Sterling Heights mosque could be delayed further as
local community files its own lawsuit, by
Ann Corcoran 3/15/17
For background see our earlier post, here. And, take note that the Obama US Attorney who sided with
the mosque builders was one of those asked to resign by President Trump a few
days ago.
From Leo Hohmann at World
Net Daily (Christians who
escaped persecution in Iraq are fighting back!): The saga of the
21,000-square-foot mega-mosque in Sterling Heights, Michigan, is not over yet.
The mayor and city council voted
Feb. 21 to settle a lawsuit by a Shiite Muslim group and allow it to build a
mosque in a residential neighborhood populated largely by Chaldean Christian
refugees who escaped Islamic persecution in Iraq.
A companion suit against the city by Barack Obama’s Department of
Justice alleging the city had denied the mosque a permit based on “anti-Muslim”
sentiments in the community was also settled at the Feb. 21 meeting, paving the
way for the mosque to start construction.
Nahren Anweya: “This minority group
consists of more than four generations of refugees and genocide victims under
radical Islam.”
But the counter-lawsuit filed Monday
argues that city officials were actually favoring the Shiite Muslims of
neighboring Madison Heights while ignoring the wishes of its own citizens who
were overwhelmingly against the mosque.
If built, the American Islamic
Community Center, or AICC, will become the third mosque in Sterling Heights. Second DOJ-imposed
win for Muslims in less than year It was the second bitter mosque battle in
Southeastern Michigan in less than a year.
Obama’s DOJ forced a madrassa on
Pittsfield Township, near Ann Arbor, and that town had to pay out $1.7 million
to the mosque while sending township employees to be trained on how not to
discriminate against Muslims.
After the contentious Feb. 21
meeting in Sterling Heights in which the mayor ordered police to empty the
city-hall chambers before the council took a vote on the mosque deal, WND
reported that the Chaldean Christians were upset and talking about a
counter-lawsuit.
On Monday, they acted. They had Ann Arbor-based American Freedom Law
Center, or AFLC, file a civil rights suit on their behalf against the city and
Mayor Michael C. Taylor, alleging violations of state and federal law.
“The mayor and the corrupted
personal interests behind him have outraged a community which is comprised of
the largest minority Assyrian/Chaldean Christians from Iraq,” said Nahren
Anweya, spokeswoman for the Chaldean and Assyrian Christians in Sterling Heights.
“This minority group consists of more than four generations of refugees and
genocide victims under radical Islam.”
CAIR crows and threatens: Dawud
Walid CAIR Michigan. Learn more about him
When the city agreed to settle the suit and allow the mosque to be
built, the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or
CAIR, said the victory for the mosque should teach Michigan cities a lesson.
“We hope that this settlement, along
with last year’s settlement in Pittsfield Township regarding a previously
blocked Islamic school project, sends a strong message to city governments in
Michigan seeking to deny zoning of religious institutions simply because they
are led by Muslims,” said CAIR-Michigan Executive Director Dawud Walid.
An attorney for the AICC mosque, Azzam Elder, threatened to “monitor”
local residents he felt were Islamophobic. “Moving forward, we’re very
concerned about some of what you’ve seen at the public hearings with some of
the residents,” Elder told the Detroit News. “We’ll be monitoring what we feel
(could be) potential hate groups.”
Besides the lawsuit, I’m thinking that the citizens there might follow
the Rutland model and work very hard to remove (at the ballot box!) the elected
officials who caved!
One of the great and lasting
legacies of a naive federal refugee program is that the US State Department and
its contractors have placed Middle Eastern groups who have been in conflict for
centuries in close proximity to each other in American cities assuming, we can
only presume, that their religious conflicts will melt away in the great
(mythical?) American melting pot.
CHRISTIAN REFUGEES FIRE BACK AGAINST OBAMA-MOSQUE DEAL IN MICHIGAN, 'Mayor and corrupt influences behind him' outraged community, by Leo Hohmann, 3/13/17, WND
The saga of the 21,000-square-foot
mega-mosque in Sterling Heights, Michigan, is not over yet. The mayor and city
council voted Feb. 21 to settle a lawsuit by a Shiite Muslim group and allow it
to build a mosque in a residential neighborhood populated largely by Chaldean
Christian refugees who escaped Islamic persecution in Iraq.
A companion suit against the city by
Barack Obama’s Department of Justice alleging the city had denied the mosque a
permit based on “anti-Muslim” sentiments in the community was also settled at
the Feb. 21 meeting, paving the way for the mosque to start construction.
But the counter-lawsuit filed Monday
argues that city officials were actually favoring the Shiite Muslims of
neighboring Madison Heights while ignoring the wishes of its own citizens who
were overwhelmingly against the mosque.
If built, the American Islamic
Community Center, or AICC, will become the third mosque in Sterling Heights. Read WND’s recent report on how the U.S. State
Department, through its refugee resettlement program, is importing centuries of
religious conflict from the Middle East into the United States, often in the
same city and even the same neighborhood.
Second
DOJ-imposed win for Muslims in less than year
It was the second bitter mosque
battle in Southeastern Michigan in less than a year. Obama’s DOJ forced a
madrassa on Pittsfield Township, near Ann Arbor, and that town had to pay out
$1.7 million to the mosque while sending township employees to be trained
on how not to discriminate against Muslims.
After the contentious Feb. 21
meeting in Sterling Heights in which the mayor ordered police to empty the
city-hall chambers before the council took a vote on the mosque deal, WND
reported that the Chaldean Christians
were upset and talking about a counter-lawsuit.
On Monday, they acted. They had Ann
Arbor based American
Freedom Law Center, or AFLC, file a civil rights suit
on their behalf against the city and Mayor Michael C. Taylor, alleging
violations of state and federal law.
Nahren Anweya’s family fled Iraq in
1989 after being decimated by Muslim community there.“The mayor and the
corrupted personal interests behind him have outraged a community which is
comprised of the largest minority Assyrian/Chaldean Christians from Iraq,” said
Nahren Anweya, spokeswoman for the Chaldean and Assyrian Christians in Sterling
Heights. “This minority group consists of more than four generations of
refugees and genocide victims under radical Islam.”
Mayor Michael Taylor of Sterling
Heights, Michigan, is a Republican who worked with the Obama DOJ to settle the
lawsuit allowing a third mosque to be built in his city. The AICC mosque,
after settling the lawsuit, was planning to break ground on the massive mosque
this summer, but now it will likely need to put those plans on hold. Robert
Muise, senior counsel for AFLC, said the mosque’s application for a zoning
permit was rife with political implications from the start. The mosque is based
in neighboring Madison Heights, but it chose to expand into Sterling Heights,
home to the nation’s second-largest community of Chaldean Christians, who are
55,000-strong in the city.
“It is evident that AICC wanted to
‘plant the flag’ in this Chaldean Christian community by building this huge
mosque,” Muise said. “This is a community of Christians, many of whom fled Iraq
because they or family members were subjected to violence and abuse from ISIS.
“Indeed, AICC’s zoning application
was a joke. It knew the city would reject it. Consequently, its lawsuit, which
has now resulted in the Consent Judgment, was a complete set up. Unfortunately,
Sterling Heights isn’t the only place where these mosque-building tactics are
being employed. We will do what we can to stop it.”
CAIR
crows
When the city agreed to settle the
suit and allow the mosque to be built, the Michigan chapter of the Council on
American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, said the victory for the mosque should
teach Michigan cities a lesson.
“We hope that this settlement, along
with last year’s settlement in Pittsfield Township regarding a previously
blocked Islamic school project, sends a strong message to city governments in
Michigan seeking to deny zoning of religious institutions simply because they
are led by Muslims,” said CAIR-Michigan Executive Director Dawud Walid.
An attorney for the AICC mosque,
Azzam Elder, threatened to “monitor” local residents he felt were Islamophobic.
“Moving forward, we’re very
concerned about some of what you’ve seen at the public hearings with some of
the residents,” Elder told
the Detroit News. “We’ll be monitoring what we feel
(could be) potential hate groups.”
The 34-page
suit by the Chaldeans, filed in
U.S. District Court in Southeastern Michigan, puts forth two claims – that the
Feb. 21 settlement was unlawful because it forced the city to violate its own
zoning ordinance and that the way the Feb. 21 meeting was handled by the mayor
violated residents’ free speech rights and also violated the state’s Open Meetings
Act.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of
seven residents who live in the neighborhood where the mosque is to be built.
U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade said
she was ‘very proud’ of the settlement deal allowing AICC Mosque to build in
Sterling Heights. She was asked for her resignation last Friday by President
Trump and confirmed Tuesday she had taken a job teaching law at University of
Michigan.
As WND previously reported, the
city’s attorneys put up almost no effort to defend the city against the lawsuit
filed by the AICC mosque, which sued the city in August last year. Obama’s DOJ
then filed its suit in December and the city immediately went into settlement
mode with Barbara McQuade, one of 46 U.S. attorneys who were asked to resign by
President Trump just last Friday.
McQuade had said on Feb. 22 she was
“very proud” of the settlement that was reached with the city allowing the AICC
mosque to build a third mosque in Sterling Heights.
“I think these cases demonstrate the
power of the law to right wrongs … and protect the rights of the most
vulnerable members of our community,” she told the Detroit News.
But McQuade, so concerned about the
Muslims, could not muster a single concern about the vulnerability of the Iraqi
Christians, said Anweya.
“The ideology is utilizing our
American laws and Constitution to build a threat against our national security
of this country,” she said.
“They’re utilizing foreign funding
from Iran, and Saudi Arabia is also funding many other mosque projects
throughout the country,” Anweya added. “This is exactly what happened to the
persecuted Christians in Iraq by being caught in a political and religious
warfare between the Sunnis and the Shiites and why we have decreased to
near extinction. Do Americans want the exact issue right here in their
backyards?”
The lawyers for the Chaldeans say
the mosque’s claims of civil rights violations were misleading, and the
decision to enter into a court-imposed consent judgment was made at a meeting
in which the mayor engaged in conduct that violated the U.S. Constitution and
the Michigan Open Meetings Act.
“The City’s decision to enter into
the consent judgment was a fait
accompli,” said Muise. “The city council meeting was a compete sham.
Indeed, this meeting was not an example of democracy in action; it was an
example of a naked abuse of government power.”
The lawsuit alleges Mayor Taylor
violated the U.S. Constitution in the following ways:
·
Adopting an ad-hoc rule that limited
speakers wanting to address the Consent Judgment matter to just
two minutes, thereby severely limiting a private citizen’s right to
express his or her views at this public hearing, even though the city allowed
other speakers addressing less controversial matters that evening to speak at
great length.
·
Prohibiting certain views based on
their content and viewpoint; that is, no one was permitted to mention religion
or even hint at it when discussing the consent judgment matter, and certainly
no one was permitted to make any statement that might be deemed critical of Islam.
·
Directing the city police to seize
individuals and escort them out of the meeting if the mayor opposed what they
were saying about the Consent Judgment matter.
· Ordering the citizens out of the
public meeting when it came time to actually vote on the Consent Judgment. This
last action also violates the Michigan Open Meetings Act, according to the
filing.
“This past Friday, March 10, the
district court judge presiding over AICC’s federal lawsuit signed the Consent
Judgment and closed the case,” AFLC said in a press release. “By doing so, the
judge effectively authorized the City to violate its zoning ordinance by
allowing the construction of the mosque.”
The suit also alleges that city
officials went out of their way to favor Muslims when considering the mosque.
“Defendants’ purpose for entering
into the consent judgment and for the mayor’s actions at the City Council
meeting was to favor those who want to build the AICC Mosque over those who
oppose it,” the lawsuit stated. “A reasonable observer would conclude that this
favors the adherents of Islam over those who are not adherents of Islam.”
According to the lawsuit, a federal
consent decree or settlement agreement, such as the one entered into between
AICC and the city, cannot be a means for government officials to evade state
law. Municipalities, such as Sterling Heights, may not waive or consent to a
violation of their zoning laws, the lawsuit states, because those laws are
enacted for the benefit of the public.
AFLC Co-Founder and Senior Counsel
David Yerushalmi commented: “It is evident that the City caved in to the
unreasonable demands made by AICC when the Obama Department of Justice got
involved in that case by filing its own lawsuit. The legally obnoxious conduct
by Mayor Taylor and the remnants of the Obama DOJ is why the new
Attorney General Jeff Sessions needs
to clean house and far more deeply than just the political appointees. It is
precisely the corrupt bureaucratic underbrush that hides and otherwise
disguises the swamp that is big government in D.C. AFLC will do what it can
through the courts, but Attorney General Sessions ought to take a look at our
complaint and understand what his constitutionally perverse underlings are
attempting to accomplish through this illegal Consent Judgment.”
Attorney Karen Lugo, an expert on
land-use litigation who is assisting AFLC in the lawsuit, said, “The residents
of Sterling Heights have been left in jeopardy by this rush to settle.”
She said the community’s concerns
about the mosque have from the beginning been focused on traffic and safety.
“So many obvious questions and
misrepresentations were never addressed, like the nearly 8,000 square feet in
the mosque basement that was never considered for parking and traffic
calculations,” Lugo added. “The deal never considered the many events and
activities that mosque officials have not disclosed to the city that will
undoubtedly be offered once the site is in operation. For public safety reasons
alone, this Consent Judgment must be invalidated by the court.”
http://www.wnd.com/2017/03/christian-refugees-fire-back-against-obama-mosque-deal-in-michigan/
No comments:
Post a Comment