The San Francisco Bay Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-SFBA), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization urged the Los Gatos Town Council, Tuesday, to grant the West Valley Muslim Association’s (WVMA) appeal challenging 19 of the 33 new conditions imposed by the Planning Commission on the Los Gatos Islamic Center.
CAIR-SFBA submitted a letter supporting WVMA’s appeal, demanding the Town Council to preserve the permit approved by Planning Commission for WVMA’s property at 19679 Farley Rd. on May 21—and to remove (or improve) 19 “unlawful” conditions imposed on the mosque.
“Approving a mosque’s permit while attaching uniquely burdensome conditions is not equal treatment,” said CAIR-SFBA Executive Director Zahra Billoo, in a release. “Los Gatos should not impose restrictions on WVMA that it would not impose on other houses of worship. The Town Council should grant the appeal and ensure that any conditions are neutral, evidence-based, and consistent with federal religious freedom protections.”
WVMA Founder Razi Mohiuddin says the Town has violated the Islamic group’s civil rights.
“No church or synagogue in Los Gatos faces anything close to the burdensome conditions imposed on our community. The disparity is documented, it is stark, and we believe it is a clear federal civil rights violation,” he said. “What we will not accept is a local planning commission deciding what worship means to our community. That is a chilling overreach that strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. We are prepared to pursue every legal remedy available to us.”
The challenged conditions include: annual compliance reviews, restrictions on religious activities, attendance caps below the Fire Code limit, parking and traffic requirements, expanded communication mandates and capital improvement requirements.
WVMA’s appeal argues that the challenged conditions violate the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), a federal law that protects religious institutions from discriminatory or unnecessarily burdensome land-use restrictions.
The California Muslim community is still reeling from the deaths of three men at a mosque in San Diego—Mansour Kaziha, Amin Abdullah and Nadir Awad.
CAIR’s annual report (published earlier year) notes the group received 8,683 complaints of anti-Muslim bias across America last year (the most since it began tracking this in 1996).
Meanwhile, yesterday’s California Post carried an opinion piece from Joel Kotkin titled “Islamists Rise,” with the subhead, “Increasingly, extremism is coming to Calif.”
“The Islamization of London, and Paris may not be reversible. But that outcome is not yet here,” he wrote. “Still, it is no longer something happening far away. It could happen in California as well.”
Much of the wider public discussion about the Los Gatos Islamic Center’s bureaucratic hours-extension-approval continued to be Islamophobic.
For example, on the Los Gatos Weekly’s Facebook page, a user named Marc Varner (whose profile says he’s from South Santa Clara County) said, “They want you dead or enslaved, as soon as they have slaughtered all the Jews. They consider it their right and duty to behead you for not obeying them.”
However, others shared views in support of religious equality.
