Playing Race Card on Muslim School

* Doesn’t it seem a bit disingenuous that two days after the Nov. 11 story “Plan for Muslim School Imperiled,” the Islamic Society started receiving hate calls?

During the highly emotional and polarized town meeting process that spanned months, wherein the impossible traffic patterns and levels that the New Horizon School would create were the main focus, no hate calls surfaced.

But now that the decision has reverted from county bureaucrats to community control, meaning that a reasonable review will result in disapproval, the Islamic Society starts receiving hate calls.

And not just your garden-variety hate calls, either: calls by a hybrid bigot who is unprejudiced enough to embrace both Christians and Jews, but propelled to express a hate for Muslims. We’d better alert the FBI to this newly emerging profile.

I live very close to the proposed site of the New Horizon School, and can sincerely attest that the neighborhood’s distaste for the project is based solely on the realization that traffic patterns in our community would become unbearable.

This was never approached as a “Muslim” issue by our community.

And anyone who seriously believes that our community is restricted to Jews and Christians might wonder how a church of a Japanese sect, Sukyo Mahikari, is thriving on the very same street as the proposed New Horizon School.

I’m not prejudiced against Muslims, but I am prejudiced against manipulators who decide to play “the race card” when all else fails.

SUSAN RAO

Rancho Santa Margarita