THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT TRIES TO MUSCLE A POMPANO BEACH ISLAMIC CONGREGATION

THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT TRIES TO MUSCLE A POMPANO BEACH ISLAMIC CONGREGATION - TOPSam Eifling, New Times, 8/17/06
http://www.newtimesbpb.com/Issues/2006-08-17/news/feature.html
On a recent Tuesday, the air around Pompano Beach City Hall smelled of evaporated rain. It was the calm after one storm and before another. By 6 o'clock, people had begun to pool under an eave at the west side of the building, news crews were unspooling cables from their vans, and Altaf Ali, a diminutive, bearded man dressed nattily in a gray suit, answered questions under the tall portico at the north entrance. All awaited the arrival of the Rev. O'Neal Dozier, a politically connected firebrand who, days earlier, in terms more graphic than even the Miami Herald cared to repeat, had declared that Muslims such as Ali were bloodthirsty barbarians."I think he's grandstanding," Ali, head of the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a private moment before the circus began. "I don't think he really means it."The previous Friday, on the Steve Kane Show, a conservative South Florida AM commute-filler, Dozier had dubbed Islam "a religion that is designed to cut off your head." Almost as an afterthought, he labeled its followers "evil, corrupt, bad people."Not only were his remarks inflammatory but they were political nitroglycerin in this diverse coastal town, where modest plans for a new mosque on a vacant lot had been wending their way through the city and county committees that review plans for construction projects. Dozier and his flock suddenly threatened to ratchet up tensions between religious groups that had coexisted quietly in Pompano Beach for at least a generation.