Hugh Fitzgerald: The Mosque At Basking Ridge: A Morality Tale? (Part 1)

by Hugh Fitzgerald

Here’s a story that earlier this year was being presented as a morality tale, where a good-hearted Muslim, Mr. Mohammad Ali Chaudry, wanted nothing more than to play by the rules in applying for permission to build a mosque, and was opposed by a town full of anti-Muslim bigots. But Good triumphed in the end, while Evil was vanquished, and not only is Mr. Chaudry now allowed to build the mosque, but the town must pay — literally — for its putative sin of bigotry (Islamophobia Division) by giving Mr. Chaudry $3.25 million.

The left-wing Guardian tells the tale:

Forty years ago, Mohammad Ali Chaudry, a Pakistani-born economist, made his home outside New York City. He came for an executive job at the telecoms company AT&T, and ended up working there for decades. Like many immigrants to the US, Chaudry came to wholeheartedly believe – perhaps more fervently than his native-born neighbors – in the triumphal story that Americans tell about their nation: how it was always growing stronger through change, melding the many into one through the process of assimilation. Chaudry was a devout Muslim. But to him, it always seemed the things that made him different mattered less than the ways in which he had proved he was the same.

Chaudry and his wife, who is from Italy, raised three children on a street called Manor Drive, in the town of Basking Ridge, in the centre of the state of New Jersey. This is not the “Jersey” of popular imagination – the land of belching smokestacks immortalised in Bruce Springsteen’s working-class anthems. Basking Ridge is out in horse country, an area of rolling green hills and white-steepled churches, not far from Bedminster, where Donald Trump has his summer estate. In keeping with the values of his adopted community, Chaudry became an active member of the local Republican party and a conspicuous civic presence, running for various elected boards. In 2004, at the height of George W.Bush’s war in Iraq, Chaudry became the first Pakistani-American to serve as mayor of a municipality in the US.

Long after Chaudry retired from both AT&T and electoral politics, he continued to keep a busy schedule of volunteer activities, most focused on building religious tolerance. He ran a small nonprofit organisation called the Center for Understanding Islam, and taught classes at local universities. Chaudry is bantam-sized, with a silvery moustache and a starchy manner, and despite his age – now 75 – he possesses a bottomless reservoir of diligent energy. He would travel the state, speaking to audiences young and old, always dressing the part of a politician, with a little American flag badge in his lapel. If there was prejudice around him in his adopted hometown, Chaudry later said that “it was not obvious, or visible, or overt.”

An American immigrant success story, a wonderful man, with a busy schedule of volunteer activities, but “most focused on building religious tolerance.” With his “bottomless energy,” he “travels the state” speaking to “audiences young and old.” It appears, however, that the audiences he addresses are non-Muslims, and the “religious tolerance” he focuses on is tolerance for Muslims, and not tolerance by Muslims.

That [Chaudry’s touching trust in his non-Muslim neighbors] changed in 2011, when he found a new cause: building a mosque in Basking Ridge. For years, Chaudry and other local Muslims had been using a community centre for a makeshift Friday service. But Chaudry decided that the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge needed a permanent place to pray, and he located what he believed to be a suitable site: a four-acre lot occupied by a rundown Dutch Colonial house. Soon after purchasing it, Chaudry held an open house to greet the neighbours. “There was not too much tension,” he said. “It was kind of jovial.” He put the letters “ISBR” on the mailbox in front of the house, to announce the Islamic Society’s arrival.

Then someone smashed the mailbox. “I was, of course, very surprised,” Chaudry said. Under New Jersey’s planning laws, the Islamic Society had to secure the approval of the municipal government to build the mosque, and from his experience as a public official, Chaudry knew that the town, which prided itself on its quaint homes and a history dating back to colonial times, was resistant to new development of any kind. But this was a house of worship, and he was someone well-known to the community. “It’s not that I was expecting any favours,” Chaudry said. “I expected them to be fair.” What shocked him, though, was the hatred.

“Hatred”? Why is he so determined to call opposition to his mosque a matter of hatred, when it appears to have been all about zoning? Chaudry had, after all, been elected to Bernard Township’s (in which Basking Ride is located) school board repeatedly, and served six years in the 1990s. He then was elected to the township’s governing committee. He  became the town’s mayor in 2001, as that job rotated  among committee members making him the first Pakistani-American mayor in the nation. The town seemed proud of this distinction.

There is no evidence, none, that any of those on the zoning board were motivated by “hatred.” The town “seemed proud” to have the first Pakistani-American mayor in the nation.

Chaudry sued the town when he failed to get his way on a zoning variance.

Before the case was finally settled, Township Mayor Carol Bianchi defended the “professionalism” of the zoning board:

“None of them are accused in the lawsuits of making any derogatory remarks about Muslims or Mr. Chaudry,” Bianchi said. “They are all highly educated, accomplished people who know the law.”

For example, Jonathan Drill co-wrote the 2015 edition of “Cox and Koenig, New Jersey Zoning and Land Use Adminstration” (Gann) described by the publisher “as New Jersey’s premier land use and zoning treatise and serves as a practical guide through the intricacies of New Jersey Municipal Land Use Law (MLUL).”

Jodi Lee Alper is a former U.S. Attorney and Environmental Protection Agency lawyer.

Kathleen Piedici is a strategic business planner who holds a Rutgers MBA, as well as degrees and certificates from the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago.

One board member, who asked not to be identified because of the lawsuits, said the board “wanted approve the mosque. We really did.”

What needs to be noted is that before the application for building the mosque by Mr. Chaudry was first submitted on April 20, 2012, the Presbyterian Church just down the street from where the mosque was to be located made its own application to the zoning board, to make improvements to its property. But after only two hearings, this much more modest request by the church was denied, and its backers did not even attempt to re-apply. Yet this telling fact is missing from The Guardian’s version of events.

Yet Mr. Chaudry was allowed to have not two, but 39 hearings, showing a great willingness on the part of the Board to give him every chance to modify his application so as to meet their requirements. It was clear that the Planning Board members wanted his application to succeed. But Mohammed Ali Chaudry was not interested in any modification of his plan. As one of the zoning board’s members said, “when Chaudry fired his local land use attorney and hired Robert Raymar, a Newark litigator, there was a feeling that he ‘no longer wanted the mosque; he wanted a lawsuit.’’

When the zoning board’s denial came in December 2016, Chaudry had the option to appeal in Somerset County Superior Court. He chose instead to sue the township, hiring the New York law firm of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler. He had no interest in adjusting to the zoning board’s requirements. He saw a chance to make a dispute over zoning regulations into a morality tale, with the Planning Board presented as anti-Islam, though not the slightest evidence of bigotry on the part of any of its members was unearthed by Chaudry’s very aggressive lawyers.

The Guardian reported that ‘“Chaudry filed a lawsuit alleging religious prejudice” and his lawyers claimed to have uncovered “racially charged emails among officials opposed to his plan.” No evidence was presented, none, of any “racially charged emails among officials opposed to his plan.” There were a few townspeople, who had no say in the zoning board’s decisions, who made unflattering remarks about Chaudry’s aggressive modus operandi, but there was nothing relating to Islam. The Guardian mentions a group of townspeople who instituted a group for “responsible development” — the scare quotes are provided by The Guardian’s reporter, who wants readers to believe those townspeople were in fact not interested in zoning regulations at all, but were prompted entirely by anti-Muslim bigotry. But what about the previous turning down of the Presbyterian Church’s application for a zoning variance?

Here is how The Guardian “reports” on the wave of  “Islamophobia”:

Long before Trump came along to capitalise on it, though, Islamophobia was building in the US, bubbling up like swamp gas from the depths. Often, racial conflict would manifest itself in small, seemingly isolated local planning fights over proposals to build mosques. The US Department of Justice, which staunchly defended the rights of Muslims during the Obama administration, noted a sharp increase in such mosque disputes between 2010 and 2016. Many took place in conservative locales such as rural Murfreesboro, Tennessee. But they also broke out in unexpected places such as Basking Ridge: a wealthy and well-educated community in the outwardly tolerant north-eastern US.

If there are more mosque disputes between 2010 and 2016,  that does not necessarily reflect what The Guardian calls “Islamophobia.” It could reflect a much more aggressive stance by Muslim groups who see the chance to get their projects approved, over the reasonable objections of zoning boards, by claiming that what are  zoning disputes are really displays of religious prejudice, and threatening litigation of the kind Mr. Chaudry engaged in, and won — won so big that many zoning boards in this country are no doubt now terrified to apply their normal criteria to mosque applications.

First published in Jihad Watch.