LOWER MANHATTAN — Community Board 1 approved a plan to build a mosque two blocks from the World Trade Center after a four-hour meeting that drew hundreds of people and emotions ranging from fear and hatred to grief and hope at a public forum in lower Manhattan Tuesday night.

“I’m so proud of the community board,” said Imam Feisal AbdulRauf, shortly after the vote, which was 29 in favor, 1 against, with 9 abstentions. “They recognize us as neighbors.”

The community board’s vote is solely advisory, and the project could have gone forward regardless of the board’s opinion.

Still, supporters and opponents of the plan packed into CB1’s monthly meeting at 3-Legged Dog’s theater Tuesday night. Both uniformed and undercover NYPD officers were present at the meeting to keep the crowd under control.

When Rauf stood to address the crowd, he was shouted down by people yelling, “Murderer!” Dr. Rudina Odeh-Ramadan, who was temporarily buried under rubble twice while she worked to rescue people on 9/11, was booed when she revealed that she was a Muslim.

DNAinfo, 25 May 2010

A Tea Party flamethrower blasted Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer Monday as a “Jewish Uncle Tom” for supporting a proposed mosque near Ground Zero.

Mark Williams, chairman of the Tea Party Express, took to his blog to spew hate at Stringer after the politician compared him to Adolf Hitler at a press conference last week. Williams countered that Stringer is a “sniviling [sic] worm” and “a Jewish Uncle Tom who would have turned rat on Anne Frank.”

Stringer vowed not to back down from “a thug” like Williams and expressed surprise that the Tea Party hasn’t booted him. “He’s a bigot whose mission in life is to divide society,” Stringer said. “He works at sowing seeds of racial and religious hatred.”

Williams set off a feud last week when he blogged that the proposed mosque and Islamic cultural center would be a monument to the 9/11 attackers “for the worship of the terrorists’ monkey-god.”

New York Daily News, 25 May 2010

See also “Family says Muslim man’s attackers targeted him because of his religion”, New York Daily News, 25 May 2010

The plan to derail a proposed mosque in Brentwood was simple but effective. Through e-mails, blogs and word of mouth, opponents told friends and neighbors they were suspicious of the mosque and feared its leaders had ties to terrorist organizations. They encouraged citizens to write letters to the city commission expressing their concerns, including worries about traffic and flooding.

It worked.

On Wednesday night, the mosque’s organizers admitted defeat. They withdrew their application to rezone 14 acres on Wilson Pike for a house of worship. “There comes a time when you have to say, ‘We can’t do this anymore’,” said Jaweed Ansari, a Brentwood physician and spokesman for the Islamic Center of Williamson County. “We started this in very good faith,” he said. “We had a neighborhood meeting, and we thought this would be a friendly thing. Instead of that, it turned out to be a very angry thing.”

Matt Bonner, who lives in Nashville but is a member of Brentwood United Methodist Church, helped organize resistance to the mosque. “Not enough people understand the political doctrine of Islam,” he said in an interview before the mosque project was withdrawn. “The fact is that the mosques are more than just a church. No one can predict what this one will be used for.”

Bonner said his suspicions about Islam were shaped in part by the writings of Bill French, a former physics professor who now runs the Nashville-based Center for the Study of Political Islam. The center is a for-profit book publisher run by French, who writes under the pen name Bill Warner. He argues that Islam is not really a religion. Instead, Warner says that Islam is a dangerous political ideology.

Tennessean, 28 May 2010