Masjid al Hoda, also known as the Muslim Community Center of Kingston, was vandalized at around 11 pm, according to South Kingstown police. The mosque is near the University of Rhode Island campus and serves as the place of worship for many students, faculty and South County residents.

Several windows were broken and “Muhammad Prophet of butchers” was spray painted on an outside wall of the Fortin Road mosque.

“A witness to the incident described seeing a lone perpetrator wearing all black with a hood covering their head break a window with what appeared to be a long handled axe,” according to a news release from SK police department.

Members of the Muslim community and campus leaders both were surprised by the act of intolerance.

“This is a very peaceful community, very little happens here, we’re very supported here and we are a part of the community so we didn’t expect it,” said Nasser Zawia, a URI neuroscience professor and spokesman for the mosque. “But given everything that is going in the world these days with terrorism in France and everywhere else and what is happening in the US, it is … not necessarily understandable but expected that somebody would act out of ignorance.”

URI President David Dooley told RI Future, “I really never expected anything like this to happen here. It’s just not been the kind of place either on the campus on in Kingston as a whole where these acts are very common. I was dismayed that it happened. It was just one of those moments when you say, ‘what is happening to us, why do these things seem to be so much more common than they were, what forces are driving people to behave in this way’ and more importantly ‘what can we do mitigate it, prevent it and create a world where these acts are just much less common.'”

Zawia and Dooley both said they plan to turn the incident into a teachable moment. Zawia encouraged Rhode Islanders to befriend a Muslim. There is a community meal, open to the public, every other Saturday evening, at the Muslim Community Center of Kingston. He encouraged people to attend. There is an interfaith vigil at the mosque (60 Fortin Rd. Kingston) Saturday at 1:30. All people are encouraged to attend.

Dooley said, “We want to take every act like this, as hurtful and as harmful as it might be, and look at how we can use it as a moment to strengthen our ties together. We’re not going to be intimidated, we’re going to be helpful.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is calling on local and federal authorities “to investigate vandalism targeting an Islamic school in Rhode Island as a hate crime,” according to a news release.

The vandalism was removed by noon on Friday. This is at least the second incident of vandalism to a Muslim institution in Rhode Island. In February, 2015, a Muslim school in West Warwick was vandalized.

Zawia said, “To be honest with you with all this horrible stuff we’ve been watching on TV and with all the deaths of innocent people it has kind of muted the way we react. It’s not novel. This compared to that was really nothing. We are approaching this as just a minor incident. It’s very sad. We’re having horrible hateful rhetoric at the national level. If you propagate hate, you will get hate. If you propagate tolerance you are going to get that.”

South Kingstown police detectives are investigating and believe “there was a witness that did observe someone running from the area,” said Captain Joel Ewing-Chow. A news release from the police reads:

At approximately 11 PM on July 14, 2016 the South Kingstown Police Department received a call reporting windows being smashed at the Muslim Community Center located at 60 Fortin Road in Kingston, RI.  Officers responded and found a window broken as well as the words “Muhammad Prophet of Butchers” spray painted in red lettering on the outside of the building.  A witness to the incident described seeing a lone perpetrator wearing all black with a hood covering their head break a window with what appeared to be a long handled axe. This individual then ran from the scene. South Kingstown Police as well as members of the University of Rhode Island Police Department checked the immediate area and could not locate the suspect.

The South Kingstown Police Department is currently actively investigating the incident.

If anyone has any information they are asked to please call the South Kingstown Police Department at (401)783-3321.

“This is a blessed community in Rhode Island and we should never think that the act of one person should tarnish all of us,” Zawia said. “We should just stay together, we are in it together.”

What do we want? Free parking!

What?

Greater City Providence deserves journalistic credit for picking up on a story about graduate student organizing at URI and connecting the dots about how those demands impact environmental planning goals. I wanted to make a specific repost here, as well as add a few thoughts of my own, because I don’t find that the labor world and the environmental world always talk to each other very effectively in Rhode Island (or anywhere, maybe). People who read RI Future, like myself, care about labor organizing and what it portends for a more equal future for all of us at the workplace, but may also be concerned about exactly the points that GCPVD brought to light.

The story: The URI grad students reportedly have asked for a continuation of free parking at URI’s downtown Kingston campus. In an earlier version of this article, I had given information about downtown and Kingston, but in this sentence I accidentally glossed over and left only the word “downtown” during last minute corrections. The union has been clear that its demands relate only to the Kingston campus. I am keeping downtown information here as well for context because I think it’s relevant to URI’s overall parking policy discussion. Apologies for the error! The free parking is of course not really free at all, but costs taxpayers money to subsidize the garages where people park, and policies that subsidize parking warp commute choices towards driving. In addition, URI stands out for having very incomplete and inconvenient transit pass policies. The result is a very easy and cheap drive commute competing with a more cumbersome and expensive transit one, right across the street from Kennedy Plaza. Students at URI Main Campus in Kingston have access to the 66 and 64 buses and an excellent bike path through South County, and could in short order have MBTA service as well. Grad students naturally see the attempts from university officials to charge them for parking as an attack on their already meagre livelihoods, but it’s an ominous sign for the future of Rhode Island if free parking policies continue in such obvious transit-oriented locales.

Where I would add to what Jef Nickerson of GCPVD has said is that I actually think this is a relatively easy issue to resolve, and doesn’t at all have to pit us either against the environment or against unions. The solution here is to charge full price for parking just as the university has proposed, but also credit grad students with that cost as pay which can be used for whatever they like. That would mean that workers who bike or ride the bus effectively get a raise, while everyone else breaks even. Graduate students are right, in my view, to be pointing out the absurdity of their pay hovering around $15,000 a year. It’s just that the solution to that is better pay, not subsidized driving.

Many states, like California, require a parking cash out for workers in certain types of jobs. In California, it’s structured so that only employers who rent parking are required to give the cash out, because it’s assumed that rented parking spots are a liquid asset that can be dropped or maintained by the employer based on parking demand, and that the savings should be passed as part of people’s wages. In URI’s case, the parking that is rented is paid for by the state to the Dunk Center, and so is definitely that kind of liquid asset. In Kingston, as in downtown Providence, the parking situation is absurd. URI has been gradually tearing up more and more of the agricultural land around it to satisfy the needs of its students and faculty to drive instead of finding ways to resolve that through on-campus housing expansion, transit, or biking. Parking cash outs have a positive effect on commute modeshares–increasing carpooling, biking, walking, and transit-use.

It’s not probably well known, but there was a window of my life when I did a lot of labor organizing, and was even a card-carrying union member. The work that the grad students are doing to improve their working conditions is something I support. But an injury to one is an injury to all not just in labor situations, but also for our world as a whole, and it’s the duty of union members to imagine a new world in the shell of the old, not just to make shallow demands about their own needs. This is a time when the grad student union could show real leadership and modify its demands in order to get what it needs for its workers while also respecting the future of our planet.

I dreamt I saw Joe Hill last night,

Driving an S-U-V.

I said to Joe, “our planet’s dying”,

He said, “it’s up to me.”

He said, “it’s up to me.”

~~~~