The fight over a proposed Islamic community center in Murfessboro, Tennessee, has brought out some of the worst offenders in the conspiracy-minded Islamophobic right, including Frank Gaffney, who testified in a court proceeding that the center-builders were part of a conspiracy to institute Taliban-style Islamic law in the United States. That was after a potential arson and hate crime at the site. Via Rachel Slajda, the Nashville Scene reports Civil Rights Division head Thomas Perez personally visited the site, while Gaffney was "giving the Chancery Court a non-expert crash course in Islamic conspiracy theory":
Thomas Perez, assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights, spent the day making house calls in Middle Tennessee, assuring Muslim leaders -- including the imams of the Murfreesboro mosque and the Islamic Center of Nashville -- that his office has their back if it turns out that opponents aren't as interested in zoning esoterica as they are in sidelining the practice of Islam in Murfreesboro.
"Basically, what we're being told is that if there's any civil violation of the rights of the Muslim community here, they'll step in," says Abdou Kattih, vice president of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, who also met with government officials.
The Civil Rights Division was created in order to ensure that the federal government protects the rights of minorities, particularly when local jurisdictions fail to do so. In other words, reassuring a minority group that has been the subject of a national backlash is the kind of thing the head of the Civil Rights Division should be doing, but conservatives may see it as another sign of anti-white favoritism, having previously characterized the administration's defenses of the rights of American Muslims as "siding with Muslims" against Americans, as though the terms were mutually exclusive.
There's also a federal law preventing "zoning esoterica" from preventing the construction of religious buildings, which is why opponents of the project have tried to argue that Islam isn't actually a religion.
