MONTREAL — New WikiLeaks documents that describe a Montreal mosque as a terror hub are defamatory, says a local Muslim spokesman.
The newly leaked U.S. documents claim a Mauritanian terror suspect being held at Guantanamo Bay was the leader of a Montreal-based al-Qaida cell that planned terror attacks in the United States.
The secret documents, released by WikiLeaks on their website last weekend, also claim that members of al-Qaida were recruited and trained at Montreal’s Al Sunnah Al Nabawiah Mosque, where the terror suspect served briefly, possibly as an imam.
But the chairman of the Muslim Council of Montreal said the documents serve as an example of how the community’s institutions are unfairly targeted by authorities.
“Our allegations are certainly correct that we’ve been targeted and this is biased targeting,” Salam Elmenyawi said in an interview. “None of the information is based on evidence. It’s rather based on intelligence analysis and this analysis has certainly ignored any other facts that contradicted the conclusion.”
Elmenyawi said the documents defame the mosque and show a blatant bias against the Muslim community.
Update: See “WikiLeaks: Montreal mosque ‘is a top Al Qaeda recruiting zone'”, Daily Mail, 27 April 2011
Needless to say, the Mail fails to quote the views of the Muslim Council of Montreal.
The paper also takes the opportunity to publish a photo of the North London Central Mosque in Finsbury Park, with the caption “Finsbury Park Mosque in London was named by WikiLeaks as another Al Qaeda recruiting ground”. Yesterday’s Mail did the same, with another photo of the mosque captioned “‘Haven for extremists’: US intelligence experts describe Finsbury Park Mosque, in north London, above, as an ‘attack planning and propaganda production base'”.
Disgracefully, there is no mention in either article of the fact that this charge dates from the time when Abu Hamza al-Masri and his followers were in control and that the mosque has been under new management since 2005.
See NLCM press release.