Planning consultant turned 'mosque-buster'

The Mail on Sunday covered an article appearing in The Sunday Times (£) on the self-styled ‘mosque-buster’ Gavin Boby and his boasts of disrupting the progress of mosque planning proposals submitted to local councils. Boby claims to have blocked plans for “16 out of 17 mosques”.

Boby, a planning lawyer who has set up the Law and Freedom Foundation, “calls for people to come to him for free professional legal help in opposing mosque proposals and claims that Islam encourages paedophilia, sexual abuse and pimping.”

According to MoS, Boby in a videoed message says that ‘If anyone out there knows of an application for a new mosque, a cultural centre for some phoney community centre or some multi-faith inter-faith harmony institute then let me know.’

Boby’s animosity for Islam and Islamic institutions stems from a belief that ‘Islamic doctrine permits, encourages and to a certain extent mandates Muslim men to take non-Muslim women as slaves to be used for sex.

‘In order to stop the Islamic doctrine, which is the root of this problem, you have to prevent further mosques from being built,’ he claims.

Boby’s association of ‘paedophilia, sexual abuse and pimping’ with Islam is perhaps to be expected given media output, particularly in the Daily Mail, which has reinforced just those types of prejudices.

Boby is not alone among far right activists who have made mosques a target of their anti-Muslim venom. The BNP’s manifesto for the Scottish Assembly elections in 2011 included this point on denying planning permission to build or convert buildings into mosques:

“As a matter of policy, we would oppose planning applications to build or convert buildings into non-indigenous cultural or religious centres.”

The BNP election manifesto of April 2010 stated “The BNP will ban the burka, ritual slaughter and the building of further mosques in Britain”.

With a number of proposed mosques suffering setbacks in recent months (see here, here and here), one can only hope that local authorities look to the role of agitators and ideologues when appraising applications.