{"id":347166,"date":"2026-06-04T22:48:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T22:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/347166\/"},"modified":"2026-06-04T22:48:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T22:48:09","slug":"council-on-american-islamic-relations-calls-out-town-for-chilling-overreach-in-restricting-mosques-worship-los-gatan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/347166\/","title":{"rendered":"Council on American-Islamic Relations calls out Town for ‘chilling overreach’ in restricting mosque’s worship | Los Gatan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mosque<\/a>RESIDENTIAL AREA – From this vantage point, the former Jehovah’s Witness building on Farley Road looks more like a tucked-away bungalow than a traditional mosque, as it lacks minarets or even a dome. But the West Valley Muslim Association’s request for longer hours has generated its fair share of controversy. (Drew Penner \/ Los Gatan)<\/p>\n

The San Francisco Bay Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-SFBA), the nation\u2019s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization urged the Los Gatos Town Council, Tuesday, to grant the West Valley Muslim Association<\/a>\u2019s (WVMA) appeal challenging 19 of the 33 new conditions imposed by the Planning Commission on the Los Gatos Islamic Center.\u00a0<\/p>\n

CAIR-SFBA submitted a letter supporting WVMA\u2019s appeal, demanding the Town Council to preserve the permit approved by Planning Commission for WVMA\u2019s property at 19679 Farley Rd. on May 21\u2014and to remove (or improve) 19 \u201cunlawful\u201d conditions imposed on the mosque.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cApproving a mosque\u2019s permit while attaching uniquely burdensome conditions is not equal treatment,\u201d said CAIR-SFBA Executive Director Zahra Billoo, in a release. \u201cLos Gatos should not impose restrictions on WVMA that it would not impose on other houses of worship. The Town Council should grant the appeal and ensure that any conditions are neutral, evidence-based, and consistent with federal religious freedom protections.\u201d<\/p>\n

WVMA Founder Razi Mohiuddin\u00a0says the Town has violated the Islamic group\u2019s civil rights.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo church or synagogue in Los Gatos faces anything close to the burdensome conditions imposed on our community. The disparity is documented, it is stark, and we believe it is a clear federal civil rights violation,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat we will not accept is a local planning commission deciding what worship means to our community. That is a chilling overreach that strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. We are prepared to pursue every legal remedy available to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The challenged conditions include: annual compliance reviews, restrictions on religious activities,\u00a0attendance caps below the Fire Code limit, parking and traffic requirements, expanded communication mandates and capital improvement requirements.\u00a0<\/p>\n

WVMA\u2019s appeal argues that the challenged conditions violate the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), a federal law that protects religious institutions from discriminatory or unnecessarily burdensome land-use restrictions.<\/p>\n

The California Muslim community is still reeling from the deaths of three men at a mosque in San Diego<\/a>\u2014Mansour Kaziha, Amin Abdullah and Nadir Awad.<\/p>\n

CAIR\u2019s annual report<\/a>\u00a0(published earlier year) notes the group received 8,683 complaints of anti-Muslim bias across America last year (the most since it began tracking this in 1996).<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, yesterday\u2019s California Post carried an opinion piece from Joel Kotkin titled \u201cIslamists Rise,\u201d<\/a> with the subhead, \u201cIncreasingly, extremism is coming to Calif.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Islamization of London, and Paris may not be reversible. But that outcome is not yet here,\u201d he wrote. \u201cStill, it is no longer something happening far away. It could happen in California as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much of the wider public discussion about the Los Gatos Islamic Center\u2019s bureaucratic hours-extension-approval continued to be Islamophobic.<\/p>\n

For example, on the Los Gatos Weekly\u2019s Facebook page, a user named Marc Varner (whose profile says he\u2019s from South Santa Clara County) said, \u201cThey want you dead or enslaved, as soon as they have slaughtered all the Jews. They consider it their right and duty to behead you for not obeying them.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, others shared views in support of religious equality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"RESIDENTIAL AREA – From this vantage point, the former Jehovah’s Witness building on Farley Road looks more like…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":292888,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[66734,36697,117926,88,90,89,142329],"class_list":["post-347166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-jose","tag-california-post","tag-islam","tag-mosque","tag-san-jose","tag-san-jose-headlines","tag-san-jose-news","tag-wvma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/292888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}