A bit of news from southern Nevada:
An Islamic advocacy group has filed a complaint against the Henderson Police Department on behalf of seven Muslim men detained while praying in a gasoline station parking lot in December.
The Los Angeles office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, announced the complaint in a press release on Friday.
The complaint says seven Muslim residents of Southern California were traveling through the Las Vegas Valley on Dec. 20 when they stopped for gasoline and food at a Rebel station in Henderson.
The apparent claim is that whomever called this in should have known it was time for evening prayers for Moslems – and, of course, that the responding police officers should have known, too. Which claims are, of course, nonsense. Not just nonsense, but idiotic nonsense.
If I were to get out of my car and start doing the Rosary in the gas station parking lot, I’d certainly expect that people would think it odd and perhaps even a bit threatening. Lets face it, some people use religion as a cloak for wicked deeds – I’m suddenly on my knees praying and if you’re not Catholic, you don’t know what I’m up to. If a police officer did not come up and ask me what I was up to and check out my background, I’d be surprised. Surprised and concerned that the cops are not being alert.
This, of course, was seven men praying in a manner only a few Americans are familiar with – it would be exceptionally odd to see and natural that official attention would be drawn to it, and that the people in question would be given the once-over. Its not like there isn’t a mosque in Henderson – from what I can tell, a rather large and well-appointed one where these men could have gone for prayers; and Henderson isn’t the biggest town in the world…wouldn’t have taken more than ten or fifteen minutes to get from where ever they were to where they needed to be.
I see three possibilities:
1. The men were just being foolish.
2. The men were testing local law enforcement to see how alert it is.
3. The men were deliberately trying to provoke an incident.
I figure foolish is the most likely – and the Henderson Police Department should kindly tell CAIR to go jump in a lake. I’ll not have us walk on egg shells for fear of offending Moslems who don’t act in accordance with normal American usage. We don’t tend to pray in gas station parking lots and anyone who does so – especially in a group – shouldn’t expect to go undisturbed. Religion is required in the public square in any healthy society, but everything has its time and place.
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