Another Lesson in Irony

Bigotry can be found in the very communities that once battled it, as Fred Grimm points out in the Miami Herald.

The meeting evoked moldy memories of the Mississippi Delta, circa 1966, where civic affairs often were entangled in racist rancor. But this was Pompano Beach, four decades of enlightenment later.

"This sounds like bigotry," I told the Rev. Alonzo Neal.

"You're a bigot!" the Rev. Neal retorted. The pastor of Pompano Beach's Antioch Baptist Church proffered an uncivil notion of civil rights: minority protection as an exclusive franchise, only available to citizens who can claim an ethnic association with the historic struggles in Selma, Birmingham and Greensboro. Not to a bunch of Muslim interlopers.

"This is atrocious," the Rev. Neal declared, after the City Commission voted not to take up an appeal of a zoning change allowing a mosque on five empty acres in a northwest Pompano Beach neighborhood -- a black, Christian neighborhood -- Neal and others kept pointing out.

"They're taking my civil rights -- civil rights Martin Luther King and other blacks died for -- and using it to stab us in the back," he complained. Neal turned King's ethos topsy-turvy. "The country is about majority rule. And the majority don't want that mosque in their neighborhood."

Dozens of residents from northwest Pompano Beach came to City Hall Tuesday to oppose the zoning approval for the Islamic Center of South Florida, now on the east side of town, to build a 29,000-square foot mosque 20 blocks west. They applauded E. Pat Larkins, the city's lone black commissioner, as he reduced Muslims to a cult of rogue convenience store owners peddling beer after hours and to minors.

"We want them to be part of our community. We don't want them raping it," he said. But Larkins made it clear he didn't want Muslims to be part of his community. He failed to explain the peculiar leap in logic that took him from disparaging immigrant-owned grocery stores to banning a 250-member mosque. But the crowd wasn't looking for reasoned arguments. They punctuated his screed with "That's right!" and "Yes!"

Larkins stirred the crowd, but failed to persuade fellow commissioners, who voted 3-2 not to overturn the zoning board decision approving the mosque. Even if the mayor and other commissioners were sympathetic with Larkins' anti-Muslim bent, rejecting the mosque in a neighborhood already laden with Christian churches would have placed the city in certain legal jeopardy. The federal Religious Land Use Act prohibits local governments from discriminating against religious institutions.

[...]

The vote sent mosque-haters into the hall outside the City Commission chambers, where the Rev. Neal held court and Tom Mohorn warned that the mosque could bring Arab criminals and terrorists into his neighborhood and Sam Smith warned that young blacks in the neighborhood "will do what kids do" and cause trouble for the mosque and its worshipers. Another minister complained to reporters that these Muslims were bent on converting young black Christian innocents to their religion.

"This is not right," said Sami Cara, a member of the Islamic Center as the bigots talked. "I didn't think I would ever hear something like this in America." Not since Mississippi, anyway. Circa 1966.

You would think that of all people who would be most accutely attuned to the evils of racism, it would be the black community. But apparently one of the lessons they didn't learn was that forty years ago, the same arguments they're making against the Muslim community were the same we heard from the likes of George Wallace, Lester Maddox, and David Duke.