Mohammad

A mayor can be an educator, also.

That was Ken Livingstone’s message when he spoke at last Friday’s Jummah prayer at the controversial North London Central Mosque. The mosque was formerly controlled by Abu Hamza, a terrorist recruiter.

Livingston, former mayor of London, is the Labour party's current candidate in the upcoming mayoral election. The topic that Livingstone pledged to educate the public about?  “The Prophet, peace be upon him,” Livingstone said.  “I want to make sure that in the next four years that every non-Muslim knows and understands the message” so that London will be cemented as a “beacon that demonstrates the word of the prophet, peace be upon him.”

Livingstone was referring to a sermon given by the Mohammad, which Livingstone called an “agenda for all humanity.” And putting his money where his mouth is, he also pledged to his Muslim audience to “make your life easier, financially.”

Livingstone said, “The line that stuck in my mind is when [the prophet] said, no Arab is superior to a non-Arab, no white man is superior to a black man … and that we should not terrorize [one another] but that God creates us so that we should get to know one another.”

Livingstone did not specify whether that verse was talking about different types of Muslims or whether it was referring to Muslims and non-Muslims, as the destruction of Christians and Jews are clearly called for in the Quran (9: 30).

The acting spokesman for the current leadership of the mosque, Azzam Tamimi, has said that he supports suicide bombings. A current director of the mosque, Mohammed Sawalha, is described by the BBC as a former senior figure in Hamas who “is said to have masterminded much of Hamas’s political and military strategy” from London and who signed signed the Istanbul Declaration in 2009. The declaration calls for attacks against the allies of Israel, which the British government interpreted it as calling for attacks on British troops.

The Telegraph reports that Livingstone has left a trail of allegations of links to Islamic fundamentalism. In 2010, in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, he campaigned against his own party’s candidate to back a controversial independent politician, Lutfur Rahman, sacked by Labour for his links to a Muslim extremist group, the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE).

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During his term as mayor, Livingstone’s London Development Agency channelled hundreds of thousands of pounds to the East London Mosque in Tower Hamlets, controlled by the IFE, even though senior LDA managers strongly opposed the grant. In return, IFE activists campaigned strongly for him at the 2008 mayoral elections, boasting that they "got out the vote" for Mr Livingstone and achieving dramatic swings to him in their east London heartland.

The Telegraph also reports that Livingstone also gave thousands of pounds of public money to the Muslim Welfare House, a charity closely associated with the Finsbury Park Mosque, which signed an open letter backing his re-election campaign in 2008.