Droves of Palm Beach County residents publicly joined the far-reaching, right-wing pushback on proposed Islamic places of worship at a zoning hearing Friday.
A raucous and “child-like” audience (as meeting host and Palm Beach County Commissioner Maria Sachs put it) voiced opposition to the Islamic worship center and attached school during a meeting about upcoming development projects just west of Delray Beach. The protest is among the latest flare-ups in what Islamic advocates see as a rise in Islamophobia targeting proposed centers of worship in places like Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Texas, a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Florida attorney tells New Times.
Friday’s meeting was the last of five public hearings held to discuss private development and public infrastructure projects in the Palm Beach County 22,000-acre agricultural reserve, a protected area initially designated for farm use. A few audience questions focused solely on traffic studies for the new county Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and Islamic center, set to be built at the corner of Lyons Road and 152nd Place South near the Mizner Country Club. But many more residents seemed to use traffic concerns as a thinly veiled way to expose apparent Islamophobia present in the heart of President Donald Trump’s MAGA empire.
Islamophobia in Palm Beach County?
In a video recording of the meeting, one man asked whether Palm Beach County had studied the “birth rate of the demographic” associated with the development. He then asked how the Islamic center’s check-in process would affect traffic in surrounding areas…