“I do believe everybody has a right to freedom of religion,” she said. She also attended a meeting of the local chapter of ACT! for America, a Florida-based group that says its purpose is to defend Western civilization against Islam.
She said they read books by critics of Islam, including former Muslims like Walid Shoebat, Wafa Sultan and Manoucher Bakh. Diana Serafin, a grandmother who lost her job in tech support this year, said she reached out to others she knew from attending Tea Party events and anti-immigration rallies. Recently, a small group of activists became alarmed about the mosque. “Now that we have to build our center, everybody jumps to make it an issue.” “We do all these activities and nobody notices,” he said.
Harmoush said the Muslim families had contributed to the local food bank, sent truckloads of supplies to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and participated in music nights and Thanksgiving events with the local interfaith council. The group wants to build a 25,000-square-foot center, with space for classrooms and a playground, on a lot it bought in 2000. A Muslim community has been there for about 12 years and expanded to 150 families who have outgrown their makeshift worship space in a warehouse, said Mahmoud Harmoush, the imam, a lecturer at California State University, San Bernardino. While an array of religious groups supported the project, opponents included the Anti-Defamation League, an influential Jewish group, and prominent Republicans like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker.Ī smaller controversy is occurring in Temecula, about 60 miles north of San Diego, involving a typical stew of religion, politics and anti-immigrant sentiment. Bloomberg hailed the decision with a forceful speech on religious liberty. The mosque proposed for the site near ground zero in Lower Manhattan cleared a final hurdle last week before the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, and Mayor Michael R. Often, they have been slower to organize than the mosque opponents, but their numbers have usually been larger. In each community, interfaith groups led by Protestant ministers, Catholic priests, rabbis and clergy members of other faiths have defended the mosques. Their message is that Islam is inherently violent and incompatible with America.īut they have not gone unanswered. “It’s one thing to oppose a mosque because traffic might increase, but it’s different when you say these mosques are going to be nurturing terrorist bombers, that Islam is invading, that civilization is being undermined by Muslims.”įeeding the resistance is a growing cottage industry of authors and bloggers - some of them former Muslims - who are invited to speak at rallies, sell their books and testify in churches. “What’s different is the heat, the volume, the level of hostility,” said Ihsan Bagby, associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky. These local skirmishes make clear that there is now widespread debate about whether the best way to uphold America’s democratic values is to allow Muslims the same religious freedom enjoyed by other Americans, or to pull away the welcome mat from a faith seen as a singular threat. They quote passages from the Koran and argue that even the most Americanized Muslim secretly wants to replace the Constitution with Islamic Shariah law. In all of the recent conflicts, opponents have said their problem is Islam itself. At one time, neighbors who did not want mosques in their backyards said their concerns were over traffic, parking and noise - the same reasons they might object to a church or a synagogue.
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