Posted on 07/07/2008 6:05:44 AM PDT by Virginia Ridgerunner
WALKERSVILLE, Md. (AP) - Officials of a rural Maryland town illegally discriminated against a Muslim group by barring them from building a mosque and holding annual conventions on land zoned for farming, the property's owner claims in a federal lawsuit.
Developer David Moxley and his father had planned to sell 224 acres in Walkersville to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA for about $6 million. The Silver Spring-based religious group canceled the deal earlier this year after the town's three-member Board of Zoning Appeals voted unanimously to reject their request for a special exception to land-use restrictions.
(snip)
David and Robert Moxleys' complaint, to be filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, alleges that town leaders conspired to block the Ahmadis by adopting new agricultural land-use restrictions, including one barring places of worship, after the group publicly announced its plans for the site.
"I've never seen a worse example of hostility toward a religious group accomplished through the zoning process as by the town of Walkersville," said the Moxleys' lawyer, Roman P. Storzer, a Washington attorney specializing in religious land-use discrimination cases.
Storzer said the lawsuit seeks a court order forcing the town to permit the uses sought by the Ahmadis, a declaration that the town violated civil-rights protections and payment of unspecified damages to the Moxleys.
The Ahmadis are not joining the lawsuit. The group announced on June 8, three days after the board's final decision, that they would "leave the matter in the hands of God" and that participating in litigation "would be tantamount to trespass on his hallowed ground."
However, Ahmadiyya community spokesman Syed Ahmad did not rule out the possibility of buying the site if the Moxleys triumph.
(Excerpt) Read more at wtop.com ...
American farm town rocked by plans for Muslim retreat
Maryland town wary of plans for mosque
Muslims’ troubles in Walkersville parallel those in Frederick
Zoning Board Rejects Islamic Center Plan
No lawsuit by Ahmadiyya Muslims against the town of Walkersville, MD
Note that this rural site is about ten miles from Camp David and sits directly underneath approach and landing corridors for BWI, Washington National, and Dulles airports. There is more to this thing than meets the eye.
The town also is not equipped from an infrastructure perspective to handle such crowds as would attend these events. They can barely handle a carnival. I’m not blaming them...it’s just how the roads are right now.
It wasn’t zoned for a terrorist training camp?
This was bound to happen. It never occured to any of them that a town with fewer than 6,000 people might not want to be overrun by tens of thousands of people, regardless of their religious affiliation. And it is hard to imagine a worse place from a national security standpoint for such a “facility” to be located. When did we vote to allow our communities to be taken over and flooded with foreigners? When did we loose the right to say NO? I don’t remember voting for that, nor do I remember voting for anyone who said they supported such a policy.
Common sense is dead, and political correctness is going to get us all killed. God help us all if these ragheads win their case.
Our very long term survival is at stake. Our posterity will reap what we sow today and people are “debating” about whether this is fair or not. Screw that and screw these Muslims.
al-Maryland al-Friqq State PING!
These people are more than free to go back to wherever they came from. I’m sure they will find a Mosque on just about every corner there.
The town made the right decision even if the people wanting to develop the site were Southern Baptists, IBM executives, or Girl Scouts. The area is supplied by little two-lane roads and traffic is controlled by the occasional stop sign. There are no sewers or water mains. Taxes would go up enormously as tens or hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of roads, police, and fire protection would have to be upgraded. So we’re all supposed to chip in just so that the Muslems have a center wherever they want one? I don’t think so.
I think this would be a better defense for the town than “We don’t want Muzzies here.”
That has been jumping out at me more and more. We constantly worry about not being fair enough. There is a constant push to be more tolerant, more accepting. There is resistance to being "judgemental" or "harsh".
The result is that Christians are silenced, Islam is added to the school curriculum, sex offenders and murderers walk free because -- "hey, he might be innocent" and our whole society slides downhill.
I'm in favor of pushing back, and if the push-back sometimes goes too far and is sometimes unfair, well -- it's just the pendulum swinging back.
Balance and Fairness requires either perfectly correct decisions 100% of the time, or else some mistakes on both sides once in a while. Seems to me that all the mistakes that are allowed nowadays are the mistakes that benefit the Left. There's no balance in that.
From the article:
Officials of the town of 5,600 based their denial largely on open space preservation concerns and fears that the thousands of people attending the group's annual, three-day Jalsa Salana national convention would overwhelm the community's roads and emergency services.
I question why they need the retreat 10 miles from Camp David.
It appears that any place not under muslim control has an anti-muslim bias.
Yeah, THAT’s a very good question, one in which I’m sure the Secret Service would be interested in having answered.
Heads will roll over that...
This lawsuit is more about a developer [Moxley] suing because he lost a $6 million deal than any ‘religious’ issue. Hope they lose and the town gets to collect costs from the developer.
All these lawsuits by Muslins are your oil dollars at work.
It'd be interesting to see how much, if any, of the funding was coming from the Saudi government.
There can be no separation of church/mosque and state when a foreign government is violating that constitutional guaranty.
What's more, the Saudi government is entirely intolerant of any other faith being practiced or promoted within their own borders.
The Left talks of “fairness” but they don’t actually practice it. It is talk to solicit concessions.
They do not engage in honest debate. They cannot win in the arena of ideas.
Double standards abound.
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