by Hugh Fitzgerald
The Guardian report continues:
How did a small-town property dispute turn into a religious war, with legal and symbolic implications for all of America? Part of the answer has to do with the country’s labyrinthine land-use laws, which leave most control to state and local governments, which are in turn vulnerable to the furies of angry mobs. Part of it has to do with America’s love of litigation. The inherently confrontational and intrusive legal process had a radicalising effect on the town, driving some opponents of the development to extremes.’
This “property dispute” turned into a “religious war” only because Mr. Chaudry was insistent on making it so. He had a right to appeal the decision made against him by the zoning board, but instead he lawyered up, having decided instead to sue the township, and to turn that zoning dispute into what it never had been, a “religious war.” In order to overcome the will of neighbors who opposed the granting of a zoning variance for the building of a mosque in a heavily residential area, because of the noise and commotion increased traffic would bring, it quickly became a morality tale, where the bigoted townsfolk, an incipient anti-Muslim mob (cf. the reporter’s bizarre remark about the “furies of angry mobs” — when was the last time?) were finally stopped in their tracks by the altogether admirable Mohammad Ali Chaudry and his team of lawyers.
But something else deeper and darker seemed to be at work. Some residents openly discussed Islamophobic conspiracy theories, such as the idea that the mosque was meant to send a message of conquest, due to its proximity to the town’s September 11 memorial. Such crackpot notions, promoted by far-right ideologues such as Pamela Geller and Frank Gaffney, used to be confined to the margins of the internet. Then Trump embraced the Islamophobes, unabashedly.
It is not a “crackpot notion” to think that many Muslims see their mosques as more than just houses of worship. It was Recep Tayyip Erdogan who famously said that “our mosques are our barracks.”
If the zoning board were, as Chaudry has claimed, so motivated by anti-Islamic animus, then why did it hold 39 hearings on the mosque application — far more than were ever accorded any other requests for a zoning variance — thus giving Chaudry both ample time and even guidance to modify his plan so as to meet that board’s objections? The zoning board, like the townspeople who showed up to express their opposition, seemed to be most concerned with the actual number of people who would be visiting the mosque, which — unlike a church, where visitors would ordinarily be expected for services only on Sunday — would be visited not just on Fridays, but throughout the week, for at least some of the five required daily prayers. There were other questions: was there enough parking space, or too much? How many people were expected to regularly attend the mosque? Would any of them be using the mosque for the early-morning or late-evening prayers? How did Mr. Chaudry calculate their numbers, and how often would they would be visiting the proposed mosque? These are all legitimate questions for a zoning board to consider.
The Guardian reporter continues:
“It’s like his [Trump’s] election has given permission to people,” Chaudry told me the first time we met. We were at the proposed site of the mosque, sitting in the old suburban house that he was still hoping to demolish. Its living room, dominated by a large stone fireplace, was filled with boxes of donated clothes that he was preparing to deliver to a family of Syrian refugees. The many bookshelves were lined with theological texts and stacked copies of a paperback that Chaudry likes to give out, Islam Denounces Terrorism. Standing on an easel in a corner was a poster-sized rendering of the proposed mosque. In an effort to make it fit into its suburban surroundings, it had been designed to resemble a mini-mansion, with gray clapboard siding, a pitched roof with asphalt shingles, dormer windows and minarets disguised as chimneys.
So the mosque is planned, we are assured, to fit architecturally into the neighborhood (grey clapboard siding, pitched roof with asphalt shingles, dormer windows), although it’s hard to imagine that minarets could be convincingly “disguised “as chimneys, for they would have to be much taller than any ordinary residential chimneys. As for the depiction of the saintly Mr. Chaudry with “those boxes of donated clothes” for Syrian refugees, perhaps the reporter ought to have looked into that book, Islam Denounces Terrorism, that he likes to give away. It’s a well-known taqiyya text, an incredible farrago of falsehoods, by one Harun Yahya, who is also known as a ferocious critic of evolution. It’s all in Yahya’s mendacious text: Muslims are benevolently inclined toward the “People of the Book,” “Jihad” mainly means an interior struggle to be a good Muslim, Islam denounces violence, and so on and so idiotically forth. Readers who want to see for themselves the kind of stuff Mr. Chaudry is disseminating should go here and read as much as they can stand :
The Guardian:
But the architecture did little to defuse tensions with the surrounding neighbourhood. Liberty Corner considered itself separate from the older and wealthier village of Basking Ridge, though they were both part of the same larger township, and few outsiders recognised the geographical distinction. And as even Chaudry and his allies admitted, some of the locals had a stubborn and ecumenical commitment to protesting anyone who dared to build anything, including Christian churches. People in Liberty Corner expressed an obstreperous [sic] ideology [sic] often abbreviated as “nimby”, for “not in my backyard”.
Here we have a key admission, casually mentioned, but the heart of the problem with the Chaudry Version: “even Chaudry and his allies admitted, some of the locals” opposed “anyone who dared to build anything, including Christian churches.” But if that is so, then there is no need to ascribe “anti-Islam” feelings to those who were strict preservationists, and who were just as hard, or harder, on applications for zoning variances for churches as they were for this mosque.
“The opponents of the mosque told their own story of victimisation, in which they were merely objecting to Chaudry’s oppressive development scheme. “It was always about land use,” one Liberty Corner resident told me. “They made it about religion.” The nimby complainers claimed that the mosque site – a marshy plot on a mainly residential street – was a poor location for a busy house of prayer. When the township planning board took up Chaudry’s proposal in August 2012, signs soon appeared in front yards around town, reading “Preserve Liberty Corner.”
Well, the mosque site was — and remains — “a marshy plot” on a “residential street” (not “mainly” residential — entirely residential, except for the planned mosque). Chaudry does not deny this. The phrase “a busy house of prayer” implies that there will be people arriving seven days a week, for at least some of the five daily prayers. Is there any assurance that they won’t be showing up before sunrise for the first prayer (Salat al-fajr), or after sunset, possibly as late as midnight, for the last prayer (Salat al-isha)? Does Mr. Chaudry not recognize the severe disruption — noise, commotion, traffic — that would bring to a peaceful residential area whose inhabitants would be awakened, or kept awake, by the first and last prayers of the day?
At one of the first planning hearings, a resident named Lori Caratzola stood up to challenge Chaudry. A law graduate, she cross-examined him about the size of the Islamic Society, accusing him of understating its membership. She revealed that she had done surveillance of a Friday service, counting 125 worshippers going into a space with a capacity for 60. After her confrontational performance, Caratzola became a leader of the opposition.
At the public hearings, Caratzola and others confined their criticisms to the nimby issues: drainage, parking, landscaping and the like. They convinced the board that a mosque would need more parking spaces than a church, because midday worshippers would come alone. When the Islamic Society submitted a new plan, with a larger parking lot, the mosque’s opponents protested that, too. It quickly became clear that the opposition was not solely concerned with parking.
Is there something suspect about Lori Caratzola being “a law graduate” who “cross-examined” Mohammad Chaudry? She’s a lawyer, and she found things in Chaudry’s presentation that she believed misrepresented the facts. Should she be faulted for being able to conduct such a cross-examination, apparently one effective enough to make her “a leader of the opposition”? And was there something underhanded about her actually counting the number of worshippers in the current Islamic Society prayer hall, which apparently was far more than Chaudry had assured the town now attended, and presumably that was the number that would now come to the new mosque? Don’t the residents have a right to know the real number of worshippers who will be coming — in their cars — from before sunrise until after sunset to the proposed mosque on a residential street? Chaudry had claimed there were 60 worshippers, but Lori Caratzola, conducting surveillance at Friday Prayers, counted 125.
There are several reasons why opponents might not have been satisfied with the “new plan” for a “larger parking lot.” First, was the parking lot doubled in size? Chaudry had claimed 60 worshippers currently attended the prayer hall. Did the original plan for the mosque’s parking accommodate only those 60? And did the new plan submitted have enough parking space for the 125 worshippers counted by Lori Caratzola? A second reason for not being satisfied with the “new plan” is that having an adequate number of parking spaces, based on a true estimate of the number of worshippers (and not the deliberate undercount by Mr. Chaudry) is only one of the problems the new mosque would pose. Another is that of how often, and at what times, the mosque’s neighbors could expect to have their lives disrupted by mosque traffic. As we know, worshippers could be expected on all seven days of the week, and from very early in the morning to very late at night. This is not a theoretical problem. Large numbers of cars arriving and leaving, noise and disruption conceivably beginning at 5 a.m. and ending at 10 or 11 p.m., are a nuisance to which neighbors in what is supposed to be a residential neighborhood have a perfect right to object. The Guardian’s reporter claims that “the opposition was not solely concerned with parking,” for he wants readers to think it was “islamophobia” that prompted their opposition. True, the opposition “was not solely concerned with parking,” but also with how frequently, and at what hours, significant traffic to and from the mosque could be expected. And one of the original objections — that the mosque was disproportionately large for the plot on which it would be built — also remained.
First published in Jihad Watch.
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One Response
I also wondered about whether the wailing “call to prayer” would be broadcast over the neighborhood prior to daybreak and at times throughout the day. It would truly reduce quality of life to have to put up with that caterwauling, never to end as long as the mosque was tolerated.
A church I was associated with in the Detroit suburbs struggled for nearly 20 years to obtain permission to build a new building near an area of “mini-mansions”. The neighbors had the same complaints as the Liberty Corner residents.