Texas Town Up In Arms Against City Council for Approving a New Muslim Cemetery

05 Aug, 2015 by Warner Todd Huston

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Many of the residents of Farmersville, Texas in Collin County are furious at the city council for moving to approve the creation of a new Muslim-only cemetery on the outskirts of town.

The city council organized a public meeting on the proposed Muslim cemetery and heard an earful from residents who opposed the cemetery mostly because they felt that once the cemetery was approved then the next move would be for the Muslim groups to demand a Mosque be built nearby.

A town hall meeting Tuesday night in a usually quiet Texas town of 4,000 did little to quell concerns among residents over a proposed Muslim cemetery. The meeting in Farmersville turned contentious as skeptics of the project aggressively questioned the purpose of the cemetery and how it might affect their quaint community, the Dallas Morning News reported.

“People don’t trust Muslims,” Barbara Ashcraft said after the two-hour meeting, the newspaper reported. “Their goal is to populate the United States and take it over.”

Present at the meeting was Khalil Abdur-Rashid, a representative of Collin County’s approximately 22,000 Muslims. He sought to ease concern over Muslim burial practices, which traditionally require that bodies be shrouded in white and placed directly into the ground. Abdur-Rashid said corpses would be placed in wooden caskets and concrete vaults before being placed into the ground — not unlike the burial practices of Americans from other faith communities.

“That has become local Muslim practice here,” he said.

Mayor Joe Helmberger also tried to ease resident concerns. “They’re going to bury their dead like I bury my dead,” he told the crowd.

Local opposition to the cemetery plans garnered national media attention earlier this summer as residents fiercely protested the project on the basis that Muslim burial practices could lead to a pollution of the county’s water supply, and expressed fears that it would propel additional Muslim institutions to move into their quiet town.

So, the local community is still up in arms about the town council allowing this Muslim cemetery to be built.

What do you folks think? Should the town council listen to its residents? Or should the Muslim cemetery get built anyway?