadis as an event at the forthcoming Olympics? If not, this proposed mosque should not be allowed to be built. Better still, to avoid giving offence, the Games should not be staged at all in the capital.