Over the summer months, Muslims in Murfreesboro — for three decades a virtually silent minority and a sliver of the city’s population — have endured challenge after challenge to their fundamental right to build a house of worship. The latest comes in the form of a trial that started Sept. 27 in Rutherford County Chancery Court, where three aggrieved citizens and their attorney, Joe Brandon Jr., are fighting the proposed expansion of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. On their side, the plaintiffs have allies such as Frank Gaffney Jr., president of the conservative think-tank Center for Security Policy.
But on Sept. 28, the same day Gaffney was giving the Chancery Court a non-expert crash course in Islamic conspiracy theory, local Muslim leaders were quietly receiving encouragement from an unexpected guest: the U.S. Department Of Justice.
Perez says it’s common for the justice department to make its presence felt in a discriminatory environment, if only to remind those under siege that laws like the Religious Land Use Act exist. American Muslims have been a particular target during the past year. According to a recent justice department report, of the 18 complaints under the land-use law that the government has monitored since Sept. 11, 2001, eight have come since May.
“We have seen a spike in the zoning confrontations, in efforts to keep mosques and the like from being built,” Perez says.
“It was a very sobering meeting to listen to Murfreesboro leaders describe the climate of fear that they’re living in,” Perez tells the Scene.
National conservative leaders like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin have moved on to the next ginned-up purely political controversy, but these people are still under siege.
This is the wreckage that remains when the GOP political circus rolls through this country.
Distrust and fear that will last for years, in an actual community, between real people who have to live peaceably together, and did just that for thirty years, until conservatives saw a political opening.
Palin has moved on to Facebook fights with the Tea Party and her 2012 run for the Presidency, and Gingrich is currently demonizing food stamp recipients. They’re never around when it comes time to repair the lasting damage they do. They leave that hard work to someone else.
cleek
OT: lunatic smashes blowjob Jesus with a crowbar.
Religion Of Peace !
Culture of Truth
local Muslim leaders were quietly receiving encouragement from an unexpected guest: the U.S. Department Of Justice.
When will Obama stop with throwing people under the bus!
Steeplejack (phone)
Can you put a cite or link at the top of your quotes? It is frustrating to start reading a long one with no context at all and have to scroll up and down to find one.
kay
@Steeplejack (phone):
Sure. I have been doing it the way you suggested (earlier, I think) but I did it a little differently this time.
Sorry about that.
TomG
I know I’m stating the obvious, but Palin and Gingrich are simply opportunists – they don’t CARE whether the damage they cause ever gets fixed; in fact, they probably would not want it to be. Because how can they turn around later and blame the victims (in this case the Muslims in the Murfreesboro community) for the bad tensions if the damage doesn’t last long enough?
asiangrrlMN
@Steeplejack (phone): Hey, man. Good to see you this early in the day!
It’s frustrating to me because it’s all political theatre for Palin, Gingrich and their ilk. They don’t care about the real-life consequences. I actually prefer the crazies who believe their own shit because the alternative (mouthing the hate for ratings points) is evil.
kay
@Culture of Truth:
Perez (the DOJ lawyer) is a particular target of conservatives.
His very existence seems to make them spitting mad. So, it’s good he’s there. I think he should hold a press conference, myself. Rub it in a little :)
Malron
For those who haven’t heard, whitehouse.gov just announced that Obama intends to veto the notarization bill everyone was up in arms about in a previous thread.
jrg
I’ve been on and off the CNN message boards today hearing from real ‘muricans who are being discriminated against by people who want gays to have the right to marry.
This is no different. We’re discriminating against real ‘muricans by not letting them tell someone else what they can do with private f***ing property.
What a bunch of morons. Trying to get them to understand “live and let live” (or “do unto others”) is like trying to teach trigonometry to a guinea hen.
Jay in Oregon
See also:
Rebuilding New Orleans
Rebuilding Afghanistan
Rebuilding Iraq
Rebuilding the economy
Martin
@cleek:
With a crowbar, apparently.
Southern Beale
Yeah, I live in Nashville. And if you want to talk about distrust and fear, let me just remind folks what our local CBS affiliate did for sweeps week back in February.
I’m sure no one will be shocked to learn that a few days after this “report” aired, a Nashville mosque was vandalized. Always I go back to our media and their utter lack of any sense of civic duty.
Shameful.
Napoleon
I love the fact that that Religious Lands act was passed because wingnuts had themselves in a tizzy that Christians are an oppressed minority in this country and need it to protect them from Chris Hitchens, or something like that, and now it is being used “against” them when they get themselves worked into a tizzy about an actual religious minority.
Redshift
I’m once again reminded of an NPR interview a few years ago with a journalist who’d been a war correspondent in Bosnia. He told of how he’d asked a woman there about how they turned on the Muslim residents in their town, why they had believed the radio broadcasts saying things like that the Muslims were going to take their daughters and put them in harems, when these were people they knew, who they had lived alongside for generations.
She answered, “why would the radio lie?”
But of course, that couldn’t happen here. We’re much more sophisticated and well-informed, right?
Danton
I live in Murfreesboro. Despite the media attention the whackos are getting, there’s a helluva lot of local support for the local Muslim community’s desire to have, not a new, but an expanded community center. (This is not to imply that Tennessee, on the whole, is progressive, but just to focus on a local issue).
What I find so bizarre about all this is that we in the Nashville area have had a substantial Kurdish population for at least 25 years. In that time, these folks have certainly not been the Other: they’ve become our school teachers, our insurance agents, our contractors, and our public employees. Now, a bunch of nutjobs who attend a local megachurch are all scared shitless that their neighbors are running what they describe, ominously, as a “training center.” Sheesh.
Murfreesboro is still America. The center is going to be built.
Martin
@kay: He should have it at lunch and offer one of Campbell’s halal soups as a snack.
Rick Massimo
I’ve been thinking about that. Like, what’s up with the Frost family? The Schiavo family? Are they finally able to take a normal deep breath?
At its worst, it really is like being assaulted.
Napoleon
@Danton:
Plus a trial like this gives the judge the opportunity, if he is right minded, to take to people like the plaintiffs and Gaffney like a piñata (think the gay marriage case from California, or that British holocaust denier case involving a historian a few years ago).
Roger Moore
@cleek:
That’s my home town, and it’s the kind of place you’d expect this stuff to happen. It has enough artists and liberals to have a decent art museum that will try to attract this kind of artwork, and enough religious conservatives to want to destroy it. It’s sad to see one’s home town show up in the news for such a terrible reason.
eemom
@Malron:
having spent some time last night trying to understand the thing, and looked around the innertubes today, I actually think it’s the simple truth that everybody thinks it looks fishy, but nobody quite understands what the problem with it is. So the WH was in fact just telling the simple truth when they said the issue needs more study.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
Time to pull this post out again.
Wondering what to tell people who say that Muslims “still haven’t condemned terrorism”?
Send them here: Muslim Responses to Extremism
(Also look for a NY Times piece re: Muslims fears. I can’t find it now and I have to run!)
rikyrah
Obama will NOT be signing 3808
The White House Blog
Why President Obama is Not Signing H.R. 3808
Posted by Dan Pfeiffer on October 07, 2010 at 01:15 PM EDT
Today, the White House announced that President Obama will not sign H.R. 3808, the Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2010, and will return the bill to the House of Representatives. The Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2010 was designed to remove impediments to interstate commerce. While we share this goal, we believe it is necessary to have further deliberations about the intended and unintended impact of this bill on consumer protections, including those for mortgages, before this bill can be finalized.
Notarizations are important for a large range of documents, including financial documents. As the President has made clear, consumer financial protections are incredibly important, and he has made this one of his top priorities, including signing into law the strongest consumer protections in history in the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. That is why we need to think through the intended and unintended consequences of this bill on consumer protections, especially in light of the recent developments with mortgage processors.
The authors of this bill no doubt had the best intentions in mind when trying to remove impediments to interstate commerce. We will work with them and other leaders in Congress to explore the best ways to achieve this goal going forward.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/10/07/why-president-obama-not-signing-hr-3808
Steve
@eemom: I agree with this. There ought to be hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee just like with any other bill. Witnesses like Jennifer Brunner can show up and testify about what they think the problems are. Even if all the guesswork and speculation is completely baseless, one of the reasons to follow regular order is so there will hopefully be less speculation.
I believe the bill did go through the House Judiciary Committee before it passed by voice vote and I’d be curious to know what sort of scrutiny it got. John Conyers is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and he’s not generally known for his inattention to the rule of law or his lack of compassion for victims of fraud and foreclosure.
Steve
@rikyrah: If Obama really cared he would issue a real veto, and not a cowardly pocket veto.
Senyordave
My dream scenario:
Gingrich living under a bridge scrounging for table scraps, and Palin aging real, real badly.
Yeah, it ain’t Christian of me to wish ill on other folks, but I’m not Christian, so who cares (besides I took a yoga class a few years ago, so I was beyond saving).
eemom
As I mentioned on last night’s Soup thread, there is a yet more appalling and much less publicized aspect of the Islamophobia of the last nine years than the mosque issues, i.e., the prosecutions of Muslim Americans as “homegrown terrorists,” as reported on Democracy Now yesterday.
HRA
@Redshift:
“I’m once again reminded of an NPR interview a few years ago with a journalist who’d been a war correspondent in Bosnia. He told of how he’d asked a woman there about how they turned on the Muslim residents in their town, why they had believed the radio broadcasts saying things like that the Muslims were going to take their daughters and put them in harems, when these were people they knew, who they had lived alongside for generations.”
This story and/or tale goes back to several generations in that and the adjoining lands. Forget the radio. It was passed down to each generation orally. There was also one about the Jews.
Sadly it was all ignorance, superstition, etc.
John S.
@Malron:
It matters not. The firebaggers will still find a way to get upset with Obama over it. I’d love to be wrong, but I’d be willing to bet that not one of the motherfuckers hyperventilating over it in the last thread will own up to being wrong.
Jewish Steel
@asiangrrlMN:
I was going to offer to be unforgivably lazy for the NYT for 25% of the money over on Kain’s thread. But then realized that I would be treading on your portfolio.
You get first refusal on that.
eemom
@Steve:
You know, I actually wonder if the reason it received so little attention is that most Congresscreatures never even thought to connect it to the mortgage foreclosure mess. A little bitty statute about frikking notarizations being “recognized”? They must vote on all kinds of boring shit like that without thinking twice about it. That’s why I thought the “stealth” meme that was circulating last night was so hilarious.
Ash Can
@Danton: That’s good to know, and very reassuring. Thanks for posting.
Zifnab
I’m sorry, but this didn’t happen overnight and it’s not just the result of a GOP media blitz. The folks currently launching suites and protests are (to some degree) locals. The local judiciary can’t or won’t throw these cases out because they recognize there would be a local political backlash. Muslims in this community got by for 30 years because they stayed under the radar, but as soon as they blipped, the town was more than ready to let it’s freak flag fly.
The national GOP tapped a wellspring of racism and resentment, they didn’t plant it.
eemom
@John S.:
well, to be fair, the Dayan guy over at FDL had the honesty to admit he can’t figure out WTF is wrong with it either.
I didn’t descend into the pit of the comments thread, though. Too early in the day for rabid dogs.
Redshift
@HRA: “Forget the radio”? The fact that there was existing ignorance and superstition to be exploited does not mean that those who exploited it were inconsequential.
And likewise, the fact that existing ignorance and superstition permits demagogues like Gingrich to convince a significant portion of the population that they are in danger of being subject to sharia law makes them more dangerous, not less.
Mnemosyne
@Zifnab:
They didn’t plant it, but there’s a reason they’ve spent the last couple of years making “Muslim” equal “n*” in their constituents’ minds. Hatred of Islam just doesn’t have the same deep roots as hatred for black people, so the right wing had to form that unconscious association for people to really get the results they wanted.
joe from Lowell
@TomG:
To expand on this point: the explicit arguments about the agenda of Muslims, being made by Gaffney in this case, is an open admission that the plaintiff’s argument is an unconstitutional call for religious discrimination, and will therefore absolutely guarantee that the courts will not stop the construction. If the the appellants wanted to win, they should have pretended their objections were about traffic, architecture, and wetlands. By bringing in Gaffney and pursuing their argument, they are sabotaging their case.
But what does Gaffney care? The check won’t bounce.
Redshift
@eemom: I did briefly, but after reading a few about how easy it is to fabricate electronic records so this would let anyone create fraudulent records, I remembered my resolution not to get into arguments with idiots.
(To be clear, yes, it is easy to fabricate and backdate standalone electronic documents, just like you can fabricate on a paper document, which is why people are willing to pay for systems that provide assurance that hasn’t been done.)
cleek
@Zifnab:
in the words of Robyn Htichcock:
“the flowers of tolerance and hatred are blooming kindof early this year / someone’s been watering them.”
he wrote that in 1996, about Limbaugh. still as apropos as ever.
...now I try to be amused
Godwin may damn me for this, but
Palin + Gingrich = Milosevic.
HRA
@Redshift:
What I am attempting to convey is this very remark aired on the radio was passed on before radios were available in those regions of the former Yugoslavia.
When a relatives was telling me the history of my ancestral land, she included this same remark. I was not convinced. I asked several other relatives who had been born over there and they said it was true.
Cris
Amen, brother.
Steve
@eemom: In the House, yeah, that’s entirely possible, although you’d think they could at least solicit comments from state Secretaries of State as to whether there’s any reason the federal government shouldn’t standardize notary processes.
In the Senate, the fact that they were trying to bypass regular order and do this in a big hurry at the end of a session should have been at least a little bit of a warning sign. I mean, even the bill’s sponsor was surprised at what the Senate did. This wasn’t a normal process at all.
cleek
@cleek:
…flowers of intolerance.
fuck me.
Michael
Speaking of Christians, at my wife’s workplace (where she’s been very happy the past 12 years), the normally absent owner has taken to going to a ConservoMegachurch over the past few years. Par for the course, some “trainer” there has graciously volunteered to come in once a week in the morning to lead a Bible study during opening hours. The email described it as something wonderful and wholesome and perfectly acceptable to all Christian creeds.
Of course, this has gone over like a lead balloon with the workplace – the Jewish employees, gay employees, Catholic employees and my Eastern Orthodox wife are less than thrilled. I think the plan is to pretend that the email request and Talibornagain training sessions just don’t exist.
They love captive audiences to “lovingly” spread their filth to. That’s why dragging employers and military commanders into their fold is so important.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
@Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther: Here’s the NY Times story I was looking for before:
American Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
@cleek: That does make more sense…!
Jon H
Perez?
I think we have our first case of a stealth Muslim anchor baby Mexican.
/wingnut
futzinfarb
Said in this way, their politics can be clearly seen as simply the logical and straightforward extension of their economic philosophy to politics. Just as their extremist free-market paradigm fantasizes that an economic system which functions exclusively through pure self interest results in the ideal distribution of resources (and does not admit even consideration of, for instance, externalities, or monopolies, or market manipulation, or even fraud), so to do they fantasize a politics in which the exclusive pursuit of their political self-interest results in the ideal polity. Considering the likely willingness of an unregulated, profit motivated mining enterprise to leave a ruined, poisoned landscape in its wake after extracting the last ounce of gold from a seam, why would one for even a moment expect these politicians to have a second thought at leaving behind a shredded social fabric and toxic conflict after they have extracted their Fox News Friends payouts from a rich seam of bigotry?