Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn joined the crowd to express his support for the Muslim community.
“Thank you to every one of you who came here this evening to stand as part of our united local community in support of Finsbury Park Mosque because of disgusting and disgraceful attack that they suffered last Friday night.
“There can be no defense for this attack, there can be no apology for it. It was simply wrong,” Corbyn said.
“If this attack is designed to divide our community, it has failed and it will always fail because we are very proud of our multicultural community,” he added.
As Corbyn made his speech, crowd chanted slogans, saying “Unite”. People from many faiths and backgrounds carried banners outside the mosque that read: “Say No to Islamophobia” and “Don’t let racists divide us”.
“Those who have come here tonight, I believe, have come out of sense of duty and sense of solidarity and sense of understanding,” the Labour leader said.
Corbyn once again underlined his position regarding the U.K. parliament’s decision in favor of airstrikes in Syria.
“We live in a world of war. It does not resolve all the world’s problems by sending the RAF [Royal Air Force] and the bombers in. Because at the end of the day, our problems have to be resolved by people in political, diplomatic and popular circles.
“I want that to be the message of this century. That we try to resolve the problems of the world by bringing people together, not by driving them apart,” he said.
Muslim Council of Britain, Stop the War Coalition and Stand up Racisim were among the organizations that supported the vigil against rising Islamophobic attacks in the U.K.
“We are here to defeat Islamophobia and the disease called racism,” Mosque Chairman Mohammed Kozbar said in his opening remarks.
Video footage from security cameras in last Friday night’s attack show a man in a baseball cap and hooded top attempting to light a container filled with petrol before hurling it over the gates of Finsbury Park Mosque. He fled before police arrived. The Metropolitan Police is treating the attack as a hate crime.