Teen Bigots Attack Sufi Mosque

Salt of the Earth, people. Salt of the Earth. That's what people in Orleans County, NY generally are.

Friendly and caring among their own. Relatively poor, compared to many other areas. (Monroe County especially.) Mostly agrarian, with the women's prison at Albion providing a welcome source of employment. Like many largely agrarian communities, there's a certain mistrust of outsiders.

Which can get damned ugly in its own right. I don't care to live there ever again, myself. And all I had to deal with were neighbors from Hell.

Then you've got people who are suffering some real problems, like those at the World Sufi Foundation Mosque at Carlton, NY.

Long story, short version: A bunch of idiot teens came to disrupt services, to the extent of firing a shot gun at the building, and hitting one of the members with their vehicle.

I have two major lines of thought following my reading of this story:


1) How much of this incident, which seems to be a major escalation of the harassment the World Sufi Federation Mosque has been suffering for years, can be said to be inspired by the recent hoorah about the so-called 9/11 mosque?

Personally, I suspect that the escalating rhetoric was part of the inspiration for these teens to decide to do this.

2) WTF is up with the response from the police and DAs? Hitting someone with a motor vehicle, on purpose, should be assault with a deadly weapon, if not attempted murder! As should firing the goddamned shotgun. I won't even begin to address the allegation in the article that the police response was slow, according to people from the Mosque.

Goddammit. RULE OF LAW, people. It's what protects us from barbarism.

Quote:

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Originally posted by OtakuLoki

2) WTF is up with the response from the police and DAs? Hitting someone with a motor vehicle, on purpose, should be assault with a deadly weapon, if not attempted murder! As should firing the goddamned shotgun. I won't even begin to address the allegation in the article that the police response was slow, according to people from the Mosque.

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Well, let's give it some time. According to the article, this happened Monday; two days ago. We have an allegation that one of the teens deliberately hit a worshiper, but I would hope that the police and DAs would take some time to investigate, rather than rush to charge someone with a crime. It may very well turn out to be as the witnesses described, but I don't know that two days is enough time to come to any conclusions.

As to the shotgun, I don't see anything that says it was fired at the mosque, merely that it was fired. IANAL etc., etc., but I don't think that merely firing a weapon in the vicinity of someone else is assault with a deadly weapon; I think you need to actually fire it at someone or something. I could well be wrong about that, and they could well have actually fired at the mosque, but I think it's premature to criticize law-enforcement's response.