Opponents of a proposed mosque in a California city collected hundreds of signatures, bombarded city planners with angry letters and e-mails, and even staged protests with bullhorns and dogs. None of it worked. The City Council approved plans early Wednesday for the 25,000-square-foot (7,620-meter), two-story mosque in Temecula after a nine-hour meeting that included rants against Islam as well as technical debates about traffic concerns and flood plains.
The Islamic Centre of Temecula Valley is one of several across the US that has seized the nation's attention in recent months as controversy raged over plans for a $100 million mosque and educational centre two blocks from the site of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. A mosque planned in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, has also sparked a dispute.
The Temecula centre has owned the land for years but didn't encounter resistance until planning work on the mosque coincided with debate over the New York site, putting 150 Muslim families at the centre of a bitter fight, said Imam Mahmoud Harmoush. Some residents worried the California mosque would be a centre for radical Islam and add to traffic woes in the rapidly developing region. The mosque spent more than $17,000 in the past year, which included studies on the 4.3-acre (1.74-hectare) site to address code concerns raised by its opponents, mosque leaders said.
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