Oyster Bay Town fires consultant on mosque expansion, citing his anti-Muslim posts
The parking lot outside the Masjid Al-Baqi mosque in Bethpage earlier this summer. Oyster Bay Town parking guidelines have been front and center in the controversy surrounding a planned expansion by the mosque. Credit: Newsday/Drew Singh
The traffic consultant hired by Oyster Bay town officials to review a planned Bethpage mosque expansion has been fired for posting anti-Muslim comments on a social media page.
Florida-based traffic consultant Jeffrey Buckholz was terminated late Thursday, town officials confirmed Friday.
“We are shocked and outraged to learn of this, and are immediately dismissing him from this case,” Town Supervisor Joseph Saladino said Friday in a statement emailed to Newsday.
Town spokesman Brian Nevin did not respond to additional questions from Newsday.
WHAT NEWSDAY FOUND
- Oyster Bay has fired a traffic consultant who had been part of the town's review of a proposed Bethpage mosque expansion.
- The consultant, Jeffrey Buckholz, in one social media post, said of Muslims, “They want to conquer us — just like they did England. Fight back NOW!"
- Buckholz told Newsday he was not aware he had been fired.
In an Oct. 3 deposition related to a lawsuit filed against the town by owners of the Masjid Al-Baqi mosque, Buckholz acknowledged posting a LinkedIn comment questioning whether Muslims can be objective when enforcing immigration laws against other Muslims. In another post, he said of Muslims, “They want to conquer us — just like they did England. Fight back NOW!"
Part of Buckholz's explanation, according to the transcript of the deposition, was that he’s “just against the whole concept of importing a culture from outside the U.S. to damage our culture.”
Court records also show Buckholz testified that he had reviewed the mosque property via Google Maps and spent no more than five minutes at the site last week, after he had submitted his traffic report to town officials several weeks earlier.
Buckholz had been part of Oyster Bay's review of a proposal to expand the Central Avenue mosque. The town last year rejected the plan, saying it would violate town parking ordinances.
Muslims on Long Island, the mosque's owners, sued the town in federal court in January, arguing that the parking law treated the mosque differently than nonreligious institutions.
Unaware of his firing
Reached by phone Friday at his office in Jacksonville, Florida, Buckholz initially said he needed permission from his client, Oyster Bay, before speaking to a reporter.
Told that Oyster Bay no longer was his client, Buckholz told Newsday he was not aware the town had terminated him.
“That’s news to me,” he said. “Unless they tell me I’m terminated … I can’t talk about anything that I’m not aware of.”
Buckholz's firing is the latest dramatic development in the mosque controversy, which has included accusations that town officials invented a fictitious grandmother who supposedly opposed the expansion. Town officials denied that claim and said the grandmother was Nassau County Legis. Rose Marie Walker (R-Hicksville).
Oyster Bay agreed in August to approve the mosque expansion and to pay the mosque almost $4 million to settle a federal lawsuit, but the town backtracked weeks later.
A 'welcome' decision
Muhammad Faridi, of the Linklaters LLP law firm that represents the mosque's owners, said Friday he and mosque officials "welcome the town’s decision to withdraw Mr. Buckholz."
"His open prejudice epitomized the bias that has tainted this process from the start," Faridi said in a statement furnished by the law firm. "His involvement made clear that this case has never been about legitimate land-use concerns — it has been about discrimination and poor judgment. The real tragedy is that it’s the taxpayers of Nassau County who continue to pay the price for this mismanagement and for years of unnecessary litigation.”
Lawyers for the mosque said in an email Friday they had found a series of racist and anti-Muslim comments Buckholz had posted on his LinkedIn page.
“We didn’t have to dive that deeply for this guy,” mosque attorney Diana Conner told The Point, a Newsday online newsletter. “But the more we dug, the more we turned up.”
The Muslim Community of Nassau County, which represents more than a dozen Nassau mosques, wrote in a letter to Saladino that firing Buckholz was "the right step, but it came far too late and only after public exposure made inaction untenable."
"True transparency and fairness require acknowledging how this happened and ensuring it never happens again. The town’s credibility depends on deeds, not declarations," the organization's president, Abdul Aziz Bhuiyan, and treasurer, Zohaib Mustafa, wrote in the letter.
Carl MacGowan is a Long Island native who covers Brookhaven Town after having previously covered Smithtown, Suffolk County courts and numerous spot news and feature stories over his 20-plus year career at Newsday.
My Little Pony, Furby making a comeback this holiday season NewsdayTV's Macy Egeland and Newsday family writer Beth Whitehouse have your look at the hottest toys this holiday season.
My Little Pony, Furby making a comeback this holiday season NewsdayTV's Macy Egeland and Newsday family writer Beth Whitehouse have your look at the hottest toys this holiday season.
