The 77-year-old nun who twice arranged for a provocative black Islamic flag to be removed from the gate of the Will Crooks estate in Poplar, east London has called for extra funding to help with training and employment for the area’s young men.
She called for “cohesion” across the nation’s multi-faith communities, urging leaders not to allow conflict abroad to be used to foment inter-religious conflict at home. She said her actions had been presented as trying to set one faith against another but that had never been her intention.
Limerick-born Sr Christine Frost, a Faithful Companion of Jesus, who herself lives in a flat on the estate and chairs its residents’ association, said the youths of the area, mainly of Bengali origin, had not been radicalised.
But some local activists were taking advantage of the current situation in Gaza to stir up division.
The black flag with the Shahadah, the Muslim statement of faith written on it in Arabic, was not the Islamic State flag, she said, although she understood how it could be exploited controversially. It was erected after a successful fundraising barbecue for Gaza that made £2,400. After an article appeared in The Guardian about a hostile reception given to a journalist who arrived to photograph the “jihadist” flag, she realised it would attract attention from right-wing extremists and the rest of the world’s media, and that it needed to come down.
“It’s not a place where hooligans and thugs and terrorists live,” she told The Tablet. “It isn’t that. But there are people there who deserve better and who have not had the opportunities that those who criticise them have had. That’s what it’s really all about. It is about the unfairness, the unfair distribution of wealth.”
She said that she had not personally taken the flag down, because at 77 she was too elderly to climb the ladder up to the top of the gate, an ornate iron artefact which she and other residents had actually helped design. A young ex-resident helped her remove the flag and she added: “I thought that was the end of it.”
The flag went back up again soon afterwards, late on Saturday night, but after the police were alerted it was quickly removed again under their supervision. The gate is now clear of any flags.
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