I would much rather have been wrong about this.

As I burble here at length on occasion,  my fathers family comes from the East End and I have lived or worked and have friends in most of the eastern boroughs of Greater London.  2 years ago I started making comments in another place, which is where I met Rebecca.  On 8 December 2004 I said this there:-

"Following my post this morning under the blasphemy thread (about the mosque in the disused factory near where I was brought up) a second mosque later bought a Victorian synagogue about half a mile away. First they built an extension, then altered the windows to look oriental. Then painted it eau de nile green. Then they pulled it down and built an enormous new one. With a huge sickly green dome and a minaret which, significantly in my opinion, looks like a missile. My parents are buried in the cemetery opposite, also a Victorian foundation and thats the view I get from their grave. It is so totally out of keeping with the rest of the areas architecture, but we all know how planning permission was granted. Half the council are of the congregation."

I could have added that my old next door neighbours were also members.  But there was something about that missile on the roof, that I could never see as a minaret.  The colour is awful, nothing like the copper patina it is faking, and the building is ugly. I try to be rational, that it is the ideology I fight,  and I must never lose sight of the fact that we are all God's creatures but something about that missile brooding over my parent's grave upsets me everytime I visit. In a way that the other mosques in east London do not, alien and ubiquitous as they are. 

I would say to my husband, "One day something will happen, and that place will be at the centre of it."  So I was saddened but not surprised, once I saw that most of the men arrested in this weeks aeroplane plot have addresses in Leyton and Walthamstow, to find today that several of them met and worshiped at this Mosque.  Whats more some of them live opposite.  Which is the Masjid-e-Umer in Queens Road Walthamstow.  If you follow that link you will see photos of the building when it was a synagogue, as a conversion and as it is now. If you go to the mosque website itself you can see the begging pleas for money to pay for the new building.

I had never seen anti Jewish graffiti on the streets of Leyton and Walthamstow until it opened.  Strangely at the same time the petty theft and vandalism that was becoming a problem in the cemetery ceased. Almost as if the destructive impulse was being consciously directed.

I am now waiting to have confirmed that these men went to my old school, which was a girls school in my day, but which is now mixed.  One of the positive things that Ofsted had to say at the last inspection was the "strength of modern language teaching, especially in Urdu"

I would have walked past this house several hundreds of times in the 20 years that I lived nearby.

Of course the BBC are concentrating only on "the Muslim community in fear" and I no longer have any patience with it.  What about my feeling that I am not welcome in my old home? That my Mum and Dad rest in an alien land?

Update from The Sunday Times this morning (13th)  Mosque pleads for calm.