A truck was seen driving around New Jersey displaying digital billboards featuring hateful messages aimed at Islamic centers — leading a town to take action.
An unknown driver took the hate on wheels to two Middlesex County mosques to disturb worshippers on Saturday, the 14th anniversary of an attack on Hindus in Mumbai — India’s largest city — by Pakistani radicals that killed nearly 200. The rationale behind the anti-Islamic perplexed some in the community.
"No one here is connected to the Mumbai attacks, nobody is probably fully aware of what happened in Mumbai years ago," said Sami Catovic, the Executive Director for the New Brunswick Islamic Center.
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Nonetheless, the truck still reopened wounds of that attack — and created new ones in the towns of North Brunswick and Piscataway. The mayor of the latter city said his residents don't want to deal with someone bringing back old problems.
"They don’t want to have the fear of someone bringing old world sectarian hatred coming over to this country, this isn’t what New Jersey or the United states is about," said Piscataway Mayor Brian Wahler.
It remains a mystery who paid for the truck. When the driver was approached by a man in North Brunswick, he told the man "I'm just doing my job."
North Brunswick Council President had a succinct message for the person responsible, saying bluntly: "Stay out of our town, we don’t want you here."
Whomever it was that paid for the truck, North Brunswick Mayor Mac Womack could only offer the explanation that "people go down rabbit holes, people get caught up in fantasies and theories and the Earth is flat things, and they get out and they do crazy things."
To that end, security has been beefed up at both mosques by town officials, with the Imam in Piscataway saying he really isn’t fearful.
"We are taught to be reliant on God, he’s our protector and if anything happens to us it can only happen by his will," said Nisan Ahmad Raouf Zaman of the Muslim Center of Middlesex County.
The Middlesex County prosecutor will be investigating, as they look into whether the stunt was a hate crime or an effort to intimidate.
