The leadership of one of the most prominent mosques in Britain includes a high-ranking commander in the anti-Israel ‘terror group’ Hamas.
Mohammed Sawalha, a trustee at Finsbury Park Mosque in north London, is an appointed member of the political bureau of Hamas. According to The Times, he lives with his family in a £500,000 council house in Kingsbury, northwest London.
Hamas frequently attacks and kills Jewish civilians in Israel and their charter contains the stated aim of destroying the Jewish state by creating an Islamist one, as well as numerous anti-Semitic tropes.
Mr. Sawalha has been known as a senior Hamas activist in the UK since fleeing Palestine for London in the 1990s, but his new, official role with the group only became known in September.
He travelled to Moscow that month as part of a Hamas delegation, which held a meeting with Mikhail Bogdanov, President Putin’s Middle East envoy, and a deputy foreign minister, according to the website Al-Monitor.
In the UK, only Hamas’s militant wing is classed a terror group – despite the political wing being outlawed by the U.S. and EU – meaning Mr. Sawalha has not broken British law.
However, in 2008 he was named in U.S. court documents as having previously been “in charge of Hamas terrorist operations in the West Bank” and was accused of meeting men laundering millions of dollars to finance the group.
He has also frequently been accused of promoting bigoted views in the UK, including claims he referred to the “evil/noxious Jew in Britain” when speaking in Arabic to Al Jazeera in 2008.
As well as his work with the Finsbury Park Mosque, he is a former director of the Muslim Association of Britain and president of the British Muslim Initiative.
Saudi Arabia helped to finance the construction of Finsbury Park Mosque in 1988 and spread its radical, Wahhabist interpretation of Islam in Europe.
The mosque was once notorious for its links to hate preacher Abu Hamza, shoe-bomber Richard Reid, and 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui before it was reformed and reopened in 2005.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is a regular guest, with the mosque sitting in his constituency. Last month, he attended a meeting on “Hate Crime Against Muslim Women” that was also attended by local police officers.
The mosque’s website states: “Unfortunately the Finsbury Park Mosque was under the forceful control of some extremists linked to Abu Hamza Al-Misri from 1997 to 2005.
“This was a dark period for the mosque as these individuals, unrepresented of mainstream Islam, used the premises to promote their ideology of hate, confrontation and disunity.”