The Islamic Center of Columbia, Tennessee—a small city about 45 miles south of Nashville—had been around for only a few years when white supremacists burned it down. On a Saturday in early 2008, three young men went to the mosque armed with spray paint and Molotov cocktails. According to a federal indictment, they first defaced the exterior walls with swastikas and phrases including White Power. Then they broke into the building and set it aflame.“Everything on the inside was charred,” a former member of the Islamic Center told me. “The roof had come down, and they had to demolish the building afterwards.” The mosque, which had a few dozen members, had been the first in Columbia and was, for a time, the only Muslim house of worship between Nashville and Huntsville, Alabama. After the fire, its leaders bought an empty church building nearby and converted it into a new mosque, though they initially kept their plans for the space a secret to avoid a community backlash.The former member who related this to me asked that I not publish his name, because nearly two decades later, the Muslim community in middle Tennessee is again on edge. The membership of the rebuilt Islamic Center of Columbia is smaller but still active. Its mosque sits less than a mile from the district office of the area’s U.S. House member, Andy Ogles. But Representative Ogles, a Republican in his second term, doesn’t seem to want Muslims to reside in his district. And he doesn’t want them anywhere else in the country, for that matter. “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” Ogles posted on X on Monday. “Pluralism is a lie.”[Ali Breland: Meet the new Proud Boys]Ogles is a Trump loyalist who has proposed amending the Constitution to allow the president a third term. Ogles has long denigrated Muslims; he’s pushed for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (who was born in Uganda and with whom Trump has lately been chummy) to be denaturalized and deported, and just last week, he called for a ban on immigration from several majority-Muslim countries. His comments on Monday were more sweeping, and a more direct attack on America’s constitutional values. They also imply an outright rejection of thousands of Ogles’s own constituents.Tennessee’s Fifth Congressional District includes parts of Nashville and several counties to the south. For 20 years, its House representative was a centrist Democrat, Jim Cooper, who… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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