UK mosques open their doors as Jeremy Corbyn sends message to Trump
The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, poses with women members of Finsbury Park mosque during its open day. Photograph: Dinendra Haria/Rex/Shutterstock
Jeremy Corbyn has challenged the “demonisation” of Muslims and sent a message to Donald Trump that “drinking tea together is far more effective than pouring concrete to build walls to keep each other apart”.
The Labour leader delivered what he called a “very gentle message to a man across the Atlantic” as he spoke at Finsbury Park mosque in north London, one of more than 150 that opened their doors on Sunday to allow people of other faiths or of no faith to take tours and ask questions about Islam.
Muslims were “being demonised by some people”, he said, but visitors to the mosque’s open day were expressing “support for an inclusive society and support for a society which respects all faiths and all religions”.
“Over the past few weeks, there’s been some awful language used in many parts of the world. Awful language degenerates into awful actions. Those awful actions end up in the deaths of wholly innocent people, as happened in Quebec,” Corbyn said in a reference to the deaths of six people in a gun attack on a mosque in the Canadian city.
Hundreds of people visited Finsbury Park mosque, which gained notoriety as a centre of radical Islam in the late 1990s when the Egyptian cleric Abu Hamza became its imam. In 2005, the mosque underwent a change of leadership and is now considered a model of community relations.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/05/uk-mosques-open-doors-jeremy-corbyn-sends-message-donald-trump
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