News Jersey: The USA Department of Justice has started an investigation into a city’s rejection for the construction of a planned mosque, following claims of anti-Muslim bias. The Muslims of New Jersey, as well as an NGO, had filed a federal case against Bayonne last week.
An official had said that the USA Attorney’s office in New Jersey and members of the department’s civil rights headquarters in Washington, DC, were examining the case, as per Al Jazeera.
Federal law prohibits native governments from imposing an undue burden on spiritual exercise through land use laws. However, Bayonne officers on Tuesday were not available to comment, the city had also failed to admit any wrongdoing underneath the agreements.
As the building plan of the mosque was kept aside, township planners had ended that as a result of Friday prayer, congregants would be coming straight from work and would need a parking zone.
The federal seemed disagreed and wrote in a ruling that they have not seen similar practices in Churches and Synagogues.
Abdul Hameed Butt, who is filing the case, said: “As is occurring in cities across America, phoney partition problems were used to block our house of prayer attributable to dogmatism against Muslims.”
“The board subjected our application to utterly totally different standards to those it applied to Christian churches,” he added.
As per the Bayonne Muslims website, for congregation prayer, they have rented a Catholic school for the past six years.
The group wishes to convert a 23,000 square-foot warehouse into a community centre with a prayer hall, classrooms, offices, a library and a gym. More than 60,000 people live in Bayonne.
On March 19, once the page denotes an editorial portrayal a gathering of some members of the town’s Muslim community, one user wrote: “We have footage of all Muslims that were at this meeting. we’ll establish United Nations agency you’re related to with. Pack your baggage, it is time to be deported.”
News of the federal probe came on the same day that another New Jersey municipality, Bernards town, united to pay $3.25m to resolve allegations by the United States and a Muslim group that the city had illegally rejected plans for a house of prayer.
The agreement between Bernards, that is found concerning thirty miles (48 km) west of New York City, and therefore the USA Department of Justice can permit the Muslim Society of Basking Ridge to build a prayer house.
The United States has alternative unfinished lawsuits against localities over denials of mosques, as well as in Bensalem, Pennsylvania; Des Plaines, Illinois; and Culpeper County, Virginia.