‘This is a temporary setback for efforts to create Muslim enclaves in the American heartland’
By Don Feder
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has temporarily blocked the construction of EPIC City, a Muslim planned community to be located about 40 miles northeast of Dallas.
This is a temporary setback for efforts to create Muslim enclaves in the American heartland.
At a cost of $100 million, the 402-acre site would have included 1,000 single and multifamily dwellings, a K-12 school, a community college, a sports facility, a shopping center and a mega mosque. The mosque already exists and was to be the nucleus of EPIC City.
Abbott didn’t mince words. There will be no “self-segregated” communities based on Shariah law in the Lone Star State, he declared. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Sen. John Cornyn concurred.
Residents of nearby Collins, Texas, said EPIC City would have strained the water supply and that calls to prayer and Arabic music broadcast over loudspeakers might have put residents on edge.
The Council on American Islamic Relations, which masquerades as a civil rights group, called Mr. Abbott’s move “bigoted and baseless.” CAIR said the same thing about opposition to in-your-face plans to build a mosque two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center attack.