STORY
The Charity Commission has issued a formal warning to the Al-Manar Centre Trust in Cardiff after finding the trustees had shared a video that could be interpreted as supporting Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation. The regulator described the charity’s conduct as “reckless, grossly mismanaged and falling far below the standards expected of those entrusted with public confidence and charitable funds” and the trustees of the charity have agreed in the future not to promote terror, violence or hate speech.
The offending video was posted to the mosque’s Facebook page in November 2023 and remained online for nearly three days. It contained content that appeared to glorify or justify the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. The Charity Commission reported that the trustee responsible admitted he hadn’t even watched the full video before sharing it, relying solely on the audio and a flowchart to decide if the content aligned with the charity’s aims. The Commission dismissed this as a dereliction of duty and noted that even the audio should have raised red flags.
This wasn’t the charity’s first brush with extremism-related concerns. It had been warned by the Commission as far back as 2014 to strengthen its safeguards against such risks, but despite this, the trustees still lacked even basic social media controls, leading the Commission to issue a statutory order requiring them to remove all potentially harmful content and implement proper oversight procedures. The Commission’s head of compliance, Joshua Farbridge, said the trustees had shown an “alarming lack of care” and stressed there was “no excuse” for their failure. He warned that charities can lose public trust in an instant through careless online behaviour, particularly when it involves material that could be construed as supporting terrorism. The Al-Manar Centre has since complied with the regulator’s demands, revising its governance procedures and removing the problematic content.