The Muslim community has increased more than 10-fold both in Florida’s Orlando metropolitan area, home to the recent Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL)-linked massacre, and St. Lucie County, where terrorist Omar Mateen hails from, reveals the latest U.S. Religion Census, a county-by-county tally of religious bodies in the United States.
Meanwhile, the number of Muslim congregations in metro Orlando grew 5 times and doubled in St. Lucie County, where the Shariah Board of America-linked mosque attended by Mateen is located.
Data from the U.S. Religion Census shows that the growth in the number of Islam adherents in metro Orlando and in St. Lucie County between 2000 and 2010 far outpaced that of the broader population of Muslims and non-Muslims.
While the overall population in the Orlando region and in St. Lucie County less than doubled over that decade, the Muslim population in those two separate areas grew more than 10 times, respectively.
That means that with every person added to the population, at least ten new Muslims came.
In the Orlando metropolitan area, the number of Muslims skyrocketed from 2,691 (1.3 out of every 1,000 inhabitants) in 2000 to 27,939 (13.1 out of every 1,000 inhabitant) in 2010. During the same period, the number of Islamic congregations in the region grew from four to 20.
The Muslim community in St. Lucie County grew nearly 12-fold to 1,747 (6.3 out of every 1,000 people) in 2010, from 150 (0.5 out of every 1,000 people) in 2000. At the same time, the Muslim congregations in the area grew from one to two.
Breitbart News’s count was gleaned from the latest U.S. Religion Census: Religious Congregations & Membership Study (RCMS), released in 2010.
The religion census is released every 10 years by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB), coinciding with the decennial count of the U.S. population by the federal government.
Besides Orange county, where Orlando is located, the Orlando metropolitan area as defined in the study includes the counties of Lake, Osceola, and Seminole.
Mateen, a 29-year-old U.S. citizen of Afghan descent from Port St. Lucie, FL, was behind the June 12 bloodbath at the LGBT nightclub in Orlando that left 50 people dead, including himself, and at least 53 others wounded.
The club is about 120 miles from the killer’s home in St. Lucie County, which lies about 50 miles outside the greater Orlando area.
A poll commissioned by the Center for Security Policy in May 2015 revealed that 51 percent of U.S. Muslims “agreed that ‘Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to shariah’ and 25 percent believe that ‘violence against Americans here in the United States can be justified as part of the global jihad.’”
Shariah, the rules that govern all aspects of a Muslim’s life, mandates the death penalty for homosexuality.
In April, one of the mosques in metro Orlando — The Husseini Islamic Center of Sanford — invited Sheikh Farrokh Sekaleshfar to speak to its congregation after he said that killing gays is the compassionate thing to do.
Philip Haney, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) whistleblower, first drew a link between the Islamic Center of Ft. Pierce attended by the Orlando terrorist and the Shariah Board of America during an interview with Breitbart News Sunday.
Mateen has pledged allegiance to ISIS, the group that claimed responsibility for the recent attack and imposes shariah on the residents of the area it has conquered.
Moreover, Haney linked Mateen’s mosque to Tablighi Jamaat (TJ), an Islamic movement with a heavy presence in the U.S. that has been linked to ISIS rival al-Qaeda, which also enforces shariah law on the territory it holds.
According to the Center for Security Policy poll, 24 percent of U.S. Muslims agree that “It is legitimate to use violence to punish those who give offense to Islam by, for example, portraying the prophet Mohammed.”
Mateen’s father and ex-wife claim he was not a very devout Muslim.
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