Plans to build a giant mosque, with a capacity of 12,000 worshippers, near London’s 2012 Olympic stadium have apparently been scrapped, reports AFP (via al-Arabia). It looks like a case of the right thing happening for the wrong reasons — at least the wrong publicly stated reasons.

Authorities in London say the group behind the project failed to file the necessary paperwork on time. But the real problem — whether they’d like to admit it or not — is that the group behind the project, Jamaat al-Tabligh (sometimes it’s written as Tablighi Jamaat), is an Islamist promoter of the idea that Muslims should engage in voluntary apartheid: building their own insular, parallel enclaves in the West as a preliminary step to spreading sharia and Islamicizing the wider society. Moreover, though such groups — the Muslim Brotherhood is the best example — are often regarded as “peaceful” by apologists, they are gateways to violent jihad.

The bottom line here is positive. Until there is a mainstream Islam that champions Western values of tolerance, freedom of conscience, equal rights, etc., Western societies should oppose the ongoing jihad to create and spread Islamist enclaves. I have my doubts that such a mainstream Islam will develop — I’m not sure it would be widely enough recognized by Muslims as “Islam.” In the meantime, however, it’s important to say that this is our position. Telling people that they didn’t get all the forms filed on time just embitters them and shows a government to be craven and arbitrary. We have principles to be proud of, and we should say so — with the incidental benefit that saying “no” to the Islamists is the only real way to help Muslim reformers.