Cowed by Armed Militia, @NewtonCounty Georgia Cancels Mosque Approval Meeting
I’m filing this in the terrorism category since this militia group was clearly using the threat of violence in the pursuit of political aims, namely to prevent Newton County from approving a permit for local Muslims to build a new mosque.
I’m dismayed and mortified that leaders in a county in the U.S. would allow themselves to be intimidated like this. On second thought, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised as back in August the same board of commissioners called for a moratorium on applications for construction permits for places of worship due to Islamophobic hysteria ginned up by a few bigots. (See “Related” links below for previous pages on this disgrace.)
The assholes who do this sort of thing don’t give a damn about freedom or our Constitution, they just want to impose their ideology on everyone else, under threat. I guess we’re turning into the United States of Theocracy. Iran or Saudi Arabia—which model do you prefer? This makes me so mad I could spit.
For decades, leaders in Newton County, Ga., have tried to make things easy for anyone who wanted to build a church, with zoning rules that have a “places of worship” exception to streamline the construction process.
But recent plans for a mosque complicated things for county leaders.
About a month ago, word spread that Muslims wanted to build the county’s first mosque on an empty plot at Highway 162 and County Line Road. Since then, a Muslim leader says, a quagmire of bureaucracy and “Islamophobic” public meetings have shined a glaring national spotlight on this county of about 100,000 people, 35 miles east of Atlanta.
The latest wrinkle came this week, when county commissioners, citing security concerns, canceled a meeting that was expected to allow construction of the mosque to move forward.
The concerns arose after a self-described militia group from a neighboring county posted a video on Facebook threatening to demonstrate outside the meeting with guns drawn. […]
More: Georgia officials were set to approve a new mosque — until an armed militia threatened to protest
