Mohammed Sawalha, the former chairman and co-founder of Britain’s premier Islamist organization the MCB, has in recent years served as a trustee of London’s infamous Finsbury mosque (former base of the hook-handed radical Abu Hamza Al-Masri).
Now we learn that Sawalha – despite living in the UK since 1990 – has all along been a senior member of Hamas and never terminated his relationship with the group. He was in fact just elevated to become a member of its politburo. The Times of London just revealed the story:
Mohammed Sawalha, a trustee of the Finsbury Park Mosque in north London, has been appointed a member of the political bureau of Hamas. His role was revealed when it was announced that he was part of a Hamas delegation to Moscow in September which held a meeting with Mikhail Bogdanov, President Putin’s Middle East envoy, and a deputy foreign minister.
The Finsbury Mosque board has claimed ignorance of the matter – but that is almost irrelevant to the harm done to British Muslims. Now they have to carry the burden of Sawalha’s extremist political baggage, as he is supposedly a major Muslim community leader.
Many of us in Western Muslim communities are alarmed by Islamists’ ruthless and cynical use of our community to advance their vision at the expense of our good name.
Islamists like Sawalha have little regard for the interests of Muslim communities in Britain or the West in general. They just want to use us as leverage to further their own agendas. In Sawalha’s case, it was Hamas’ agenda he served all along, not British Muslims.
Sawalha’s loyalty has not been to us Muslims living in the West and trying to assimilate – but rather to his narrow sectarian political agenda. He succeeded in hijacking our community’s agenda to suit his own. It is a terrible betrayal – he suckered thousands of British Muslims into doing Hamas’ bidding without most realizing it. Anyone who took him at face value got used.
This pattern of Islamist manipulation will not change until a new generation of Muslim leaders makes a clean break with Islamists, their ideology, and their exploitative tactics.