Mosquebusters

Click here for pictures from inside the world of Mosquebusters.

LONDON — It is winter, the middle of December, and I find myself making an odd phone call. Pacing around my living room, I kick at the carpet as I dial the number.

"Hello?" I say.

"There’s no time," the man on the other end of the line answers immediately. His name is Gavin Boby. We have e-mailed before, but I introduce myself again, explaining my background: education, photography and video experience, that sort of thing.

Boby’s tone is measured and businesslike. "It sounds like you have skills that could be of use. Muslims are very bad losers," he says matter-of-factly. He’d like me to act as a witness, he tells me, videotaping his court appearances and searching the Internet for "targets." The conversation is taking me into uncomfortable territory; my voice wavers, and I begin to flounder. Boby doesn’t notice. "I’ll send you instructions on how we work," he says and hangs up. I have just become a Mosquebuster.

The Mosquebusters, or the Law and Freedom Foundation as they’re officially known, are part of a new wave of anti-Islamic campaigners in England with links to more established anti-immigrant groups such as England Is Ours and Stop Islamisation of Europe. Like many of these groups, the Mosquebusters fear that traditional British culture, laws, and values will disappear with the changing face of Britain and worry that extremist interpretations of sections of the Koran urge Muslims to kill non-believers and take slaves.

Until mid-February, the Mosquebusters advertised for volunteers, under a campaign called "No More Mosques," on the website of the ultra-nationalist English Defence League (EDL), a group that organizes anti-Islamic street marches that often decend into brawls, riots, and arrests. The EDL and other anti-Islamic groups have no problem convincing their members to parade in public yelling insults like "Muslim bombers off our streets!" and "Allah is a pedophile!," but the Mosquebusters have a quieter, perhaps more insidious approach: In offices and city halls, they are crafting legal cases against mosque construction applications across the country. It’s a war against Islam, but one that often resembles a bureaucratic turf battle more than a clash of civilizations.

Mosquebusters leader Boby, known as The Lawman, is careful to draw the distinction between religion and race. "It is primarily about the division between Islamic and non-Islamic society, and the lawless violence at the heart of Islamic doctrine and practice," he says in his manifesto. Boby dresses conservatively, with a black suit, white button-down shirt, and pastel neck tie, done up tight. He is clean shaven, his brown hair cropped close, and his small eyes squint behind wire-framed glasses. He has the look of a typical middle-aged businessman. And most of the time, he is.

From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., he runs a planning application company in Bristol, in western of England. He is a qualified barrister with undergraduate and graduate law degrees. But what Boby really wants is "an army of people, about 500 across the country," as he says in one of his online motivational videos. As I watched the recording from my flat in East London, while digesting one of his instructional e-mails on bureaucratic mosque-busting, Boby leaned closer to the camera, maintaining eye contact: "It is very important that mosques are stopped."

Boby launched the Mosquebusters website in 2011, but the group has been working behind the scenes for longer. It offers legal expertise, pro bono, to anyone disputing the construction of a mosque in England, and it has a growing web presence. Boby relies on a handful of volunteers to help with his work; they don’t have a physical office but work from home communicating via e-mail, with Boby alone. "I’ve tried using members of the EDL as volunteers before. They’re too reactionary," he says. When Boby needs to meet his Mosquebusters or clients, he takes them for lunch, one-on-one, in London or Bristol — an offer he made to me as well when we talked by phone. Boby doesn’t speak with the press, so a chance to meet him would have been rare. But later in the week, he had a change of heart; he e-mailed me questioning my motives and asked me to disregard all prior correspondence.

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Black and white pictures of World War II fighter planes decorate the Mosquebusters’ website, boasting triumphs on fuselages. "Progress So Far… 10," reads the banner. To date, mosques in Blackpool, Bolton, Ealing, Huddersfield, Kirkless, Luton, and York have been fought off by the Mosquebusters. A mosque in Uxbridge, stopped initially by a Mosquebusters community petition, has now landed back in court under appeal from the local Muslim community. It threatens the Mosquebusters’ otherwise flawless record.

On a Saturday in late January, I went to see the mosque in question. Located at the end of the Metropolitan tube line, Uxbridge is 20 miles from central London, buried in a largely white, working-class suburb. Walking half an hour south from the Metro stop to the contested Royal Lane Mosque, one passes a small commercial center, a throbbing road, damp underpasses, and sprawling estates. The town has the feeling of a place forgotten and fearful of change. It has a population of about 1,300 Muslims, just under 5 percent of its total residents.

Five years ago, Royal Lane Mosque was the Irish Community Centre. Over time, the Irish community’s had waned, and there wasn’t enough money to keep the center open. The building lay derelict for three years, the wooden bar and beer-stained carpets shut behind boarded windows. Two years ago, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Association bought the building and began to renovate it. They repainted the interior, laid down green carpets for kneeling, installed televisions and speakers, and began to re-do the façade. The windows are now arch-shaped, filled with frosted glass for privacy.

But after spending $205,000 on the renovation, the association was denied permission in September 2011 by the Hillingdon Borough Council to use the building as a mosque. Local residents, with the help of a pre-prepared Mosquebusters template, had put pressure on the council, arguing that the mosque’s 10 parking spaces wouldn’t accommodate all visitors. The Ahmadiyya Muslim Association built an extra two parking spaces and lodged an appeal a month later.

Brian Fairless lives across the street from the Royal Lane mosque. He leans against the door frame of the semi-detached house that he’s lived in for over 20 years. "I don’t see why they couldn’t have this mosque somewhere else, where there’s a larger Muslim community," he says, crossing his arms over his thin chest. Fairless, 66, is retired and now spends one month out of the year in Sri Lanka, donating his money and time to people affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. He fundraises in England, using the money to build shelters, homes, and community centers for people of all religions. But he doesn’t want this one on his doorstep. "I don’t want loud calls to prayer, and I don’t want my parking space taken," he says.

From the street, the mosque is hard to spot. It sits back from the road behind a soaring metal fence. Its brick exterior is painted off-white, and with no signs or markings it blends into the grey winter sky. Groups of Pakistani men wait sheepishly outside, looking shy and uncomfortable. Cars begin to arrive, parking on the street, on the pavement, and in front of resident’s windows, waiting for the mosque gates to be unlocked.

Wrapped in heavy coat, scarf, and wool hat, Sohail Quereshi, the mosque’s imam, holds whispered conversations with other worshippers. They are unsure whether to open the mosque, unsure who might be watching from behind curtained windows. This is the first time they’re using the facility; usually, they rent the event hall next door. The council still hasn’t given its consent for the mosque’s operation, and the parishioners worry that this unauthorized service could damage their community’s reputation and negatively affect the status of the appeal. Quereshi turns to me outside the gates and shakes my hand warmly as I introduce myself. "We didn’t know whether you were local press," he says. "For them to see us using the mosque would be very damaging."

Eventually, the men file in. Shoes are removed, stored in racks by the front door. Coats are slung on plastic garden furniture. Inside, the space is split into two large, clinically sparse rooms. One room has a polished marble floor; children slide about in their socks waiting for table tennis and arm wrestling competitions to begin. The second room — the mosque proper — has a thick, striped green carpet. With the front door closed, the mood inside changes. The members of the congregation mill around, shaking hands, joking, and eating pizza off Union Jack paper plates. The pizza consumed, white blankets with red and green embroidered patterns are laid on the cold marble. The 50 or so men in attendance kneel in lines opposite Quereshi. Silence falls as they bow their foreheads to the floor in unison.

* * *

It’s not religious practice, claim the Mosquebusters, it’s parking. Or noise pollution. Or building codes. And with downloadable petition templates, generic letters to councilors, and free legal advice for begrudged locals, it’s Boby’s mission to make it as easy as possible for your average, disgruntled suburbanite to join in. If there’s a trial or hearing about planned construction, Boby will come down to the courthouse to provide free legal representation; if a mosque site has been proposed, he’ll arrange volunteers to paper a neighbourhood with flyers. But the Mosquebusters aren’t just a resource for aggrieved pensioners — the group actually wants its volunteers to spread out, actively trolling city planning offices and public records for mosque applications. "It is satisfying detective work, rooting around Islamic deviousness!" reads the instructional e-mail sent to volunteers.

The process begins by searching for D1 planning applications (non-residential buildings), then checking floor plans for a "prayer room," checking names of applicants and agents for names that sound Muslim. "It might be lodged under the label of ‘multi-faith center’ or ‘community center,’" says Boby. "Mosque applicants are crafty and often try to hide what it’s really about."

It might seem that the Mosquebusters is a quixotic, xenophobic campaign limited to a handful of small towns in England, but it has ties to other anti-Islamic groups around the world. People from Australia, Canada, Germany, Scandinavia, and the United States comment on the Mosquebusters website regularly, and the group is often written about by far-right organizations. "Mosquebusters racks up another win, all was needed was for someone to oppose it’s [the mosques] construction," crows Tundra Tabloids, a Scandinavian website that claims to keep tabs on the political correctness that allows Islamic extremism to flourish. "This is brilliant. I hope council was paying close attention," reads a caption on MRCTV, a right-wing news website.

But as the Mosquebusters have grown, they’ve earned some unwanted attention. As I was reporting this story, Boby cut all ties with me, refusing to speak or meet for interviews. The Mosquebusters web presence is now cleaner, straighter: Gone are the war planes, the pictures of slam-dunking cheerleaders celebrating another mosque closure. The organization’s adapted "Ghostbusters" logo, a caricature of the convicted Islamic terrorist Abu Hamza with a glass eye and hook for a hand, is gone. And Mosquebusters no longer advertises for volunteers through the English Defence League; a disclaimer makes clear that the two groups have no official association.

Still, Boby isn’t backing down from his crusade against Britain’s creeping Islamicization. "Authorities need to know that the wind is shifting and that when it has blown away the politically correct fog, they will be left in full view," he says in his latest YouTube video, arguing that officials so fear being seen as politically incorrect that they’ll grant mosque applications to anyone. And like any hard-working, ambulance-chasing, small-town laywer, he’s got his pitch down: "If anyone knows about an application for a mosque, some phony community center or some multi-faith-interfaith-harmony-institute, or a school or college, let me know."