I don't have an issue with the people who are against the school on a planning and infrastructure basis. I can't give a completely educated arguement on this, because I don't live in Camden and haven't looked a lot at the layout of the town.
My problem is with these morons screaming, yelling and generally being ignorant motherfuckers. The people who live in the town, who as soon as they heard the words
Islamic school, they jumped on the "Must be a terrorist training camp" bandwagon and start tattooing "Go home Mohammad" on their chests. The kinds of people whose most intellectual arguments consist of "C'mere and say, ye arab lovin' cunt!"
I'm all for debate on the school. Key word being
debate. Not trying to storm a official meeting with a carton of Woodstock.
Islam is a religion, not a race
This is debatable I think. Take the Jews. People consider the Jews a race (especially European Jews), even though Judaism is made up of people from all countries.
Most ignorant people I know, as soon as you identify a person as Muslim, they instantly assume they are a rag-head or whatnot. Just like when you identify someone as being from Iraq, they instantly assume they are Islamic and ergo a terrorist.
So while it doesn't fit the biological definition of race, I still think you could define someone who hates Jews as a whole or who hates Muslims as a whole as racist. Especially since they make assumptions that a person of a certain faith is from a certain part of the world, and should "Go back to where they came from", regardless of whether or not they were born here.
/rant