Some neighborhood residents say religion has nothing to do with their vocal fight against rezoning plans to put a 20,000-square-foot mosque, cemetery and gymnasium at U.S. 29 and Hood Road.
But some members of the local Muslim congregation of Dar-E-Abbas aren’t so sure. They say religion plays a part, evidenced by comments they’ve read on community blogs.
At a packed city Planning Commission meeting last week that was moved to Lawrenceville to accommodate the crowd, about a half-dozen speakers framed the issue as a land-use matter involving traffic, parking and noise. They hammered the point, they said, despite goading from the media to speak about religion…
Yusof Burke, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Georgia, said even though Muslims are no longer strangers to Georgia, mosques do attract opposition for religious reasons. There are more than 35 mosques and an estimated 80,000 Muslims in metro Atlanta, he said. (More)