And Now You Jagoffs Made It Personal

It's one thing to go after Muslims and the Park 51 project in NYC.  It's entirely another to go after Muslims and try to deny them 1st Amendment rights where I live in northern Kentucky.

"We have not heard from anyone opposed to the project," Boone County Assistant Zoning Administrator Mitch Light told the paper at the time. That was in stark contrast to 2002, when the mosque project in Florence (then proposed for a different site) received "considerable opposition" from locals "citing concerns about increased traffic and a negative impact to property values and to the community in general."

Less than a month later, however, the new mosque site has become the subject of a new round of anti-Muslim attacks. A website called The Vigilante ("standing firm in a storm of socialist sedition") attacked the project on August 5, calling on Florentines to "to understand what they are in for" with the the new mosque:

"Once Islam has established itself sufficiently in any nation, it seeks to overthrow any existing regime or constitution or law, and replace it with Islamic theocracy," the site warns. "All Islamic mosques have Islamic leaders (rulers) who can call Muslims for fighting, and as such are satellite headquarters for spreading Literal Islam's political doctrine of world domination and totalitarianism--no matter how many 'moderate Muslims' they serve."

This week, the anti-Muslim fear campaign stepped up a notch with an anonymous flier that's being distributed, warning residents that the Muslims are coming to get them.

"Everyone needs to contact Florence City Council to have this stopped," the flier reads in part, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal. "Americans need to stop the takeover of our country."

Yep.  A mosque right here in Florence, not more than a couple of miles from where I live.  That was before this idiocy spread nationally.  That's before people decided it was OK to be bigots in my neighborhood.

Even the politicians are weighing in as Florence and Manhattan become sister cities in anti-mosque rhetoric. Rep. Geoff Davis (R) is Florence's congressional representative. Like many Republicans, he's opposed to the Cordoba House project in New York. "Plans to construct a mosque near the Ground Zero memorial site, where thousands of Americans lost their lives due to a radical Islamic terrorist group attack, is not only insensitive but provocative," he told the Enquirer yesterday.

But when it comes to the mosque project in his home district, Davis seems a bit more cautious. "So long as the appropriate state and local rules have been followed, this is permissible under the establishment clause regarding freedom of religion in the First Amendment of the Constitution," Davis said of the Florence mosque.

A spokesperson for the Florence mosque project did not respond to my requests for comment. Joseph Dabdoub, a spokesman for the project, told the AP, "The flier was very disappointing. These are average, hard-working people from the community, looking for a place to worship."

This might be a good time to point out that Florence already has an Islamic center, and it's "just a few blocks from the proposed mosque site," according to the Enquirer. That building "hosts many activities, including daily prayers, community gatherings and Sunday school," and it's also "focused on outreach in an effort to introduce Islam to the local community, which representatives say has increased membership and contributed to the need for a larger facility."

But guess what?  The law is the law...and the law is clear.

It seems that those supporting the new mosque will likely get their wish, according to local officials. As in New York, those pesky property rights are getting in the way of project opponents.

"If anyone owned a piece of property in the city of Florence and it is properly zoned -- whether it was a business development or residential development -- they could do that, and that's the case with the Islamic center," Florence Community Development Director Joshua Wise told WLWT-TV.

But now it's personal.  Now the anti-Muslim bigots are distributing flyers where I live, to my neighborhood, to the people I see every day, to where I am proud to call home.  And I'll be damned if I let these backwards assholes embarrass Florence Kentucky nationally like this.

Now I have a personal stake in this fight.

It's on.