Officials in the small town of Sidney, N.Y., want to stop a Muslim community center from burying bodies in a cemetery on its own land.
Town officials say the burial ground is illegal. “You can’t just come bury somebody in your yard,” Sidney Town Supervisor Bob McCarthy told AOL News in a phone interview.
The town, located about 100 miles southwest of Albany, has demanded that Osmanli Naksibendi Hakkani Dergahi, a Sufi Muslim community center, shut down the cemetery and remove the two bodies already interred there. But Hans Hass, the leader of the center, which bought the land years ago, says the cemetery is legal and claims the town is acting out of anti-Muslim sentiment.
“I think it’s out of bigotry,” Hass told the New York Daily News. “They don’t like us being here, even though we’ve been here since 2002.”
Hass said the timing of the town’s opposition to the cemetery seemed to coincide with the controversy surrounding the proposed Islamic community center near ground zero in New York City, something McCarthy denies. The issue came up “long before that,” he told CNN. McCarthy said bigotry had no bearing on the town’s actions.
“These burials were done illegally, without notifying local authorities or obtaining proper permits,” McCarthy told the Daily Star in upstate New York last month. “We will be seeking to have these bodies disinterred and stop future burials.”
He said the center should follow the letter of the law like everybody else. “These people not only have their rights, they want more rights than anybody else has.”
New York state has no law regulating cemeteries on privately held land, so local laws apply. And the town of Sidney stipulates that any cemetery must be on a “single contiguous area of at least 15 acres,” Sidney Town Clerk Lisa French told AOL News in a phone interview. Osmanli Naksibendi Hakkani Dergahi owns more than 40 acres.
Hass said he has a letter from 2005 signed by the town’s code enforcement official that says “a cemetery at this location would be allowed use according to the town of Sidney zoning ordinance.”
But French noted that New York state law says you cannot have a cemetery on mortgaged property, which the land in question is. She said the town isn’t getting a fair shake in the media. “Race, religion, it doesn’t matter. I’m just here to do my job. The town didn’t go look for a reason to pick at these people.”
According to French, the town, which has a population of about 6,000, received a phone call from a member of the community center alerting officials that the cemetery may be illegal.
“One of their own hot-lined the town,” said French. She did not disclose the name of the individual.
McCarthy said the issue is a local one and added that he is being harassed by the media.
“This is an internal town issue. We have not done anything, there have been no papers filed, no one has been served and an attorney is looking into it. That’s all that happened,” he told the blog Talking Points Memo Wednesday. “But you know when you get the liberal media out there with this thing, it’s like you’re out there killing these people or something.”