SYDNEY, Australia: Police were called in to calm hundreds of people who were locked out of a meeting to discuss a proposed Islamic school on the outskirts of Australia’s largest city.
About 650 people attended the meeting late Wednesday in the town of Camden just southwest of Sydney, but some 200 more were left outside after the auditorium filled up.
Television news showed residents, who came to voice their feelings about the school, pleading with police and town council workers after being told they could not enter.
Local media said council workers called police to help control the residents after some reportedly tried to squeeze past security guards. The incident was peaceful, however, and no arrests were reported.
The proposed 1,200-pupil school has created tension in semi-rural Camden, where many say it would strain the town’s infrastructure.
Town council meetings on the issue have regularly drawn large, vocal crowds. The council has said it expects to issue a ruling by March on whether to allow the school.
Outside one such meeting last month, hundreds of residents protested the planned school. Weeks later vandals rammed two metal stakes topped with pigs’ heads into the ground at the proposed school site, prompting allegations of bigotry from Muslim and human rights groups. Islam considers pigs unclean.
The Quranic Society, a Sydney-based Muslim group that is bankrolling the proposed school, says Christian-based schools in the area have not encountered the same resistance.
“Our state, our government, our society doesn’t recognize one religion as better than another, so these Australian citizens are entitled to this school,” Quranic Society spokesman Jeremy Bingham told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.
Islam is a fast-growing religion in Australia, where it has about 400,000 followers among the country’s 21 million people. Recent years have most seen occasional tensions, including days of rioting between Muslim and non-Muslim youths at Sydney’s Cronulla beach in late 2005.