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 on the estate and chairs its residents’ association, said the youths of the area 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 and was erected after a successful fund-raising barbecue for Gaza which raised £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 could attract negative attention and that it needed to come down although she did not personally remove it. After being removed once, the flag re-appeared but was then quickly taken down.
“It’s not a place where hooligans and thugs and terrorists live,” she told The Tablet. “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.”
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