Wednesday, August 25 2010 - 09:35 PM
Mosque Fallout
NEW YORK (AP) — Mayor Michael Bloomberg delivered an impassioned speech at an event marking the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, saying that not allowing a proposed mosque to be built near ground zero would be “compromising our commitment to fighting terror with freedom.”

“We would undercut the values and principles that so many heroes died protecting,” Bloomberg said at the dinner Tuesday in observance of Iftar, the breaking of the daily fast during Ramadan.

The mayor said he understood the “impulse to find another location for the mosque” but a compromise won’t end the debate.

“The question will then become how big should the no-mosque zone around the World Trade Center be,” Bloomberg said. “There is already a mosque four blocks away. Should it, too, be moved?”

Sharif el-Gamal, the mosque site’s developer, and Daisy Khan, a co-founder of the group planning the mosque, were also at the dinner attended by about 100 people, including members of the Muslim community and city officials such as police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

After Bloomberg spoke, el-Gamal said he was “very honored and blessed” to be an American and a New Yorker.

“Mayor Bloomberg’s speech embodied the values and the mores that we as Muslim Americans live and cherish,” el-Gamal said.

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NEW YORK (AP) — A 21-year-old man is being held without bail on charges he stabbed a New York City cab driver in the throat after asking whether he was Muslim.

Manhattan prosecutors say Michael Enright spoke to the cabbie in Arabic and then said, “Consider this a checkpoint,” before attacking him Tuesday night on the Lower East Side.

Enright was arraigned in a Manhattan court Wednesday on charges of attempted murder as a hate crime, assault as a hate crime and weapons possession.

His lawyer, Jason Martin, says Enright was a senior in college at the School of Visual Arts, lives with his parents in suburban Brewster and has done volunteer work overseas, including in Afghanistan.

The driver told police that his attacker asked whether he was a Muslim and when he answered yes, Enright pulled out a folding hand tool, reached into the front seat and slashed him.

Enright, of suburban Brewster, N.Y., was arrested Tuesday night, said Deputy Inspector Kim Royster, a New York Police Department spokeswoman.

The driver was treated for cuts to the throat, upper lip, forearm and thumb, Royster said.

The New York Taxi Workers Alliance identified the victim as Ahmed H. Sharif, a yellow cab driver for 15 years. In a news release, the labor group noted that the incident occurred amid tension over plans for a new Islamic cultural center and mosque in Lower Manhattan near ground zero.

“I feel very sad,” the release quoted Sharif as saying. In the current climate, he added, “All drivers should be more careful.”

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NEW YORK (AP) — The proposed mosque near ground zero drew hundreds of fever-pitch demonstrators, with opponents carrying signs associating Islam with blood, supporters shouting, “Say no to racist fear!” and American flags waving on both sides.

The two leaders of the construction project, meanwhile, defended their plans, though one suggested that organizers might eventually be willing to discuss an alternative site. The other, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, said during a Middle East trip that the attention generated by the project is actually positive and that he hopes it will bring greater understanding.

Around the corner from the cordoned-off old building that is to become a 13-story Islamic community center and mosque, police separated the two groups of demonstrators. There were no reports of physical clashes but there were some nose-to-nose confrontations, including a man and a woman screaming at each other across a barricade under a steady rain.

Opponents of the $100 million project two blocks from the World Trade Center site appeared to outnumber supporters. Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” blared over loudspeakers as mosque opponents chanted, “No mosque, no way!”

Signs hoisted by dozens of protesters standing behind police barricades read “SHARIA” — using dripping, blood-red letters to describe Islam’s Shariah law, which governs the behavior of Muslims.

Steve Ayling, a 40-year-old Brooklyn plumber who carried his sign to a dry spot by an office building, said the people behind the mosque project are “the same people who took down the twin towers.”

Opponents demand that the mosque be moved farther from the site where nearly 3,000 people were killed on Sept. 11, 2001. “They should put it in the Middle East,” Ayling said.

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TEMECULA (Time) – Temecula, California has little in common with New York City. But the debate over a new mosque in the sleepy suburban town east of Camp Pendleton echoes many of the themes expressed in the controversy surrounding the Park51 Islamic center to be built near the World Trade Center site.

In Southern California, the question is whether the Islamic Center of Temecula Valley should be granted a permit to build a mosque on land it owns next to two established churches.

The Islamic center currently holds prayer services in a warehouse next to a pipeline company, down the street from a smog-test station and a masonry-supply yard. During Friday prayers, around 25 local conservative activists stood outside shouting slogans of hate through a bullhorn, carried signs with messages like “No More Mosques in America” and brought along several dogs, hoping to offend Muslim sensibilities.

“We’ve never had a problem with anybody before this,” says Imam Mahmoud Harmoush, the center’s spiritual leader and a lecturer at California State University in San Bernardino. “It is common sense that you don’t disrupt a religious service by creating noise and bringing dogs.”

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MURFREESBORO, TENN. (Washington Post) For more than 30 years, the Muslim community in this Nashville suburb has worshipped quietly in a variety of makeshift spaces — a one-bedroom apartment, an office behind a Lube Express — attracting little notice even after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

But when the community’s leaders proposed a 52,900-square-foot Islamic center with a school and a swimming pool this year, the vehement backlash from their neighbors caught them by surprise. Opponents crowded county meetings and held a noisy protest in the town square that drew hundreds, some carrying signs such as “Keep Tennessee Terror Free.”

“We haven’t experienced this level of hostility before ever, so it’s new to us,” said Saleh M. Sbenaty, an engineering professor who is overseeing the mosque’s planned expansion.

The Murfreesboro mosque is hundreds of miles from New York City and the national furor about whether an Islamic community center should be built near Ground Zero. But the intense feelings driving that debate have surfaced in communities from California to Florida in recent months, raising questions about whether public attitudes toward Muslims have shifted.

In Tennessee, three plans for new Islamic centers in the Nashville area — one of which was ultimately withdrawn — have provoked controversy and outbursts of ugliness. Members of one mosque discovered a delicately rendered Jerusalem cross spray-painted on the side of their building with the words “Muslims go home.”

The Islamic Center of Murfreesboro became a hot-button political issue during this month’s primary election, prompting failed Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron Ramsey to ask whether Islam was a “cult.”

Another candidate paid for a billboard high above Interstate 24 near Nashville that read: “Defeat Universal Jihad Now.”

Evangelist Pat Robertson weighed in, wondering on his television program whether a Muslim takeover of America was imminent and whether local officials could be bribed. (The mayor of the county where the Islamic Center is proposed called that idea “ridiculous.”)

The members of the Murfreesboro mosque, who say they have always rejected extremism, have been bewildered by the vitriol.

Sbenaty, 52, who came to the United States from Syria for his doctoral studies three decades ago, gets misty-eyed describing the kindness his neighbors showed his family after Sept. 11. At one point, he recalled, he was in a shopping mall parking lot with his wife, who wears a hijab, and a group of locals made a point to stop and assure them they had nothing to fear.

The other day, however, as he was standing on the mosque’s 15-acre parcel of land just outside town, drivers honked and flipped their middle fingers in the air as they rode past.

“It’s tough to see that change,” Sbenaty said.

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NEW YORK (msnbc) — In the latest in a spate of anti-Muslim incidents over the last two days, an intoxicated man entered a mosque in Queens on Wednesday evening and proceeded to urinate on prayer rugs, New York police officials said.

The man, identified as Omar Rivera, reportedly shouted anti-Muslim epithets and called worshippers who had gathered for evening prayer “terrorists.” One witness told the New York Post the man was “very clearly intoxicated” and had a beer bottle in his hand at the time.

“He stuck up his middle finger and cursed at everyone,” Mustapha Sadouki, who was at the mosque at the time, said. “He calls us terrorists, yet he comes into our mosque and terrorizes other people.”

Rivera has been charged with criminal trespassing.

A recent string of incidents – including the stabbing of a Muslim cab driver and the desecration of a California mosque – has some members of the Muslim community worried that crimes against Muslims could reach crisis levels.

Earlier this week, a mosque in Madera, Calif., had been vandalized with signs referring to the controversial plan to build an Islamic community center two blocks from the site of the September 11 terrorist attacks, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“No temple for the God of terrorism at Ground Zero,” one sign read. “Wake up America, the Enemy is here,” read another. Both were signed “ANB,” reportedly standing for the American Nationalist Brotherhood.

Imbrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told msnbc.com that it is only after “times of severe crisis” like the Oklahoma City bombing or September 11 terrorist attacks that the organization has seen such an uptick in hate crimes against the Muslim community.

“I think we’re beginning to see the result of this manufactured controversy about the Islamic community center in Manhattan,” Hooper said. “I hope this is not an indication of a trend.”

Hooper said the organization attributes the increasing number of incidents involving anti-Muslim rhetoric as a product of an “Islamaphobia machine” that includes right-wing news, blogs and other media outlets.

When asked to specify exactly what media outlets are to blame, Hooper responded, “We don’t need more enemies right now.”

(more to follow)

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