Dominating the sky-line of Regent's Park's Hanover Gate entrance is the now somewhat slightly tarnished golden dome of the Central London Mosque. Its leafy affluent environs are a far cry from the congested run-down streets of Whitechapel home to the East London Mosque which was the subject of last Tuesday’s posting.
Some of the messages being purveyed at the Regent’s Park mosque, however, are no less worryingly divisive than those being purveyed at its East End counterpart that formed the subject of Tuesday's posting.
First, it transpires that it was at the Central London Mosque, in November 2004, that Abu Izzadeen (aka Trevor Brookes) was filmed preaching a sermon of hate towards the kaffir (unbeliever) and inciting acts of terror against non-Muslims, for which he was arrested last Tuesday along with five other terror suspects.
The police stumbled upon the video footage of Mr Izadeen preaching this incendiary message at the Central Mosque earlier this year, when investigating the foiled plot of British-based Islamist terrorists to kidnap and behead Muslim members of the British armed services.
In the video-footage the police found, Mr Izadeen describes the British Government as “crusaders who come to kill and rape Muslims” and, more importantly, asserts that any Muslim who joins the Army should be decapitated.
Why on earth was this man given permission to preach at the Mosque, given his earlier known track-record?
Second, as revealed by the Channel 4 Dispatches programme ‘Undercover Mosques’, broadcast last January, the Central London Mosque also purveys other forms of hate-material at its book-shop. Among the DVDs reportedly on sale there is one of a talk by Sheikh Yasin where he accuses Christian missionaries of putting the Aids virus in the medicine of Africans.
Another DVD reportedly on sake there is of a Saudi trained preacher saying that: ‘Kaffir is the worst word that can ever be written, a sign of infidelity, disbelief, filth, a sign of dirt.’
There is an element of unintended irony in the Central London mosque distributing material containing this accusation, given that, last August, its coffee bar and kitchens were forced to close for a week after a routine inspection of them by Environmental health officers discovered them crawling with mice and cockroaches and a ‘significant risk to human health’.
I am put in mind of that old adage: Those who preach under golden domes should not throw stones.