The American Spectator

At Large

p>A brief item from Sunday's Washington Post : br> /p>

Italian police arrested three Moroccans on Saturday -- an imam and two aides -- accusing them of belonging to a militant cell that allegedly used a mosque in central Italy as a terror training camp.

br> Who is not familiar with similar stories, where this or that European mosque, staffed by Saudi and Pakistani imams, has served as a boot camp for terrorists? Competing with the latest al Qaeda video are documentaries like " Undercover Mosque " which show how, outside their places of worship, mullahs and other anointed ones insist they are regular folks who just want to get along, while inside they preach jihad, praise the Taliban, and condemn democracy, integration, and equal rights.

No wonder Londoners are anxious about plans to build a colossal 75 million pound mosque in "the heart of British society." The East London mosque will be located next to the planned Olympic stadium and that alone has raised security concerns. Local Tory councilor Alan Craig told the Daily Express: "It will be a horrendous security nightmare if they are allowed to build this large mosque so close to the (2012) Olympics." Besides security concerns, there is the obvious symbolic dimension. The London Markaz will be the largest place of worship in Britain, if not Europe, dwarfing Christopher Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. Funded by Saudi oil money, the mosque will certainly be seen as proof of Islam's increasing presence and influence in Europe. Not surprisingly, the proposal has the backing of London's far-left mayor Ken Livingston, who has repeatedly denounced what he called the "vicious" campaign of misinformation against the mosque.

The proposed mosque has caused a furor in Britain with Muslims and the Left on one side and groups like the Christian People's Alliance on the other. When more than 280,000 people petitioned the government to abolish plans for the mosque, they were immediately denounced as Islamophobic and intolerant.* One of those quick to condemned the petitioners was the noted Muslim apologist and former Catholic nun Karen Armstrong. "When 255,000 members of the so-called 'Christian community' signed a petition to prevent the building of a large mosque...they sent a grim message to the Muslim world: western freedom of worship did not, apparently, apply to Islam," Ms. Armstrong wrote in the Guardian.

Never mind that there are now some 300 mosques and 500 madrassas in London, as opposed to zero churches and zero synagogues in Saudi Arabia. According to Ms. Armstrong, it is Londoners who are intolerant.

Indeed, there are now large sections of London and Paris that are off-limits to non-Muslims, neighborhoods and suburbs where even the police dare not go. Recently Britain's Home Secretary John Reid was verbally attacked for having the temerity to visit a Muslim area. The outgoing Home Secretary's weak response was to say, "There was nowhere in this country from which anyone should be excluded, nowhere that could be called exclusively Muslim."

topics:
Islam, Law, Pakistan, Oil