Mick Hartley

There was some controversy back in 2017 when the former Golders Green Hippodrome was turned into the Centre for Islamic Enlightening. Golders Green is, after all, a notably Jewish area of North London. But faith leaders, including Jewish leaders, dismissed the objections as racist. The place had, after all, been used as a church by an evangelical Christian group for 10 years after it closed as an entertainment venue. 

There's not much evidence of Islamic Enlightening in this latest saga. An exhibition about Albanian Muslims who helped Jews during the Holocaust – an event that would clearly have made a positive contribution to relations between the mosque and the local Jewish community – has been cancelled over "security threats", and the event’s links with Yad Vashem.

The event had faced calls of a boycott, most notably from 5Pillars, a Muslim community news and opinion site that opposed the exhibition’s ties to Yad Vashem, which it described as a “Holocaust museum based in Jerusalem which is partially financed by and supports the state of Israel”.

5Pillars editor Roshan Salih said on Twitter: "No to normalisation. Boycott Israel and Israeli institutions."

Before the event was postponed, Rabbi Natan Levy, head of operations with the event's co-organisers Faiths Forum, said it would be a "powerful reminder that the Muslim community in Albania was one of the few that did not idly by when the Nazis attempted to eradicate their Jewish neighbours".

Fiyaz Mughal, UK-based Director of Faith Matters, has claimed that ‘forward thinking’ members of his community are being ‘held to ransom’ by Muslim extremists.

Mughal said members of the congregation were targeted and the mosque had been denounced as un-Islamic for holding an event associated with Israel’s national Holocaust memorial museum.

Calls for a boycott, spearheaded by Roshan Muhammed Salih, editor of British Muslim news site 5 Pillars were made for over the event’s links to the Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem….

But Mughal insisted that:

When Muslims can’t engage with even Yad Vashem because extremists threaten them … enough is truly enough.

Karen Pollock MBE, Chief Executive, Holocaust Educational Trust called the cancellation:

A great shame. What would have been a positive initiative to highlight the role of Albanian Muslims who saved up to 1,800 Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust, has been cancelled due to a targeted campaign against this Mosque and its members.